Product Concept Definition

At this point the scope of the project has been defined in detail and the project team are ready to be appointed. Although a Project Manager can be appointed at any stage of the project, s/he will need to be appointed prior to the establishment of the project team. The Project Manager is responsible for all aspects of project performance including: planning, budget execution, project execution, and close-out Funding.

Collecting information from R&D, Project Teams, Marketing and Strategic Planning will provide the resources, costs, timing, risks, and opportunities associated with products and the market and will indicate their weight on overall operations. Additional information regarding projects probability of success, their ROI, and market life span will help with prioritizing them, deciding which to undertake, and how to introduce them into the market. Project specific information needed would be the phase, launch year, probability of success, projected sales, and pre-launch costs that include R&D, in order to value each project specifically.

According to A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), - Third Edition,

A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide 5th edition).Newtown Square, Pa.: Project Management Institute, Inc., (2013)

II. Planning Stage - PM meets with VP of Tech to go over spec. The two collaborate to create a Project Plan including a Gant Chart or equivalent to determine team member deadlines (individual initiatives) four launch.

Describe common practices to estimate the duration of project activities as well as real reasons that cause project delays.

Jim outlined some objectives in the scope statement for this project. After each of these objectives have been tackled and overcome, I would utilize incremental commitment to review what has just been accomplished, what is left to be accomplished and whether or not the project team is meeting its goals and if those goals are still in line with the companies goals.

Monitor project completion dates; concentrate on the specifics of our products, such as adjusting size, performance, reliability and age of all product segments to meet

Projects are used today as a way of achieving a variety of outcomes in local or international locations for new constructions, new product development, product improvement, process design, process improvement, utility installation, theory and technology development, and many more. Bringing a project to a successful conclusion requires the integration of numerous management functions like controlling, directing, team building, communication and others. It also requires cost and schedule management, technical and risk management, conflict and stakeholder 's management, and life cycle management.

Project Management Institute. (2000). _A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (4th ed.)._

In field of project management, there are a plethora of mechanisms under perpetual reevaluation. One specific segmentation of project management under such scrutiny pertains to cost duration, which is the time and monetary costs of completing individual tasks within the project’s critical path (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). The process of monitoring and evaluating the time and financial impacts of each task is referred to as cost duration analysis (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). A chief concern of cost duration analysis is identifying tasks within the project’s critical path which can reduce project duration (PMI, 2013). A common approach to reducing a project’s duration is task “crashing” (PMI, p.181). According to The Project Management Institute (2013) crashing refers to the process of methodical determining the financial value of increasing a critical path task’s resources in order to decrease project duration (p.181).

In the define phase proposals are formulated, estimated and tested for feasibility. The results will be presented to the senior management in order to receive a "go" for the project which often is in the form of a contract.

Senior management utilized the functional managers from the five key process areas that accounted for about 90% of the critical processes involved in product development. These managers identified three main changes to the current system that needed to take place in order to meet the development time reduction goals: Increased parallelization of design tasks, elimination of some design iterations, and quicker completion of the

1. Idea Generation: Idea generation is the actual development of ideas that can become products or services. Either competitors, employees, suppliers, or customers can be the generators of these ideas. Idea generation is the first step in the offered get development process and is often the least costly financially speaking.

1. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge; PMBOK Guide. 2008 Fourth edition. United States of America. Project Management Institute, Inc.