{"id":6449,"date":"2011-07-01T04:05:42","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T11:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=6449"},"modified":"2011-06-08T09:24:41","modified_gmt":"2011-06-08T16:24:41","slug":"twins-%e2%80%93-double-your-efficiency-double-your-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=6449","title":{"rendered":"Twins \u2013 Double Your Efficiency, Double Your Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"\"<\/a>If I ever hear \u201cWell \u2013 could you make a baby in one month with nine mothers?\u201d again \u2013 I will scream.\u00a0 Personally, I average four months per baby with my preemie twins.\u00a0 Because designing is so costly, looking for twin opportunities \u2013 more often called \u201cdesign re-use\u201d \u2013 is a very sensible plan. In partnership with product planning, program management can greatly help a company effectively use resources to make more products faster and to reach a wider market.<\/p>\n

The super annoying question about nine mothers usually is used to answer \u2013 Why are you planning so long for one or two people to do the task; could you get it done faster with \u00a0more? The frustrated designer or design manager is tired of explaining that the assigned staff are the only ones with the expertise, and they are already divided among a few projects, and yes, they are already training others and documenting so there is less dependency on them, but even that effort is slowing things down, and no matter what, bringing in someone extra right now, or worse yet three extra people, or a whole new contractor is only going to slow things down further. \u00a0I prefer to look at the question differently: How can we plan to do more with the same resources?<\/p>\n

If we are investing in key new developments with expensive talent and materials, how can we get more out of them?\u00a0 Can we make products that use the key new deliverable in multiple ways? This is sometimes called design re-use, but I am focusing on the intentional plan to design with multiple uses originally planned. \u00a0A non-high tech example is designing a hotel ballroom with movable walls so that it can be rented in pieces or whole depending on demand. A common computer chip marketing plan is to design one comprehensive design, but allow access to limited parts for a lower price. \u00a0For software, a more expensive license will allow access to more features.\u00a0 It not only saves development time, but also support time, and provides consistency to re-use algorithms where possible.\u00a0\u00a0 New product planning should include program management as soon as possible to see where a company\u2019s efforts can be used and re-used multiple times.\u00a0 If the product requires ten deliverables to incorporate, but eight can be finished quickly, perhaps those eight can be used for a lower tier market and a test vehicle at the same time.<\/p>\n

Sensible product definition studies include feasibility analysis and estimates of return on investment (ROI) \u2013 By including program managers early, and IT, and vendor liaisons, opportunities for shared resourcing can help a proposal pass an ROI test.\u00a0 In addition to internal brain power, shared planning can better use equipment and purchased design kits or IP, and other items purchased from external vendors.<\/p>\n

Yes, of course, there are times when you can crash (PMI speak for shorten schedule by increasing resources) the schedule, but usually those situations don\u2019t result in the parallel pregnancy question. When it doesn\u2019t help to put more people on a key deliverable, it can certainly help to put a great idea into more products.<\/p>\n

Now, please don\u2019t start asking about one really good mom making nine babies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If I ever hear \u201cWell \u2013 could you make a baby in one month with nine mothers?\u201d again \u2013 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1518,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1,849,850],"tags":[39,412,167,146,1373,181,947,38,50],"class_list":["post-6449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-time-management","category-communications","category-miscellaneous","category-team-leadership","category-organizational-leadership","tag-best-practices","tag-collaboration","tag-continuous-improvement","tag-engineering-management","tag-goals","tag-process","tag-product-definition","tag-project-management","tag-requirements"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}