11.1 Two organizations or one

It doesn t matter if your product idea is the hottest in the marketplace or if it is protected by patents: If it cannot be commercialized, you will end up wasting both money and time on what may ultimately be thought of as an expensive science experiment. Being able to birth a new idea and nurture it until it is ready for prime time takes organized effort, which, in many instances, proves to be the largest impediment to business success. When distilled to basics, the issue of having to rely upon people for the creation of a product requires attention to two elements: (1) mechanistic-like effort, and (2) an ever-changing emotional state of mind. Effort can be defined as the ability of a person to participate in the development cycle; this encompasses intangibles such as level of creativity and inherent ability. Tangibles include design, implementation, test, and customer support. By setting up your organization in such a way as to optimize effort expended, you are able to at least manage a significant part of the business to achieve time-to-market. Up until now, processes have been presented that are designed to define development workflow from design to initial deployment and slightly beyond. Assigning tasks, or better yet, organizing people around these workflows must be carefully considered.

The emotional state of mind of your greatest asset, your engineering team, is equally important. Within the organizational structure itself, there has to be some method of addressing the needs of employees...