Creating New Foods. The Product Developer's Guide - The organisation of the Product Development project

Technical achievements of the individuals are important, though staff are seldom selected for their creative and successful product development. The staff must have an understanding of the consumer and the market, as well as the process and the product; they need to be innovative and creative, but all should have the ability to drive the project to a commercial conclusion.

The company may not have the necessary skills and knowledge and will employ consultants to do parts of the project for example market research companies to do consumer research, engineering consultants to design equipment. It is important that the outside experts are also coordinated into the team. Forming this team is a prime responsibility of management.

Most important are the communication linkages, the formal reporting channels and the functional inter-department channels of communication for daily working.

Any organisation will require:

one person to lead the project who has the responsibility and also the skills to carry the project to

a successful end;

support staff for the leader, to do the work in the project.

Whatever the structure, successful product development requires a balance between management and innovation. Over-management can stifle innovation, but uncontrolled development can lead to inappropriate products and the higher probability of commercial failures.

2.6.2 Physical resources

The tools - space, equipment, raw materials, computers - must be to hand or become available. The project is sometimes restricted as regards equipment and this can stifle major new developments. Important are the knowledge resources – today likely on-line though library availability is still important. The knowledge data bases need to include company information and knowledge.

2.6.3 Financial resources

For product development, finances need to be planned and controlled. Budgeting does not have to be complex to be good. One straightforward approach is to take each activity in the plan and look at its resource requirement on a monthly basis, and so build up a schedule of expenditure. Total expenditure for each activity can be predicted, but then it is useful to develop monthly expenditures for cash flow purposes and for control of expenditure. Product development is an area where there is need for control of costs because they can rapidly escalate. Use of graphs of cumulative expenditure, actual against budget, can be very informative.

Capital costs, particularly in the later stages of the project, can become significant, especially if the product is an innovation. They would normally feature in the capital budget associated with the project, or if the project is in the commercialisation stage they may be in the budget of one of the functional departments. They should not be overlooked when planning the project, or in calculating the total project cost.

There need to be cost forecasts for the project where the costs are broken down into the main activities, so that the balance of the costs in the project can be checked. Surprisingly this is not always done in industry and there can be a complete imbalance between the costs of the market research and the costs of the technical research, depending on the dominance of the functional areas in the product development team.

2.6.4 Project quality

This is ensured by having planned and systematic actions included in the company's total quality management (TQM). The ISO 9001 model for quality assurance details the system for design/development as well as production, installation and servicing. This is published by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and was updated in 2008 (ISO 9001:2008). There are also standards put out by national organisations for product design.