New Product Introduction

The New Product Introduction template is used to manage product development projects efficiently. It helps aligning all stakeholders from various departments by managing the tasks and deliverables needed to define, develop, and launch a new product in time. The template includes all workspaces required: Projects, Project Templates, Project Phases, Project Tasks, People, and Teams.

This template can be used together with the Product Portfolio Management template to link the product master record with the given development project and vice versa. To achieve this, please download the given template and set the given linking picklist fields in both directions.

Projects

Projects are used to hold all information about the product development process and also to manage all activities and responsibilities within the process.

The project is driven by a Phase / Gate approach, dividing the project in different phases which are followed by dedicated gate reviews. During these gate reviews, given reviewers have to confirm the availability and quality of required deliverables before proceeding with the next phase.

As projects enter a new phase, the system will automatically create Project Task records to request the provisioning of required deliverables from the given stakeholders. To handle these tasks easier, they will be grouped by using dedicated Project Phase records. Once all Project Tasks of the related phase are set to complete, the project will be transitioned to the given gate review status automatically.

Set up of project is driven by Project Templates which define the list of deliverables, their duration and dependencies. They may also define standard responsibilities by involving teams and users, but also standard efforts.

Project Phases

Project Phases are managed automatically by the project’s Phase / Gate process. As a project gets created, the system will create the matching phase records at the same time. Project Phases are used to plan and track all deliverables required within a given phase.

Phases also get connected to the Gantt tab of Projects to navigate the list of deliverables an easy manner and to review the full project schedule:

Project Templates

Project Templates are used to define the overall structure of a new project. The template will define the default set of tasks and their default duration. One can also optionally define responsible teams and users as well as expected efforts for each task.

Project Tasks

The Project Tasks workspace holds the tasks created when the Project moves to a new phase. Team Leaders, Assignees and Reviewers will get involved using workflow notifications and entries in their My Outstanding Work list.

These stakeholders can attach and link deliverables of their activities to the tasks and run workflow actions to update the status of these tasks.

Teams & People

A People workspace is used to manage all resources required to execute an NPI project successfully. These People records have to be linked to Teams which define the various groups involved in the NPI projects. Both workspaces enable to easily set responsibility for Project Tasks for given teams and users by using filtered picklists. They also enable to track pending activities on both team and user level: