New Product Development (NPD) Accelerator

This section contains the following topics:

CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD Capabilities

Pipeline Management

Portfolio Management

Idea-to-Launch Management

Project and Resource Management

User Access Groups

Install the Add-in

CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD Capabilities

CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for New Product Development (CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD) helps organizations shorten the time-to-market for new products, increase their rate of innovation, increase new product sales, and reduce new product development costs. To achieve the aim, organizations require balancing all product development skills and resources for optimum strategic, financial, and operational impact across all product lines in all product lifecycle phases.

CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD offers the following main capabilities:

The Portfolio management includes the following features:
- The ability to track specific product categories.
- The ability to track the product or product type.
- The ability to track products by brand, customer segment, and product line
- The ability to move products through lifecycle phases.
- A rating system that uses specific factors to provide product analysis.
- The ability to perform portfolio management of products.
- The ability to track competitor products.
- A page layout for portfolios based on product information.
- A group that provides appropriate access for product managers.
Pipeline and project management includes the following features:
- A gate scoring object to track and store all gate scores for each stage that a project goes through.
- Automated gate submission processes that support each of the Stage-Gate gates.
- A gate scoring page layout to provide metrics on gates for projects.
- Custom attributes and page layouts, including status tracking of go, hold, and kill-based on gate scores.
- Tracking of budget per phase.
- A built-in project template for the stage-gate five-step process.
- Support for deliverables and worksheets with a document folder structure.
- The ability to perform project portfolio management.
- A group that provides appropriate access for project managers.
- An Executive Dashboard.
- A Stage Review Dashboard available for project managers to review projects before submitting them for gate approval.
- Extra project portlets available to be added to any of the project page layouts.
- A Portfolio Management Dashboard available for portfolio managers to view everything.
- A group that provides appropriate access for portfolio managers.
- A group that provides appropriate access for team members.
Idea-to-launch management includes the following features:
- An Idea Vault to collect all ideas and allow portfolio planning.
- The idea screening process that allows you to score the idea and turn it into a project.
- Custom attributes and page layouts for ideas.
- A gate scoring mechanism for gatekeepers to rate ideas against business goals.
- The ability for non-Clarity users to enter new ideas, access idea scoring, and view pertinent projects.
- The Idea Management Dashboard that displays necessary metrics and provides quick updates for users.
- A group that provides appropriate access to marketing managers.

Pipeline Management

The process of prioritizing and sequencing projects to balance resource demand and capacity is known as project portfolio management or pipeline management. As projects move from one stage in their lifecycle to the next, they require reviewing in the context of all the other in-flight projects, to determine if they are still worth doing. This is a portfolio process of selecting and scheduling.

Advantages of pipeline management include the following:

Resource conflicts and overloads are avoided, thus reducing project delays
Scarce resources can be allocated to the highest priority projects
Pipeline throughput is improved by ensuring the right mix of projects at all phases of development

Portfolio Management

The purpose of portfolio management is to increase the business value of your product portfolio by accomplishing the following goals:

Ensure the product portfolio has an acceptable balance of reward against risk
Improve alignment between innovation and business strategy by top-down allocation of new product development (NPD) resources
Maximize the value of the product portfolio by monitoring the health and performance of all products over their entire lifecycle

Analyzing a product portfolio provides you with answers to such questions as the following:

Do we have sufficient products in each stage of development?
Do we have products in development for all of the markets or strategic arenas in which we compete?
What are the planned launch dates for each of the products in the portfolio?
Do we have an appropriate balance of value against risk in the product portfolio?
Are we over or under spending in any specific product or market area?
Which products are at risk?
Where do we have product gaps that we require to fill?
Do we have sufficient high value products?
Do we have too many low value products?

Idea-to-Launch Management

Idea-to-launch is the process of bringing new products from inception through to market. This process requires collaboration and coordination of multiple business functions including R&D, marketing, sales, finance, distribution, and the supply chain.

Employing an idea-to-launch process upholds the following capabilities:

Support a rigorous go/kill decision process at funding gates
Have well-defined stages that eliminate missed steps and rework
Have standard deliverables for effective gate decisions
Be adaptable to the scope and risk profile of the product being developed

Project and Resource Management

A key to improved project success is effective project and resource management. CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD offers comprehensive project and resource management capabilities that allow your organization to achieve the following goals:

Reduce resource bottlenecks by managing all resource allocations and assignments
Minimize schedule delays by managing all project schedules and progress
Help reduce project delays by capturing all issues and risks
Enable early identification of cost overruns by capturing all project planned and actual costs
Improve quality by providing standard templates for cross-functional project plans
Reduce project delays by tracking dependencies between product and technology development projects
Improve cross-functional coordination through program management of cross-functional plans

User Access Groups

Six CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD user access groups exist, each with a different set of security rights. The groups are defined in the following ways:

Non-Clarity Users - Users who do not require CA Clarity PPM to perform their jobs, but can enter ideas into the system.
Team Members - Regular members of CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD project teams.
Marketing Managers - Users who perform marketing management activities.
Project Portfolio Managers - Users who manage projects and portfolios of projects.
Product Portfolio Managers - Users who manage the products, and the portfolios to which the products belong.
Executives - Company executives who use CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD to view project, product, and portfolio metrics dashboards.

Non-Clarity Users

Non-Clarity Users are employees who do not use CA Clarity PPM on a daily basis to do their jobs. The access group enables them with permissions defined to show only ideas, gate scoring, and projects, with the Idea Management Dashboard.

Team Members

Team Members are users who perform a variety of activities as members of NPD project teams.

Marketing Managers

Marketing Managers are the CA Clarity PPM Accelerator for NPD idea managers—the guardians of the idea review process. It is their responsibility to make the initial decision to send an idea through the scoring or fast track option. They review and submit ideas, utilize the Idea Management Dashboard, enter planned costs and other idea data, and typically manage the overall idea process.

Project Portfolio Managers

Project Portfolio Managers create project portfolios and oversee projects. The managerial responsibilities cover a wide scope of activities, such as adding team members, creating the cost plan, reviewing planned and actual costs, editing and creating tasks, assigning and allocating resources, potentially approving timesheets, reviewing schedule variances, baselining the project, managing issues and risks, and adding dependencies. Project Portfolio Managers utilize the Stage Review Dashboard to determine that the project is on track.

Executives

The executive users use the Executive Dashboard to analyze portfolios and potentially gate scoring.

Install the Add-in

For complete instructions on how to install an add-in, see the Installation Guide.