Customer-Centered Products: Creating Successful Products Through Smart Requirements Management

FROM THE PUBLISHER

When your product development process fails, do you blame scarce resources or unforeseen technical challenges? Those may be factors, of course, but most product failures and development rework can be traced to a poor understanding of customer-centered needs and requirements. This book will show you, as a manager, how to prevent failure by guiding and empowering your people to define and understand the right requirements early in the product development cycle.

Drawing on their 50 combined years of real-world product development experience in many industries-including aerospace, medical, transportation, insurance, and military applications-the authors spell out exactly what's involved in "doing it right the first time." They provide tested methods for defining hardware and service products as well as software, a true rarity in handbooks on requirements.

Whether you manage product development, procurement, or service, it's possible, and even likely, that you lack formal training in requirements definition and management. This book fills that educational gap by offering the necessary fundamentals and framework. Uniquely, it helps you examine your organization's culture and work environment with an eye toward how it helps or hinders product development. It also positions you to take advantage of automated tools for managing requirements, with proven techniques for increasing efficiency

Through step-by-step analysis and enlightening reallife examples, you'll learn how to:

Assess weaknesses in your current requirements process. Create a big picture roadmap for your project. Capture critical data on customer needs, budget and scheduleconstraints, and management responsibilities. Apply operational concepts and interfacesi.e., detailed scenarios of how people will use your products in the real world-to build quality in from the start. Bridge communication breakdowns that lead to ambiguous, inconsistent, or missing requirements. Manage layers as well as levels of requirements on complex projects. Design with product testing and verification in mind. Document your requirements uniformly and prioritize them to control risk. Measure requirements quality throughout the development cycle. Integrate the inevitable changes that arise.

By improving the fit between your products and your customers' needs, and by streamlining your development process, you'll achieve the Holy Grail of product development. Let Customer-Centered Products show you how to make your products "faster" and "cheaper"without sacrificing "better."

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

Shows how to define and understand the right requirements early in the product development cycle, providing tested methods for defining hardware and service products as well as software. Explains fundamentals of requirements definition and management, and shows how to analyze an organization's culture and work environment with an eye toward how it helps or hinders product development. Hooks is president and CEO of a training and consulting firm. Farry is an engineer and pilot, and cofounder and president of a bionics company. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Many business projects, if made into a movie, would best be shown backwards—to enable a happy ending. Ivy Hooks and Kristin Farry show us how to ensure both a happy beginning and a happy ending. — (Norman R. Augustine, Former Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corporation)

Defining the correct set of requirements early in the design cycle can lower development costs, reduce the development schedule, and produce a more useful product. The authors of this book understand all these factors and explain how to go about obtaining the correct requirements. — (Aaron Cohen, Professor, Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University)