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Monitoring and evaluation

Summary
Like any other form of management, the management of design requires the setting of performance targets, the monitoring of achievement, and the evaluation of success. At the level of the individual design project, review points should be set at the brief stage so that achievement is evaluated against time and expenditure on a regular basis. Senior management should also review the overall performance of the company's design activity on as regular a basis as its reviews of sales and financial performance.

While the design project manager should have responsibility for monitoring the progress of a particular project to ensure that it is progressing to schedule and within its budgetary targets, senior managers need to be sure that they are made aware of any deviations. There is also a need for a formal procedure for evaluating the achievements of each design project and communicating the results to everyone concerned.

Although casual monitoring has its place, a disciplined approach is also needed, preferably by setting specific review points during a design project. Such reviews should evaluate achievement against expenditure and time, with the design brief (which will generally include statistical performance targets as well as descriptive ones) providing some of the key measures.

Three points are worth making in this context, although they also have wider implications:

  1. The time element of a product plan is as crucial as the cost element. There is a tendency to accept past timescales for new product development or modification as being the norm, but this is increasingly unacceptable in the face of competitors who are accelerating the pace of design change at an impressive rate. A vital target for senior managers must be the continuous reduction of timescales between initiating a design project and launching the new product.

  2. At specified critical stages a full and honest review of costs and timescales is essential. If either seems likely to change significantly, pricing and other marketing implications - including launch tactics - must be re-appraised.

  3. The responsibility for implementing a company's design policies needs clearly to be at board level, with either the chief executive or another board member being answerable for the product design and development activity. But, because the product - and therefore its design and technology - has a central role in the performance of a manufacturing company, these policies must also be accepted as the corporate responsibility of the whole board.

Best practice tip

Set specific review points

[CS] Case study : Kango Ltd

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