Medical Device Link.

Originally Published MDDI February 2003

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT INSIGHT

Advisory boards enhance development efforts and help companies meet the ever-increasing challenges of developing 
and launching new products.

Richard Rosen, Battelle Memorial Institute

At a medical device development or R&D company, a part of the general manager’s job is the successful execution of product development efforts. In organizations that conduct multiple R&D programs—often involving significant resources, multiple locations, and high technical complexity—it is a challenge for any manager or group of managers to provide the oversight required to ensure a program’s success. What follows is a management tool that I have found highly successful in addressing this challenge. 

Consider your own firm’s situation. During the conduct of your product development efforts, do any of the following situations sound familiar?

• Inadequate mechanisms exist to help identify and manage technical, schedule, market, and resource risks.
• The documented product development process is not applied consistently. 
• The company wants to provide growth opportunities for newer project managers and teams while managing the risk of using less-experienced staff. 
• Senior management cannot provide timely, consistent, cost-effective oversight product development programs.
• Ineffective mechanisms exist to keep a project on track as market and bus-iness conditions change. 

Advisory Board Composition

To address these issues, consider instituting an advisory board process to augment your in-place management review methods. Each advisory board (one per project) consists of a group of knowledgeable but uninvolved staff who are at a peer level with the project team members. The board’s roles are to provide an objective overview of project progress, to provide technical and programmatic advice to the project manager and team, and to improve the quality and consistency of product development programs across the organization. More than just serving as technical reviewers, the advisory board must also have additional authorities that require their advice to be seriously considered and implemented. 

Because an advisory board typically includes a senior program manager and a senior technical staff member, it offers significant experience. This can be helpful in quickly identifying potential problems and risk issues so they can be addressed and resolved before they become larger problems. 

Advisory boards are also an effective mechanism to transfer best practices and lessons learned from one project to another.

On a personal level, the advisory board provides a mentoring function to the project manager. It offers support and guidance in key decision making, which can be effective in moving a project forward. It also minimizes the number of nonproductive activities that sometimes occur during large, complex development efforts. 

The advisory board also provides another point of contact to and from the customer, whether it is a contract product development client or a marketing or product line manager within the same company. In addition to direct contact with the project manager, the customer now has another avenue of communication with someone current on the specific project. This also provides another channel for the customer to provide constructive feedback regarding the performance of the project manager and team.

Advisory Board Authority

An important aspect of the advisory board is its authority to redirect the project if the team is not addressing technical, programmatic, or business issues. To be effective, however, it is important for both the project manager and advisory board to clearly understand that their roles are meant to be complementary. The advisory board is not intended to assume day-to-day programmatic responsibility. Complementary functions are achieved by holding both sides accountable for the project’s success.

Meetings

The advisory board chair, typically a senior program or technical staff member with prior experience in a relevant product development activity, should interact frequently with the project manager and team. This can be done through informal discussions designed to keep the chair abreast of current activities and any issues that may arise. Formal project advisory board meetings are conducted on a regular basis, with the frequency dependent on the scope and complexity of the project. With the use of appropriate tools and best practices, a short, one- to two-hour monthly meeting is usually sufficient to review the status of the project and provide redirection as necessary. 

A checklist that includes project objectives, a review of the key issues and decisions, and the status of action items assigned during the previous meeting drives the advisory board meeting agenda. See Table I for topics included in a typical advisory board meeting.

To minimize the effort required to prepare for a meeting, a standard set of project metrics, normally updated by the project manager on a regular basis in the course of managing a project, should also be reviewed during the advisory board meeting. In our experience, these metrics include seven items: schedule, milestones, costs, deliverable status, scope control, action items, and state-of-the-customer updates. 

To provide a good, high-level understanding of the project status, it is important that the project budget and costs be closely tied to performance of the team with respect to meeting the key milestones defined for the project. The state-of-the customer metric is simple documentation of periodic assessments made by the project manager and team, noting the perceived satisfaction of the customer or major stakeholders of the project. For this metric, as well as the others, standard formats and templates can be used to promote consistency from one project to another, simplifying the review process by the advisory board.

Benefits of an Advisory Board

Table I. Typical advisory board meeting agenda items. (Click to enlarge)

Implementing an advisory board process generates visible improvements and project outcomes. Some of the benefits include:

• More consistency in team performance, regardless of project size.
• Management of expectations among all stakeholders.
• Improved conflict resolution.
• A better support structure for project managers.
• Higher reported customer satisfaction with project results. 
• More consistency in project deliverables and documentation.
• Best practices effectively spread throughout the organization.
• More-accurate assessment of pro- ject managers and staff capabilities.
• Better understanding of key drivers in the organization and what it takes to effectively implement a project.
• Checks and balances to help redirect technical work, if necessary.

Advisory Board Pitfalls

Implementing an advisory board process can often meet with culture and organizational barriers. Commonly, an initial reluctance on the part of board members results from a perception of duplication of effort with the project manager’s role. Additionally, when an advisory board is added, some project managers fear a loss of control with respect to day-to-day activities. For this reason, the advisory board process must receive strong and visible top-management support, and advisory board chairs must act in partnership with project managers—not as their adversaries or as whistle-blowers.

In order for an advisory board process to benefit your organization, it must be tailored to your culture and systems. What follows is a list of pitfalls that can hinder the successful implementation of the advisory board process.

• Advisory boards that are too busy to interact regularly with the project and do not review progress frequently enough to add value. 
• Advisory board chairs that assume programmatic responsibility instead of providing an overview role; this leads to confused and frustrated project managers. 
• Project managers that are not prepared for advisory board meetings with succinct summaries of standard metrics, potential issues, and program risks.
• Project managers that paint an overly optimistic picture by not disclosing information, issues, or potential problems. 

Conclusion

There are several lessons that I have learned during the course of developing and implementing these processes in an R&D organization. First, senior management in the organization needs to be prepared to clearly define and delegate authority and responsibility to the advisory board. Trust is a key factor. The implementation must promote and foster an environment that commends open, frank communication between the project manager and the advisory board, and that celebrates the successes that occur as a result of this partnership. 

In addition, advisory board meetings must also be conducted at a frequency sufficient to add timely value to the project, and key issues, decisions, and action items must be documented with assignments of responsibility.

Finally, companies should periodically review and assess the performance of the advisory boards for continuous improvement and increased efficiency. Firms should ensure time and again that the boards represent a value-added function in the product development process. 

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