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Expert has been influential in helping management improve "time to market" since 1984. He has guided manufacturers in many industries to develop integrated product development (IPD) systems, also known as concurrent development. Through analysis of a specific product development organization, he has discovered the gaps between departments that lead to delays, miscommunication, and wasted effort. He then works with management to build cross-functional development teams, define roles, responsibilities and authorities, and finally develop communication mechanisms for overcoming these organizational gaps. Expert also provides his expert advice through training workshops, in which the developers themselves discover how dysfunctional their current chimneys are and create their own means of overcoming them, thereby automatically building ownership in the solution. Expert has written on this subject. The title of this publication notwithstanding, Expert much prefers to avoid terms such as concurrent engineering (CE) and simultaneous engineering, because these overlook the vital links that engineering has with marketing, manufacturing, purchasing, quality, finance, and especially with customers. More inclusive terms include integrated development, integrated product and process development (IPPD), and simultaneous development.

Expert has spent fifteen years assisting companies around the world in accelerating or otherwise improving their design process. Although he is best known for his time to market techniques, he also works with managers to create processes for achieving their objectives of "more, better, faster." Often, he is called in to integrate design per se with its interdependent processes in marketing, manufacturing, and other departments. Sometimes it is a matter of building a flexible process that will efficiently accommodate both minor upgrades and major new platform developments. He has helped companies in many industries, high tech and "low" tech alike, to radically shorten their time to market by employing the tools of activity overlapping, partial co-location, incremental innovation, product architecture, and effective capacity management. No stranger to design techniques, Expert was involved in aircraft design and design automation software development before he left college with a Ph.D. in engineering.

All too often managers think of product development as an engineering or R&D function, since this department contributes most of the labor. Expert has helped these managers to appreciate that the links to the customer and customer needs through marketing and sales are absolutely critical, as are the links with downstream manufacturing, service, and testing functions. Often the difficulty is with the engineers themselves: They prefer to work in a vacuum without outside "interference." In this case, cross-functional team training, using the book he co-wrote, helps everyone involved to see the benefits and techniques of integrating development teams. Unfortunately, integrating teams is getting harder, because they are increasingly likely to be dispersed around the city or around the globe. Few teams recognize the disconnects, delays, and mistrust that multiply as they become "virtual." Expert overcomes these communication and trust breakdowns by helping the team to establish communication protocols and partially co-locate when and where they can. Dispersed or not, however, most often "teams" are weak because they are teams in name only: They have no authority, each member is involved only part time, the team is not evaluated or rewarded as a team, and functional managers tug at "their" members and overrule team decisions. Expert works with many such teams to help them and their managers to a build high-performance unit that can get its new product to market quickly.

Expert is a recognized expert in new product development, especially in techniques for speeding up development cycles. Along with Donald Reinertsen, he wrote a book on product development which has over 80,000 copies in use worldwide. Since 1984 he has been providing consulting and training specializing in product development techniques, especially in rapid development. Although speed is not always the primary objective, it turns out to be the best comprehensive metric we have for product development performance.

Expert doesn't believe that there is one set of "best practices" that applies universally. Instead, there is a whole kit of tools, some of which work best in some circumstances and some in others. For instance, quality function deployment (QFD) is often touted as a best practice, but many who have tried it have been disappointed in how slow and cumbersome it is. Expert shows clients how to get the benefit of QFD without suffering the delays that often accompany it. Another example is the fuzzy front end, an improvement opportunity that Expert and Reinertsen have been helping clients to exploit since the mid '80s, but others have only recently seen its potential.

Stage and gate development processes have become quite popular as managers look for ways to control their projects and ensure success. Unfortunately, such processes have their dark side when time to market is crucial. They force work into a sequential mode and constrain activities in a lockstep rhythm that is safe but not very fast. (And, Expert notes, it isn't even very safe when you can be left behind by a competitor.) Expert recognizes both the advantages and weaknesses of stage gate processes, and he helps clients to adapt them to their needs. Interestingly, since the objectives of each project are likely to differ, the best solution will also differ. Thus, the issue is not whether to use a gates approach, but how much of one to use on each project.

For instance, do you really want effort to cease at a gate, as the theory would suggest? Fortunately, there are powerful alternatives to stage gates that are being use effectively in object-oriented software development today. [See Expert's column, "Revisiting Iterative Product Development" in the September 1999 issue of Product Development Best Practices Report.] Because his multi-industry experience spans such fields as hardware and software, Expert can show clients how to transfer cutting-edge software techniques into the hardware world.

Expert identified opportunities in a client's development process and helped them implement improvements that ultimately earned them an international award for product development excellence (power tools industry).Working with senior management at one client, he discovered opportunities to speed up development and implemented some of these, including risk management and cost of delay (construction equipment business).He analyzed a client's product development capacity and advised them on how many projects they could undertake with their resources (medical devices industry). Expert facilitated and advised a corporate quality improvement team charged with accelerating the firm's product development. He helped to set up a multinational cross-functional development team (motor vehicles client).He restructured a client company's fuzzy front end process so that there was direct carry-through from quotation and planning to shipping the new product (semiconductor manufacturing equipment).