The PMO Best Practices: Roles & Responsibilities (The PMO Practice Booklet Book 6)

To be successful at new product development, you need to gather skills, experiences, and insights from all over your organization. This isn’t like running a relay race, where people with all the same skills and training can achieve a common goal. Not one functional area alone can accomplish the complex task of creating a new product and bringing it to market.

Poor execution can also result in not knowing who or what group is responsible for the completion of specific activities. Often times many organizations with critical tasks do not have a thorough understanding of the responsibilities that comes with it. This is a key indicator that the development process is confused and roles and responsibilities for the activities are not clearly defined.

Companies often miss program milestones because key tasks are delayed waiting for the right people to do them. Some programs are cancelled well into development because the development resources are needed elsewhere. People bounce back and forth from program to program, with results dropping in effectiveness and increases in needed coordination. Companies typically launch more product development projects than they have capacity for and then are surprised when projects fall behind schedule. Ineffective resource allocation is frequently the underlying cause.

This best practice guide will show you how to assemble a cross-functional team for the program – a team composed of members from different functional areas whose knowledge and expertise are needed in the new product development process. I will explain the following:

• How to recruit members who possess the necessary knowledge and talents
• How to help the teamwork well together
• How to anticipate the changing needs of a new product project as it moves from idea to market.

We also address the organizational structures that can help new product introduction teams realize the most success.