Product Innovation Best Practice Series
Brief Insightful Advice for Busy Innovation Leaders
January 2009
Author: Robert G. Cooper is one of the most influential innovation thought leaders in the
business world today. A sought-after public speaker, prolific author and advisor to industry, Cooper
has assembled the world’s most comprehensive body of research and knowledge on the topic of
Product Innovation. His many groundbreaking discoveries including the Stage-Gate® Idea-to-Launch
Process and Portfolio Management for New Products are widely implemented around the world and
are largely considered industry best practice.
Accelerate Your Best Projects
Perhaps the greatest challenge that users of Stage-Gate®
face is making the gates work. “As go the gates, so
goes the process,” declared one executive, noting that
the gates in her company’s process were ineffectual. In a
robust gating system, poor projects are spotted early and
killed; and projects in trouble are also detected, and sent
back for rework or redirect — put back on course. But
as quality control check points, the gates are not very
effective in many companies, allowing too many poor
projects to proceed.1
Gates are rated one of the weakest areas in product development with only 33 percent of firms having tough
rigorous gates throughout the idea-to-launch process.
Further, only 56 percent of development projects meet
their sales targets (44 percent do not), which means that
gates are not doing their job: too many bad projects and
too many projects in trouble are sliding through!
Gates with no teeth: The most common complaint is
that, while the company has installed a stage-and-gate
system, the gates, which are the vital component of
the governance or decision-making process, are either
non-existent or lack teeth. The result is that projects
are rarely killed at gates. Rather, as one senior manager
exclaimed, “Projects are like express trains, speeding
down the track, slowing down at the occasional station
[gate], but never stopping until they reach their ultimate
destination, the marketplace.” In short, the gates have
no teeth: once a project is approved, it never gets killed.
An example: In one major high-tech communications
equipment manufacturer, once a project passes Gate 1
(the idea screen), it is placed into the business’s product
roadmap. This means that the estimated sales and profits
from the new project are now integrated into the business unit’s financial forecast and plans. Once into the
financial plan of the business, of course, the project is
locked-in: there is no way that the project can be removed
from the roadmap or killed. In effect, all gates after Gate
1 are merely rubber stamps. Somehow management in
this firm missed the point that the idea-to-launch process
is a funnel, not a tunnel; and that gates after Gate 1 are
also Go/Kill points: this should not be a one-gate, five
stage process!
In too many firms, like this example, after the initial Go
decision, the gates amount to little more than a project
update meeting, a project review meeting, or a milestone
check-point. As one executive declared: “We never kill
projects, we just wound them!” Thus, instead of the
well-defined funnel that is so often used to depict the
new product process, one ends up with a tunnel where
everything that enters comes out the other end, good
projects and bad. Yet management is deluded into believing that they have a functioning Stage-Gate process.
Hollow decisions at gates: In still other companies, the
gate review meeting is held and a Go decision is made,
but resources are not committed. Somehow management does not understand that approval decisions are
rather meaningless unless a check is cut. The project
leader and team must leave the gate meeting with the
Contact Stage-Gate International for more information +1-905-304-8797
www.stage-gate.com
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used under license by Stage-Gate International. Logo for Stage-Gate used under license where appropriate.
resources they need to progress their project. Instead,
projects are approved, but resources are not — a hollow
Go decision. And it becomes all too easy to keep approving project after project as long as the resources are
fictional — that usually leads to too many projects in the
pipeline, and projects taking forever to get to market.
result was a gridlocked pipeline with over 50 major
projects, an almost-infinite time-to-market, and no or few
launches. By toughening the gate meetings — making
them rigorous senior management reviews with solid
data available — and forcing more kills, management
dramatically reduced the number of projects passing
each gate, the result being a reduction to eight major
projects, better projects, time to market down to 1.6
years, and five major launches annually.
If “gates without teeth” and “hollow gates” describe your
company’s gates, then it’s time for a rethink. Gates are
not merely project review meetings or
milestone checks! Rather they are a
Gates are the quality control check-points
Go/Kill and resource allocation meeting:
Gates ensure that only the right projects move forward
Gates are where senior management
meets to decide whether the company
should continue to invest in the project
based on latest information; or to cut
GATE
• Decision:
one’s losses and bail out of a bad project.
Prescribed list of
Go / Kill / Hold / Recycle
And gates are a resource commitment
deliverables
3
1
2
• Forward Plan approved
meeting, where, in the event of a Go
GATEKEEPERS
decision, the project leader and team
Decision based upon. . .
• Expectations clearly defined
receive a commitment of resources to
• Readiness check
• Robust data
progress their project (see exhibit, right).
• Business rationale
• Based on solid work
• Action plan
An example: Cooper Standard Automotive converted their gates into “decision
factories.” Previously management had
failed to make many Kill decisions, with
most gates merely automatic Go’s. The
2
Decision
criteria
If Go, resource commitments
are made
• Use pre-defined decision criteria
• Right at the gate meeting
• To make Go / Kill & prioitization decisions
• Employ a score card!
Bottom line: Take a hard look at your gates. If they lack teeth — never kill a bad project or let too many low
value projects slip through — then its time to make them tough senior management reviews with robust data
available. Use Go/Kill and prioritization criteria, and try objective scorecards to rate the attractiveness of each
project investment. And make sure that you actually make resource commitment decisions at gates — that
way, you force some projects to be killed or put on hold, simply because there aren’t enough resources to
handle all of them.
1 Adapted
from: R.G. Cooper, “The Stage-Gate Idea-to-Launch Process – Update, What’s New and NexGen Systems,” J. Product Innovation
Management, Volume 25, Number 3, May 2008, pp 213-232.
2 S. Osborne, Make More and Better Product Decisions For Greater Impact, Proceedings, Product Development and Management Association
Annual International Conference, Atlanta, GA, Oct. 2006
Contact Stage-Gate International for more information +1-905-304-8797
www.stage-gate.com
© 2014 Product Development Institute. Stage-Gate is a registered trademark. Logo for Product Development Institute Inc.
used under license by Stage-Gate International. Logo for Stage-Gate used under license where appropriate.
Stage-Gate International is the world's leading full-service provider of solutions which enable
organizations to improve their Product Innovation and Portfolio Management capabilities and
performance. Our clients include 5000+ organizations of all sizes across all industries.
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