Stretching of product development increases costs. Accelerating lowers costs, right? Wrong!

Screams after stretching or accelerating the product development often sound very loud. These screams the project manager must resist if he wants to keep the costs of product development. If he gives in, he has to claim the necessary additional costs from the program manager. Both are difficult to impossible to achieve without sufficiently granular and yet practical cost transparency in product development.

Stretching often leads to additional costs due to longer project management, subcritical capacity utilization, uncovered fixed costs in development and production, surprising capacity bottlenecks, effects on other projects, as well as customer reactions.

While accelerating shortens project management time, it increases the costs of capacity bottlenecks, overtime, impacts on suppliers and production, impact on other projects, and quality risks.

Stretching and accelerating often lead to the use of task forces to limit additional costs. However, a vicious circle of schedule changes, additional costs, and task forces arises when corporate culture keeps costs intransparent and overly encourages task forces.

We advise you to institutionalize sufficiently granular and yet practical cost transparency in product creation in order to stabilize schedules.