Navman was a classic kiwi success story, starting as a small bunch of engineers based in Peter Maire’s garage, growing into a highly successful company exporting world-class products based on leading-edge technologies around the world. As the company grew, the complexity and rate of change increased significantly – more people involved in developing the products (multi-division / multi-location organisation with over 500 employees), more products/technologies of higher complexity, more competitors and greater risk if a product failed (compare a product recall for a couple of thousand units to recalling hundreds of thousands of units!). Navman simply couldn’t operate in the same way it did as a small organisation.

 

My role was to make the necessary changes to improve delivery of products to market and ensure the company could continue growing.

 

The first thing I did was a review of current processes. I found that each business unit was following a different process at different levels of detail that had evolved over time. Those processes weren’t being followed consistently and frequently were simply not being used.

 

We wanted to have in place ‘best-practices’ that would add significant value to the business. But we didn’t have the time or resources to “re-invent the wheel” so we chose to implement Stage-Gate® process. There was a quite a gap to achieve the goals of Stage-Gate and we couldn’t stop the business while we made all changes required. In fact, we had to make these changes without impacting the ability for the company to continually deliver products to market (check out this video).

 

One of the first things we needed to do was to gain some consistency.    So we put in place a basic Stage-Gate® framework that the project teams could continue to work in, slotting what they were already doing into the appropriate stage. It’s wasn’t perfect, but it was a start in achieving consistency within each of the phases. Don’t underestimate the benefits of using common terminology in stage and gate names and the stage projects really are in the process!

 

The first key deliverable we standardised was the Project Charter. A lot of time and effort tended to be wasted at the early stages of projects, because there was no clear and common understanding of project scope, requirements and actions. The Project Charter was used to initiate any project thereafter and keep everyone focused.