Pay particular attention to allocation of time for alpha and beta testing as well as test marketing of final products.
Survey.
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The issues which characterize the NPD stages from the project management perspective (PPM group) are to determine the following: milestone count; how many projects pass from one stage to the next; project count by stage (WIP); resource requirements and time lines.
The data has been collected by the researcher from within the company from a wide variety of sources ranging from NPD documentation, archival records and interviews with various people working on the R&D process.
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The primary drivers of performance appear to be: 1. Cross-functional Involvement and good interfacing between those involved in undertaking NPD. 2. Developing a profile of defined product/market arenas to direct new product ideation and investment in R&D and marketing capabilities. 3. Provision of adequate resources for undertaking NPD. 4. Leadership and organization of projects including the use of product champions and enabling managers the flexibility to make decisions relating to NPD activities. 5. A strong market orientation that links both customer and competitor insights into the NPD process for improved decision-making. 6. A high level of senior management involvement in order to illustrate to employees that management is committed to successful NPD outcomes. 7. Undertaking up-front homework including appropriate project screening and evaluation activities, concept development and testing, and preliminary market and technical testing.
Survey. Results from questionnaire analysis.
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Be flexible with managing resources to have higher levels of success with product development execution.
Survey of 120 development projects from 57 firms. Hierarchical regression was significant, beta = .179 at p<=.1.
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Higher levels of sophistication in capital budgeting are associated with new product development success.
Survey with significant findings.
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Invest in tools, staff or other resources to help reduce development bottlenecks, the time to market benefits usually far outweigh the investment cost.
Case Study. Top manufacturers have found this to be true.
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Matching new product development tasks to employee interests and strengths helps to ensure that those tasks will be appropriately handled. Employees who possess traits associated with inventors thrive in R&D environments; those who act as champions do well during the opportunity recognition phase; those who are project implementers are best placed in project execution roles; while serial innovators do well throughout the entire process.
Survey data.
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An interesting modification to concurrent engineering is the agile concurrent engineering (ACE) methodology. Its main characteristics are full utilization of resources through resource sharing, agile teams suited for medium or small-sized firms and minimum organization restructuring. In this methodology, a quantitative modeling tool for the concurrent engineering process was developed which describes the mini-circulations and resource sharing within the system. This tool (ESHLEP-N) was a high-level evaluation, stochastic Petri-net model.
Source: Yan and Jiang (1999). In: Kamrani, A., & Vijayan, A. (2006)

Coordination in this sense refers to the problem of ensuring that scarce development resources are allocated efficiently to the different tasks that must be accomplished, that task deadlines are set appropriately and communicated clearly, and that the sequence of planned activities leads to a total project duration that approaches the minimum possible. In the literature on project management, these problems are typically addressed in terms of PERT charts and 'critical path analysis.'
Source: Eppen, Gould, and Schmidt (1993). In: Hoopes, D.G., & Postrel, S. (1999)

Organizational strength (strategy, skills, culture) as driver of new product success.
Source: Heynard and Szymanski, 2001; Montoya-Weiss ad Caklantone, 1994). In: Troy, L. Hirunyawipada, T. & Paswan, A. (2008)