Speed-to-Market Best Practices Benchmark

A Tool for Benchmarking Speed-To-Market vis a vis Leading High Technology Companies (Short Version)

Speed-to-Market is understanding customer needs sooner and satisfying them earlier than your competition. It is meeting customer needs in time, performance, quality and cost. It is not setting unrealistic schedules, working longer hours, sacrificing customer quality, or reducing development expense.

  • Successful, leading-edge companies have a set of critical factors and key practices that set them apart from the followers.

  • Corporate Development Partners has tracked these success factors and key practices and developed a "Best Practices" survey that measures where your company is effective and where there are gaps in getting quality products to the market fast.

  • This survey is designed to measure the effectiveness of your organization in those factors that are most important to being a successful Speed-to-Market company.
This survey is free and confidential and respondents will remain anonymous. The summarized report will be sent to the contact person in your organization. Due to popular demand, if there are more than 20 respondents per company, feedback will be delayed.
Your Name: 
Your Company's Name: 
Email Address: 
Phone Number: 

Directions
Each of the following statements describes an important Speed-to-Market practice. Please think about each statement carefully. Then check the number corresponding to your knowledge/perception of your organization's effectiveness.

Scale:

  1. Not effective
  2. Marginally effective
  3. Moderately effective
  4. Very effective
  5. Highly effective
Example:
Allocating significant resources up-front.1  2  3  4  5 

Begin Survey: There are 38 questions.

1.
 Establishing corporate vision that provides clear direction at all levels. 1  2  3  4  5 
2.
 Using product family strategies that accelerate product evolution. 1  2  3  4  5 
3.
 Prioritizing and building in features incrementally over a series of product releases.  1  2  3  4  5 
4.
 Clearly defining goals and objectives that value speed-to-market. 1  2  3  4  5 
5.
 Defining products starting with market and customer needs. 1  2  3  4  5 
6.
 Developing close relationships between major customers/users and key executives, managers and product teams. 1  2  3  4  5 
7.
 Assessing the trade-offs between speed-to-market, performance, cost and development expense in product planning. 1  2  3  4  5 
8.
 Clearly defining products and fully utilizing technology potential. 1  2  3  4  5 
9.
 Allocating significant resources up-front. 1  2  3  4  5 
10.
 Ensuring early cross-functional team involvement/parallel assignments. 1  2  3  4  5 
11.
 Conducting product planning and product design concurrently. 1  2  3  4  5 
12.
 Obtaining development schedule buy-off by team members. 1  2  3  4  5 
13.
 Quantifying the cost of being late to market.  1  2  3  4  5 
14.
 Assuring in-depth knowledge of the development schedule. 1  2  3  4  5 
15.
 Continuously monitoring the critical path. 1  2  3  4  5 
16.
 Maintaining highly visible program status reviews. 1  2  3  4  5 
17.
 Rapidly adapting to change through contingency planning and disciplined tracking. 1  2  3  4  5 
18.
 Maintaining strong, open partnerships with customers and suppliers. 1  2  3  4  5 
19.
 Establishing shared risk relationships - working the problems together.  1  2  3  4  5 
20.
 Demonstrating "make it, sell it, improve it" mentality/process. 1  2  3  4  5 
21.
 Using incremental, iterative product development/release based on consistent user feedback. 1  2  3  4  5 
22.
 Exercising excellent team communication. 1  2  3  4  5 
23.
 Creating strong team ownership for making decisions. 1  2  3  4  5 
24.
 Quickly assessing the impact on product performance and/or development time resulting from change requests by customers or suppliers.  1  2  3  4  5 
25.
 Managing change control processes. 1  2  3  4  5 
26.
 Employing concurrent engineering practices.  1  2  3  4  5 
27.
 Building in continuous process review/self-improvement based on past successes and/or failures. 1  2  3  4  5 
28.
 Balancing fixed plans and flexible responses/replanning. 1  2  3  4  5 
29.
 Reducing cycle time of processes which impact product development and operations.  1  2  3  4  5 
30.
 Involving teams early-on in the product planning process. 1  2  3  4  5 
31.
 Ensuring all relevant functions and expertise are represented on the team. 1  2  3  4  5 
32.
 Developing team ownership, passion and a sense of urgency. 1  2  3  4  5 
33.
 Clearly defining team authority and autonomy. 1  2  3  4  5 
34.
 Believing that acceleration in time to market is consistent with improving product performance.  1  2  3  4  5 
35.
 Valuing the creative tension caused by opposing forces/complementary skills.  1  2  3  4  5 
36.
 Balancing conflicting demands of "do both" versus "either/or".  1  2  3  4  5 
37.
 Willingness to make decisions, take risks and break barriers.  1  2  3  4  5 
38.
 Mutual trust and open communications across functions. 1  2  3  4  5 

End of Survey Questions

 
 

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