ABSTRACT
An additional finding was that some organizations did not limit their approach to product development but also applied it more generally to business change projects, i.e., to everything they did which created change in the organization. Organizations which needed to keep a track of man hours to bill their customers also have the most comprehensive cost and resource planning and monitoring systems. All the organizations were able to demonstrate explicitly how each project undertaken fitted their business strategy. The screening out of unwanted initiatives and projects as soon as possible was key. The use of a staged project framework was found to be well established in most of the study participants’ organizations. Many innovative ways have been used to obtain this involvement, including: focus groups; facilitated workshops; early prototyping; and simulations. The need for many programmes and projects to draw on people from a range of functions, perhaps even from different organizations, makes a cross-functional team approach essential.
