Do You Know the Lean Maturity Level of Your Product Development?
One of the tools developed and validated during the LeanPPD project was the SMART Maturity Assessment which enables companies to identify their readiness and maturity level applying best practices towards a lean product development process.
The LeanPPD assessment tool was reviewed and recently updated by LAA’s team to include latest trends and best practices. It has three main goals:
- Enable companies all over the world to assess the key lean practices required to achieve a lean product development process.
- Assess the companies’ current and desired maturity levels in order to develop an action plan.
- Obtain in a simple and automatic way the results of the assessment highlighting the main opportunity areas.
The SMART Assessment tool was developed considering four perspectives:
- New Product Development Process: To be competitive in the market companies should have a product development process than maximises value delivered to customers by eliminating waste.
- Tools and Methods: In an effective product development process, tools assist teams to carry out their tasks in the most productive way. This perspective assesses how teams use tools successfully to enable a lean product development process.
- Knowledge: This perspective helps companies to assess their practices in order to enable knowledge sharing and creation to speed up their current development process.
- People and Skills: People are the essence of a company. It cannot compete in product development without capable, energised and aligned teams that execute lean thinking in their daily activities.
The SMART Maturity Assessment facilitates the tracking of the company’s progress during its journey to become lean in product development.
The tool proposes a qualitative maturity assessment model to identify the maturity level based on 56 best practices in 4 perspectives.
No matter how much progress companies have achieved implementing lean practices, the SMART assessment will enable them to obtain their current readiness level and identify key actions that could be carried out to facilitate their prioritization and implementation.
The outcome of the assessment will be a report which will include radar graphs showing the gaps per perspective where the AS-IS and TO-BE levels for each of the 56 practices.
