While trimming the product portfolio and changing the design process, you also need to change the thinking and working patterns of your employees to suit a development process that now focus on total cost at a product portfolio level, and not the single product. Otherwise, complexity will continue to grow over time. By changing the mindset of your employees, your company will be able to achieve the desired objectives of a more flexible and productive organization.
Training for a Future State
By using active involvement of employees and imitating the future state processes in workshops, we can help ensure that people know what to do, when they show up at their desk Monday morning and new routines have to be implemented.
We set up workshops where we try to imitate the future state procedures with stakeholders taking active part in the process and playing their future roles. Employees will then get a change to familiarize themselves with their new tasks, procedures and responsibilities, and not just learn from a presentation of an organizational diagram or flowchart, or from a more passive presentation setup.
When planning such workshops we use your systems and process of our customers and not a theoretical setup – and we have got positive feedback from companies on this approach of implementing a change process.
Teaching Theory & Cases
There is a large body of product development and business literature dealing with the subject of product platforms, complexity management and configuration management. We can put together workshops and lectures suiting different departments and needs in your company.
Combining theory and models with real life examples, makes way for a better understanding of the principles of platform based product development.
All our employees have teaching experience from industrial settings and academic courses at universities.
Complexity Management Game
In order to quickly pass on key learning points on important challenges in product development, we have developed a game, which is useful both as a part of a course and as a team building event. The attendants are grouped into teams and are competing against each other. They have to build toy cars, and are challenged with changing customer habits and dramatic changes in the market and business environment. On a single day we will take you through many of the challenges faced by companies during a span of several years.
We have got very positive feedback on this game, and some employees have stated that it is the best course they have ever attended at work.
