6.5 Establishing outcomes, budgets and constraints

Decision making is the key framework for product development, but knowledge fills out the framework to give the live project. Knowledge is brought into the framework, and also created within the framework so that the decisions can be made. But knowledge has a cost; increasing the knowledge adds to the cost of a project. In product development, the intelligent and systematic balancing of knowledge and costs is fundamental to successful product development. Others might say it is the balancing of the costs of product failure against project costs. In product development, there is a need to define outcomes (the collected and created knowledge) and the budget (the costs) at the beginning of the project, and also to reconsider these at the completion of the four stages and at any other critical point in the PD Process. Conditions change throughout the individual projects and there is a need for top management to reconsider the outcomes and the budgets at the same time as permission for the project to proceed to the next stage is given.