Abstract
New product development (NPD) is paramount for any organisation that seeks to be successful and be ahead of its competitors. Due to a lack of process guidance and limited resources in developing new products, most organisations fail to commercialise and successfully deliver acceptable products to the market. In the defence industry products are developed based on needs and doctrines, and funding is made available to create a new capability, but the success rate of these new products is very low. Most products take longer than the planned development period, and some are faced with scope creep and end up overspending on the project. In the end, there is not much value coming out of the new projects, since some products cannot be used due to old technologies and obsolete components.
The NPD process stages need to have activities that must be performed for each stage, upon the completion of these activities a determination at the stop/go gate has to be made on whether to continue or stop the project. The stop/go gates use a preset of criteria to evaluate these activities. These criteria are unique, differ for each gate and consider the phase at which the project is at. A guide is needed to have consistency criteria that can be used to trace the project progress and if there are any shortcomings the process should be able to stop the project without wasting any more funds, time and resources.
The research aims to address the tailoring of the NPD process and specifically investigate the criteria that are generally used in the industry to make a stop/go outcome. Since the problem statement is for the military environment, the military criteria are also considered. Military criteria are more into delivering products that are not for the general market and not meant to generate any monetary value but rather to address a shortcoming within an organisation. Its products need to be robust to survive harsh conditions such as extreme temperatures. A consistent list of these criteria is formulated to track the project’s progress, milestones, spending of funds and elapsed time. These are checked at every completion of each stage, and the gatekeepers get to be aware of the project risks and achievements. The risks can be mitigated during the development phase of the products and if solutions are not found the project can be stopped earlier without too much damages.
Interviews were conducted specifically with the military experts since this is a specialised field with its design requirements when it comes to product development. These participants had to validate the literature findings on the NPD process and its criteria, and also add what could be important in the NPD process. In the end, the reader should be equipped with NPD process knowledge to deliver a successful project from its inception to the launch, and be able to foresee the risks in the early stages of the project so that the project can either be stopped or iterated without wasting resources.