Developing Products in Half the Time: New Rules, New Tools by Preston G. Smith & Donald G. Reinertsen

Author:Preston G. Smith & Donald G. Reinertsen [Smith, Preston G.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 1997-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

New Roles for Functional Managers

If you have just an occasional dedicated team or two, they will not be too disruptive to the rest of the organization. But if much of your organization moves to these forms, many questions arise about the “residue” functions and functional managers. These issues must be dealt with explicitly, because if they are not, the organization will, over time, lose its functional strengths and the functional managers will wither.

If most of your product development work is being done with dedicated teams, the role of the functions must be redefined, especially for the technical functions supplying most of the people for the teams. Two such roles are critical to the ongoing vitality of the company. One is maintaining corporate competence in the function. Say in mechanical engineering, someone must continue to keep the computer-aided design (CAD) system up to date, assess new methods of replacing life testing with computer simulation, and evaluate new technologies for your products.

The other need is to keep the function’s skills up-to-date, for those both on and off of teams. For example, the Manager of Software Engineering would oversee recruiting, training, and career growth for all of the software engineers in the company, making sure, among other things, that the software engineers keep up-to-date in new computer languages and structured programming methods. Some programmers may need to spend time back in the Software Department between team assignments learning new programming techniques.

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