Team Based Project Management – giving professionals the technical and adaptive skills they need to succeed with global projects
The Client – A global force in household, health and personal care branded consumer and household goods. The company has sales of over £10 billion and consistently grows ahead of the industry due to relentless innovation in its leading power brands. It has operations in over 60 countries, sales in over 180 and has highly motivated multinational leadership teams.
The Challenge The aim of this assignment was to design and then deliver a blended training solution that brought to life their global New Product Development process which was designed to span their diverse product portfolio. The overall aim was to use their total global resource and focus it on bringing NPD ideas to market as fast and effectively as possible.
The Objectives – The assignment had three specific objectives:
- To develop a high impact; time efficient; and interactive training solution aimed at all the people involved in the NPD process around the world. The functions involved were many and varied and included R&D scientists; packaging engineers; intellectual property professionals; marketing and category leaders; regulatory professionals; supply chain and manufacturing professionals; finance; and commercial professionals to name but a few.
- To bring the NPD process to life using carefully designed exercises and case studies that can be readily understood by people from many different country and regional cultures.
- To use the training to build strong relationships across the functions and the geographies in order to improve the quality of conversations and enhance the speed by which great ideas are turned into successful products on the shelf.
Our Training Design Principles – We applied our 8 training and design principles to this assignment, more of which can be discovered at https://senseiuke.com/what-we-do/develop-leaders/design-principles/
Our Approach – We worked with a small internal team drawn from a cross-section of the key functions actively involved in the NPD process. Working with them we co-created a variety of highly interactive training sessions ranging from a half –day overview sessions for people who need to be aware of the process but are not involved, through to a 3-day workshop for those professionals who are actively involved in the core NPD process around the globe.
These workshops were co-delivered with the client and we ran over 75 workshops in every region that the client has operations. This included all countries in Europe, the Middle East, Australia, the Far East, North and South America. We estimated over 1000 people went through this training over an 18 month period.
The Impact – Participants left our workshops with a deep understanding of how the global NPD process works; the tools that they can use to help their projects succeed and their role within the process. They learned the adaptive skills needed to get the best from globally dispersed project teams and through a series of radical action conversations and team exercises confronted and resolved some of the issues inherent in the way they worked now.
Importantly they had fun learning together and relationships forged in these workshops lasted long after the afterglow of the workshops faded and contributed towards this company becoming one of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in its sector.