Most company’s ultimate objective is to deliver to the customer the right product at the right price at the right time. Salespeople are very good at selling things that don't yet exist. And engineers are very good at creating something that doesn’t yet exist. Any company that can successfully align these two departments will realize a significant competitive advantage.
In highly a competitive marketplace such as manufacturing, the lifetime of products is getting shorter. If a competitor comes out with their model that's better and cheaper, then it might mean that your product is obsolete almost immediately.
In terms of a product’s lifecycle, if development time encroaches into what should have been the manufacturing time, the return on investment can be significantly diminished—time-to-market reduction is a key. If you get it right, the return on investment can be enormous.
“It's not easy and requires commitment from the top and working downwards to enable culture change,” says Kendall. “It’s important to keep the salespeople involved during the whole span of the project, not just the start and the finish. That means asking their advice and opinion, not just sending them a monthly project update.”
Salespeople will want the engineers to create a product that’s smaller, faster, more energy efficient than the competition—they can sell loads of those. But engineers will say you can’t just break the laws of physics. On the other hand, engineers who want to be helpful run into problems overpromising the product to the customer, and the salespeople, rightly, will ask why the engineer is working on something that isn’t what the customer paid for.
It's never too early to get the two departments talking to each other. Kendall says engineers need to educate the sales team in the art of what’s possible—not being negative but being realistic. Engineers are often perfectionists, which often manifests itself with a desire to take more time to improve a product. And the marketing person, or the project manager, or even the customer needs to step in and say that the product is already fit for the purpose it’s intended for.
Manufacturers need to strike a balance between the customer experience right and innovative ideas so they can charge the customer the right price for delivering a top-notch product.
Three keys to aligning engineering and sales
First, there’s one pivotal role which brings sales and engineering together: the project manager. The project manager’s role is to align all of the interested stakeholders from across the company, whether they be engineering, sales, manufacturing, legal and regulatory, intellectual property and leadership.
Kendal says it’s often an engineer who takes on that role.
“They have to play the conductor to the orchestra, so to speak. The conductor doesn’t have the ability to play all of the instruments—but it’s their job to make sure the entire orchestra is playing the same tune at the same speed and inflection. They need to have enough ability to be able to pull it all together without having to be an expert in every component,” he says.
The second key to aligning sales and engineering (as well as others) is to put them into a dedicated, co-located, multidisciplinary project team. Dedicated means the team is focused on one project rather than dividing their time between several. Co-located means they've got to be in the same workspace together. Multidisciplinary means representatives from all the different internal departments involved in the project.
A good example of that is the Apollo 13 mission, a NASA moon mission in 1970 that had to be aborted while in space due to equipment malfunction. The mission head, Gene Kranz, put the electrical engineer, the mechanical engineer, and others engineers together in a room with the same materials the astronauts had and told them they couldn’t come back out until they had a solution.
The third key is that engineers should get a chance to talk to the customer to understand what the customer really wants. This should happen in the early stages and again after product delivery, getting feedback on how the customer is using the product. “You’d be surprised how many times the customer ends up using the product in ways the engineers didn’t intend; this isn’t the customer getting it wrong—it’s on the engineer for designing the product a certain way,” says Kendall. “Getting engineers and customers together goes a long way to resolving that, because in those cases the product likely isn’t meeting the customer’s needs.”
How an engineer can succeed in project management
There’s one crucial thing that separates really good project managers from average ones. The average one will prioritize specific skills such as technical expertise in the product, planning skills, estimating and so on. But excellent project managers focus on the objective of the project—they take a step back and see the big picture. Engineers are, by temperament, keen on the details. A good project manager needs to say, "hang on a minute, let's be focused on the objective here.” It's that focus on the objective that really brings the team together.
What tools does an interdisciplinary team need?
While it’s easy to see planning software as a project management solution, Kendall says it should be about one percent of the job of being a project manager. “The software is less important than the skills that go with it. It's not about the systems and the products, it's about establishing a culture where we are going to talk to each other, to the customers and the suppliers,” he says, adding that this team approach is to understand they have benefits to deliver for the organization and its customers, so work out the best way of doing it together.