April 26, 2005

Chief Executive Officers today cite their companies' needs for speed, adaptability and flexibility to changes in the B2B industry as one of their biggest worries.

It's second, in fact, only to sustained top-line company growth. Along the same lines, less than a quarter of consumer products companies are happy with their product development capabilities and performance, according to the Aberdeen Group.

As a CEO, I understand these concerns. Enterprises today operate under intense time-to-market pressure and must respond to fast-changing conditions that make business agility more important than ever.

I also understand that these market-driven directives can be frustrating to your design team. Your team may have reached the point where you've hit a productivity wall. You're working harder faster, and better than ever--but you're still getting asked for more.

Something has to give under this pressure. And it does. Slipping a release date, scrapping key features for some future product, putting off the investments in new technology that could lead to future innovations--these are unwelcome, real-world choices for many design teams today.

At this point, you may be wondering what you're doing wrong. Before you dig too deep for answers, consider the idea that the problem may lie elsewhere. I suspect that within the parameters of your current design environment, you're already doing the best you can.

But this design environment may be shortchanging your responsiveness and flexibility as a design team. In other words, it might not be you-- it might be your design tools.

Specifically, your design team may have hit an obstacle that's uniquely problematic to companies operating under extreme time-to-market and flexibility pressures: your 3D model's history tree.

History-based CAD tools for 3D modeling have history trees that represent a single contributor's design process for creating a model. If you've ever had to modify another designer's history-based model, you know firsthand that these complex histories can make it difficult for anyone but the model's creator to change it.

Unfortunately, these history-based models are at their least flexible right when you most need to modify them. This puts you in a bind when you must work quickly. Either of two undesirable outcomes can result from this inflexibility.

Because typically only the model's creator can make the change, the original designer can become the bottleneck. Or if you can't wait around, you may decide to scrap the original design and completely recreate the design yourself. Both of these scenarios affect your team's bottom line and go against the principles of adaptive design.

In contrast, your team could use a dynamic modeling tool instead. A history-free model is pure geometry, so it's not bound to the sequenced steps used to create it. Dynamic modeling lets anyone pick up a design and run with it.

This opens the door for transferring designs to other team members, pulling in the expertise of multiple contributors, and leveraging concurrent design techniques to help your team meet its deadlines. Dynamic modeling also pushes out the point at which you have to freeze your models for production, keeping your options open as long as possible. This means that late-cycle customer change orders and other design changes don't have to be project showstoppers.

History-based modeling tools may be adequate for companies that still use a linear product development process. In this case, a single owner of a part or design follows the end-to-end design process from start to finish. But where history-based tools fall short is when enterprises need an adaptive approach to product development.

A recent McKinsey report asserts that product development needs to change "in ways resembling the lean-manufacturing techniques that transformed mass production."

Enterprises in industries that require responsive design processes and rapid time-to-market in fact can no longer afford the misunderstandings, rework, and dead-end design scenarios that come along with linear development processes.

Incorporating dynamic modeling tools and a collaborative team process can be key to achieving business agility in these industries. We've seen the results that adaptive product development provides through our customers who report a 40% increase in productivity by taking a dynamic modeling approach to design over history-based modeling.

Adaptive product development is about solving problems quickly and working collectively as a design team. Dynamic modeling tools provide a logical and simple means of reaching this goal.

Product development tools that help your design team work faster, retain flexibility, and adapt easily to change--now there's something that pleases designers and CEOs alike.

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