Projects, Processes and Systems - Essay Example

Developing the right products at the right times is a serious concern among organizations which have important goals to achieve prior to obtaining competitive advantage and excellent performance in their industries. One example of an organization facing this kind of situation at all times is Apple Incorporated. Other high-tech firms that try to incur strategy of developing products at the right times may also include but not limited to Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell, Compaq, Toshiba, Acer, IBM/Lenovo, Asus, and Sony.

All these firms have R&D departments trying to ensure completeness of projects on a concurrent and timely manner. For instance, at Dell, it is the firm’s primary concern to deliver product offerings on-time to their customers in order to provide high value for customer satisfaction, and ensure high productivity, efficiency and achievement of organisational goals. Developing the right products at the right times In the age of technology and tough competition, those firms in the industry where companies like Apple identify themselves to be integral components continuously faced with choices to remarkably create important image, so as to acquire potential target market, which at the bottom line will support their product and service offerings.

The R&D departments of these companies play a very elemental role in order to come up with products that could grasp the opportunity and eventually address the prevailing market needs with timeliness. In reality, R&D department has projects to accomplish on a timely manner in order to provide a strong support for the achievement of organizational goals. These projects are multiple in nature such as developing the right products, harmoniously and at the right times, which make R&D project management a complex and challenging corporate activity (Verma et al., 2011, p.462).

Developing the right products at the right times is a very important objective in the case of companies like Apple, IBM, Dell and other competing firms having the same nature of business. This is an essential project at Apple’s R&D department prior to formulation of highly innovative products that could satisfy its strategy prior to obtaining competitive advantage in its industry. Toyota on the other hand has to tie up R&D with its marketing department in order for it to formulate new models of cars prior to the changing needs and demands in the market.

In reality, the R&D department of Toyota has to develop products at the right times in order not to stay far behind the competition. The company has to ensure that there must be something new to offer in the market. Therefore, the principle in reality behind the development of new products at the right times as one of R&D projects could reflect on the actual impact of understanding customer needs, ease of manufacture for new products, monitoring of development cost, minimization of time to market, and ensuring that the actual development is due to actual customers’ needs, so it is important to integrate R&D, production and marketing (Hill and Jones, 2009, p.138). Thus, R&D projects, like developing the right products at the right times could only be successfully implemented if R&D has to be integrated with other working departments of an active organisation.

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