Product Development Processes
"Re-engineering business processes is all about the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of processes to bring about dramatic improvements in performance."

Do you recognise any of these comments in relation to your company's new products and services:

· "New products take too long to reach the market, and we rarely deliver them when we say we will"
· "Our new products don't always deliver the promised return on investment"
· "We always overspend our development budget"
· "Customers seem to find problems with our new products and services"

When compared to other business decisions, new product developments carry higher than normal levels of risk, not least the financial risk of investing large sums of money. Using our experience of bringing new products and services to market we have developed a tool, Paratus, which assesses and analyses product development processes quickly to identify where improvements and enhancements can be made. The tool has been developed over a number of years to provide a measure of the relative effectiveness of a company's product development process, benchmarked against industry best practice. You can use the output from Paratus to:

· Reduce time to market
· Cut development costs
· Optimise your development portfolio
· Improve the quality of your products and services

Critically reviewing how new products are developed and launched into the market can highlight weak spots. We have found that small improvements can bring about rapid tangible benefits.

Action IT consultants have used Paratus to assess the relative strengths of product development processes for a number of clients both in the UK and overseas.