Resources: Archives — Past Meetings — 2003

(Past Meetings: 2004 2003 2002)

Wednesday, February 19, 2003, 11:30 A.M.

Dealing Proactively with Uncertainty
Venue: Sun Microsystems, Newark, 7777 Gateway Blvd., Bldg. B14.

Time: 11.30 AM to 1.30 PM
Costs: Pre-registration: $20 for members and $30 for nonmembers
Walk-in registration: $25 for members and $35 for nonmember
Lunch will be provided.

Presenter will be Preston Smith, Principal of New Product Dynamics and author of "Developing Products in Half the Time: New Rules, New Tools"

As the business climate becomes more demanding, unanticipated risks in your projects are becoming less acceptable. Schedule slippage and budget overruns hurt more than they did a few years ago. In this program, Preston will present:

A model of risk that is scalable to any size project or program and easily deployable as the risk management approach built into any product development or project management life cycle.
Methods for identifying drivers (causes) of risks so you can manage root causes rather than the symptoms of risks.
An appropriate quantification of the key factors of a risk that allows you to prioritize risks without introducing errors that render your numbers meaningless.
A clear distinction between a risk and an issue and the different types of management they require.
Some supporting tools and strategies that support implementation of an effective project risk management program.
Guidance on identifying and overcoming the organizational and cultural impediments that can block implementation of your risk management program.
If you have an interest in minimizing risks in your projects, thus improving their predictability, we invite you to attend this program.

Bio

Preston Smith, founder and principal of New Product Dynamics, began specializing in rapid product development in 1984 as an internal consultant, became an independent management consultant concentrating on time to market issues in 1986, and earned Certified Management Consultant (CMC) standing in 1990. Preston has consulted on highly effective new product development techniques and time to market over a wide variety of industries in many countries. He is known for adapting techniques that have proved valuable in one industry to another industry.

Prior to 1986, Preston gained broad engineering and technology management experience over a period of twenty years through employment with North American Aviation (now part of Boeing), Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, IBM, Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies), General Motors Research Laboratories, Ensco (a government transportation safety contractor), Institute for Defense Analyses, and Emhart (since merged into Black & Decker).

Although Preston may be best known for his many publications, his daily activity centers on onsite consultation and training in new product development using a results-oriented approach that he has honed over the years. Consider how his consulting capabilities can benefit your organization.

For professional development, Preston participates in an industry or professional conference per month, on average. He develops his consulting skills by participating regularly in meetings and conferences of the Institute of Management Consultants, and he contributes to Consulting to Management.

Some product development techniques Preston is best known for include:

Project economic trade-offs, such as the cost of delay
Proactive project risk management tools
Continuous improvement of the product development process (and viewing product development capability as a competitive advantage)
Effective cross-functional development teams and the trade-offs involved in using them
Co-located and dispersed (virtual) product development teams
Iterative (non-sequential) product development processes

In addition to serving on the Advisory Board of the Society of Concurrent Product Development (formerly the Society of Concurrent Engineering - SOCE), Preston also serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Time-Compression Technologies magazine and regularly writes an "Expert Commentary" column for Management Roundtable's Product Development Best Practices Report.

Preston Smith holds a Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford University, and is a member of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA), the Society of Concurrent Product Development (SCPD), and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

His latest book is Proactive Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development, with Guy M. Merritt, Productivity Press, 2002 (June), 246 pages.