Questions and Answers from IRI's Members: What Are IRI Members Talking about? These Questions Were Recently Posed on IRI's Community Forum

Q: How do you organize RD from the home page, select Collaboration Center, then Community Forum. For more information about IRI membership, visit our website, http://www.iriweb.org autonomously. The corporate coordination and direction is accomplished in four main ways: 1. We talk frequently, mostly via teleconferences but also in person. If there is an interface required to products in another business unit (almost always these days), we will have a representative participate in weekly project meetings. We also encourage more frequent personal conversations and emailing. 2. We are now using a Corporate Instrument Development Process (referred to as the CIDP). In the past, each business had their own process and many of the phase gates had different definitions and deliverables. Two years ago, we formed a team to unify the independent processes. This was no easy task and, although this effort was promoted and sanctioned at the senior level, the time/resources to accomplish it were not directly planned on. Initially, the motivation was mainly to simplify our position with various regulatory bodies such as ISO and FDA, but the advantages of using a common language when defining and reporting on projects was also recognized. We are now fully onto the new process (no remaining grandfathered projects) and have fully trained everyone. We have built a fair amount of flexibility into our CIDP by letting the marketing and project managers define the scope up front as needed. For example, a relatively minor hardware improvement to an existing instrument in which the research group has already built a prototype, might elect to go directly from spec and planning to beta phase, skipping the usual alpha phase. Any deviations from the norm have to be presented and approved by senior-level management at the feasibility phase gate review so there aren't any surprises later and before the spec and planning phase can begin. Enforcing our CIDP has had some difficulties. Its all too easy to let the process slide when faced with the inevitable technical and scheduling challenges and it is also very, very tempting for upper-level management to specify a product delivery date (i.e., for a trade show) before feasibility has been achieved, which means the project team is faced with inventing while on a timeline! Suffice it to say, we need better adherence to the process while not losing sight of the business demands. 3. We have yearly planning meetings for each of the business areas and then a combined meeting where product roadmaps are worked out. This has a very strong emphasis on required support from other business units. These meetings involve all senior management, including our CEO. …