The first step to reduce your development time is to build a strong knowledge of your schedule. Once you have built your schedule, you can begin to analyze and evaluate. There are great reasons to reduce your development time:
Evaluation Understand the reason each development task takes the time it does. Track the actual duration of each task versus the expected duration from the schedule. Most software scheduling tools will allow you to record the actual task durations and allow you to see if the schedule is staying on time. If tasks are consistently early or late, by how many days are they early or late? Talk to those responsible for the activities. Why were they early or late? You can learn a lot by sitting down with the people responsible for completing the tasks. Eliminate tasks Pull-off the bandages. You know they exist. Tasks that originated as a short term fix to a problem. Does that problem still exist? If it does, can you solve the root cause? It may take more time initially to solve the problem, but will smooth out the development process in the long run. Are any tasks redundant? Are there departments doing the same task? Are there any tasks that both you and a supplier are doing? For example, is the supplier sending information which you are entering into a PLM or ERP system? Can the supplier enter the data directly? Focus on the critical path Once you have eliminated unnecessary or redundant tasks, identifying improvements gets harder. The tasks on the critical path add up to your total schedule. Eliminating or reducing the time each task takes is necessary to reduce your total timeline. You will need to address real issues that are slowing you down. These issues could be related to processes, staff, corporate structure, or environmental. Eliminate Capacity Bottlenecks Guess what? Some bottlenecks are people, but not in the way you think. Sometimes the problem isn’t the people who can’t get things done, but the people you can’t get things done without. If one person has to sign off on every idea that goes into development, that person is a bottleneck. There is a limited amount of work that person can review in a day. What happens if that person is out of the office unexpectedly due to an illness? Make people more flexible and interchangeable. Everyone wants to be indispensable, but if that means work stops because one person is not present that is not good for the well-being of the company. Most leaders are familiar with the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. You may recall that part of what defines great companies are humble leaders who set their companies up for success beyond their tenure. If you are a leader, trust your staff to make good decisions. If you have to review everything, you are a bottleneck. Also, place value on the individuals who offer creative solutions, not those that crank out the most work or look the busiest. You may find some tasks are late because one department or group is behind. Is it a long-term problem or due to a recent change. Analyze if a particular department needs additional resources or training. Has turnover been high and there are more new staff than usual? Is one group full of recent hires and would benefit from additional training? The role of technology Technology can eliminate tasks or reduce the duration of tasks. However, you will not understand the impact of technology without going through the above evaluation steps. Technology can solve issues with communication or reduce the burden on people. Understand the issue it is you are trying to solve before trying to solve it with software. Implementation of new technology is usually accompanied by process changes. There are always improvements to be made. Hopefully, you have thought of a few you can implement as you read through the article. If you have had a great idea, share it in the comments!
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If you are looking to create product faster, the first step is a well developed and managed product development schedule. Below are the basic steps to creating a schedule. The smaller the organization, the easier the process. Larger organizations will need to gather information from a large variety of people and departments. The time is well spent because those same individuals will later be supporters and can help explain how and why the schedule was built. Task List Start by listing all tasks that must be completed. Set some guidelines for the size of tasks that will be included, depending upon the complexity of your development process. If you get too detailed, the schedule will become difficult to manage. If you do not include enough detail, an important task might be overlooked. Think in terms of tasks that take days or weeks, not hours. One person cannot be responsible for the task list. Pull together people from various roles that are involved in the process. Brainstorm with the whole group. A good method is to have everyone list the tasks that they perform on sticky notes and put them up on a wall to see. Later you will start to put them in order. Estimate Task Durations You will need an estimated time duration for each task. Gather initial estimates in the brainstorm session but you will want to validate. Do a historical evaluation against previous product development schedules. Hopefully, you tracked if tasks were completed on time and therefore how long they really lasted. You can also survey an expert group. Remember when asking experts that personal experiences will influence responses. Those who work directly on the task, may overestimate hoping to get more time. Management may underestimate the time their team needs in order to please a leader. Using a three point estimate can alleviate biases. By asking for the most likely, optimistic, and pessimistic estimates; you will receive a clearer picture. Determine Task Dependencies Now you need to determine which tasks must take place before others can start. For instance, garments must be sketched by designers before the technical designers assign measurements. Sometimes tasks do not have to be finished before the next can be started. For instance, a two week task (D) may only need to be 50% complete before the next (E) can start. Record that the start of task (E) can lag behind the start of (D) by one week. Again, lay the tasks out visually so a group can brainstorm and validate the dependencies. Once finalized you can assign a task number and record the dependencies like the table below. This information will help you with data entry if you use a software tool to create your schedule. Visualize the Schedule Use Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) to create a diagram which will allow you to visualize the critical path and near critical paths. The PERT diagram below was created by entering the above task list, predecessors, and durations into a software tool. The tasks that add up to the longest sequence form the critical path. There is no slack on the critical path. If a task is late the whole schedule is delayed unless a later task can be shortened. Treat the critical path like the artery of your schedule. Keep that path healthy! You will also want to identify if you have any near critical paths. For instance if the schedule is 36 weeks long and there is a 2nd sequence of events only one week shorter than the critical path, you will also need to manage that path to avoid delays. In the above PERT diagram the yellow tasks indicate the critical path. The fit review process is a near critical path as it ends only three days before fabric production. Both the fabric production and fit review 2 tasks must be complete before garment production can start. You will also create a Gantt chart. A software tool may help you place your schedule into a calendar and recognize limitations such as weekends and holidays. The Gantt chart is the tool I suggest sharing with the product development team. Each task can be assigned to a resource, so teams or individuals understand which tasks they own. By assigning resources you can also recognize if any resources are overloaded. The Importance of Milestones or Gates
