New Product Development (NPD) for any organization is an exciting yet challenging task. While the prospect of new software product development opens the doors to future business development and an additional source of revenue, it also involves technical, marketing, and financial risks. Most of the decisions taken in this phase are with a degree of uncertainty and are therefore risky.
While some decisions can be reversed easily there are some, which when altered can cause huge cost overheads. New Product development is, therefore, a demanding exercise that needs effective project planning and control for informed decision-making.
The right Project Management Tool can help make this stage simpler. However, to make this stage less risky and more effective, the real requirement is an AI backed Project Management Tool (PMT).
New Product Development with an AI backed Project Management Tool
An AI backed PMT uses machine learning to fall back on past performance to take effective actions and make the right recommendations for any new product development.
This blog examines the efficacy of AI backed Project Management Tools to support the three essentials for any New Product Development to succeed. Which are,
- Team Selection
- Time Management
- Quality management
The following section explains these in detail.
Team Selection
It’s better to have a great team than a team of greats! – Simon Sinek
‘Choose wisely’ may be one of the best pieces of advice you are ever given while selecting a team. However, like all good advice, the trick lies in how to put it into practice.
AI backed Project Management Tool (AI-PMT) offers a big aid in this process. They record and analyze a Programmer’s or Developer’s past performance. This stored repository of knowledge gives you critical insights for decision-making.
Evaluating Efficiency Calculation
One parameter that can help in team selection is calculating an employee’s efficiency in a particular skill or competency. This helps in better decision-making while putting a team together.
To cite an example, our Project Management Tool PineStem offers a feature called efficiency calculation. The calculation is based on the budgeted hours and the actual hours spent by an employee.
Let’s say we have a task for which the budgeted hours are 10 and the actual hours spent by employee ‘A’ are 7. His efficiency then for this particular task is 142.8%. Let’s consider another employee ‘B’ who uses 15 hours to complete the same task. His efficiency would be 66%.
Clearly, employee A is ideal for the assigned task.
Apart from selecting between two employees, intelligent Project Management Tools also help in identifying the right skill or competency of an employee.
In the above examples, task 1 could be a task which requires Java competency and task 2 could be for Angular JS. In that case, the employee’s competency clearly is in Java.
Time Management
The second most important thing for new product development is time management. Time management includes planning and scheduling of detailed activities estimating their duration and aligning them together.
It also includes allocation of resources and a number of other matters. During the control phase of new product development, it is absolutely imperative to monitor the degree to which the work is completed to identify if it’s as per schedule. A Project Management Tool can effectively control this aspect and assist in keeping the project on track.
To use an example, our AI backed Project Management Tool PineStem sends warning messages to notify the completion of budgeted hours for a particular task. This kind of intervention by the Project Management Tool helps the project manager to take things under control and deploy corrective actions.
Quality Management
The third key aspect to ensure successful new product development is quality management. A bad piece of code can derail a project schedule and spoil customer experience. It is therefore critical that the project manager determines the components of quality assurance at the beginning of a project. These details help design critical quality gates throughout the project life cycle.
An important outcome of quality assurance is how to use the information gathered to improve processes in a way that will avoid failures of future tasks and other project work activities too. Here again, an intelligent Project Management Tool can help effectively.
To elaborate, few Project Management Tools offer bug tracking with detailed reporting on detecting the bug pattern. This information is useful to evaluate the nature of bugs that are being generated. Moreover, it helps eliminate repetitive bugs. This knowledge helps in all future projects including new product development and avoids redundant activities of cleaning the same bugs.
Conclusion
A Project Management Tool can help in many other aspects of the new product development. If you’d like to know more about it please do write to us at support@pinestem.com.
To experience the benefits of an AI backed Project Management Tool take a free trial with us at https://pinestem.com/
Website : http://osmosys.asia