The example schedule has three tasks that are milestones: Start, Prototype Review Meeting, End. The equivalent milestone meeting in your organization might be called line review meeting, development meeting, product review meeting, etc. The purpose is a report on the status of development and to insure everyone agrees on the direction of the product line. You can see in our schedule example that a pause is created as multiple development processes feed into the meeting and no production processes can continue until after the meeting. Creating a milestone allows for the status of development to be analyzed at this point and manages the risk that work is being done that will need to be changed. This can also be referred to as a gate. Either it opens and you continue work or it stays closed until issues can be corrected. Automated Tools There are many scheduling software tools available, many of which are free. Many organizations already use a tool like Microsoft Project and a few PLM systems such as YuniquePLM by Gerber Technology have built scheduling tools into the software. WhichPLM describes this advantage well in this article. Other PLM tools commonly include workflow tracking or task management, but may not include schedule planning tools. There are also several open source software tools for project scheduling. I do not recommend trying to manually create a product development schedule in Excel when more automated options are available. Regardless of the software tool used, remember that the person using the tool needs to understand the theory behind building the schedule. The software tool can’t replace good management skills. If you have multiple product development schedules that overlap, you will want to look for a software tool that allows you to view overlap between the schedules. For instance, if you develop for multiple seasons / product releases and development of the next starts before the previous is finished. This is true for most of the apparel industry. Project management refers to this level as Program Management (management of a portfolio of projects). Want to learn more about managing the schedule and reducing development time? Sign-up for the Fireflyline mailing list to find out when new articles are released. You know those people who when you ask them how they are doing they respond with “oh, I’m so busy” and they are proud of being busy. I am 100% in support of success. I am 100% in support of being productive. I could care less if you are busy. If you are productive and busy great! If you are busy but not productive, I hope you are ready to make a change. Narrow and Clarify Priorities Do you know your priorities? Could your staff explain how what they are working on relates to those priorities? Narrow the list of priorities to a few and make sure anyone in the organization can explain how the work they are doing supports those priorities. I am not talking about general goals such as increase revenue 10%. I’m talking about the three things that must be accomplished this week in order to meet that goal. Let Your Team Focus Do you expect your employees or coworkers to read email within five minutes of receipt? Stop. Rarely are issues so urgent and if the issue is urgent you can walk to the team member’s desk to discuss or use the telephone. Multitasking is actually impossible. The more frequently we change train of thought, the less we get done. As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson put it in Rework “interruption is the enemy of productivity”. Make a cultural change to allow your employees to focus. Encourage meeting free blocks of time. Let employees turn off email notifications. Let people have some quiet time. Validate and Test Concepts Early Working in the apparel industry we all know that sometimes designs must be changed and improved. How you go about validating changes and improvements can mean the difference between being busy or being productive. A lot of loops, twists, and turns in your development cycle makes for a more artful flow chart, but that process is hardly productive. Doing tasks over keeps people busy but doesn’t allow them to feel productive. Changing a product a week before production is painful and costly for all stakeholders. If production is delayed, even the customer is impacted. Take a meaningful pause early in the development cycle to review sketches, 3D renderings, or initial prototypes. Allow time in your development cycle to make adjustments following this review. When people feel like they are making meaningful progress toward a goal, moral soars. Clothing lines don’t make money until they are produced and available for sale. Spend less time planning and more time delivering strong products that your customers want. Leverage Technology
Why wait until you have produced a whole line of product to find out what the consumer wants? Products can be tested without actually producing garments. 3D images can be created that look like real garments. Or if you want to test a new graphic t-shirt, use Photoshop to put the new design on an existing product photo. Reach customers via social media or post a customer survey on your website. If you are a wholesaler, send out a quick survey to retail buyers. Do you have a PLM system? Are you using the system as a product lifecycle management system or a product data management system? A full lifecycle management system captures information from inception to delivery. All stakeholders including your suppliers and manufacturers have access to view and/or edit information. Workflow information such as development calendars and the status of each style is captured in the system and flags notifies if you are behind. If you are too small for a PLM system, that’s ok. You are nimble because of your organization’s size. There are a lot of inexpensive tools you can string together and leverage. Excel or Google Sheets can capture garment measurements. Adobe Illustrator can be used for 2D CAD work. Pull all of it together into a PDF file and you have a techpack or use a cloud based tool like Techpacker. There are also inexpensive or free project management/collaboration tools such as Freedcamp and ProjectPier. |