The work environment is changing in this economy
By Mathieu Turpault, Managing Partner, Director of Design at Bresslergroup
The current economic cycle is forcing all of us to step back and question “The way we’ve always done it.”
As researchers, designers and engineers, we’re turning our design thinking skills on ourselves – determining where we can streamline, but make some wise investments, gain even greater efficiencies and solve problems creatively.
Generally, I think that management structures are becoming a more entrepreneurial, less rigid, certainly here at Bresslergroup and beyond.
We see this as a time for experimentation, where even traditional rivals look at ways of working together to find new synergies, where virtual partnerships form to scale to fluctuating workloads, where a new outlook on management is required to get ahead of the game. A lot of this activity follows the growing open innovation model.
From clients and prospects, we’re feeling increased fixed fee pressure, more competitive bidding and pressure on getting to market faster to gain competitive advantage and control development costs. But there is a constant drive to develop products with as low as possible cost of goods.
The primary rub is that engineering out product cost requires a fair amount of development effort and it’s difficult to anticipate how much design and engineering effort will be required to optimize for low cost production. Since we are already meticulous about engineering out costs, this represents an even greater challenge while quoting new projects.
We haven’t noticed an increase in scope creep. As long as we manage properly from the start and maintain clarity, there are few surprises.
Clients also seem more circumspect about deviating from the original product specs, to save time and money. However, we always advocate for research to validate concepts and test performance.
Many clients have tightened up on research budgets, which tends to keep down scope creep but in many cases increases the risk inherent in new product development.
For us, the recent changes don’t come as a big surprise. The consulting world has always had to adapt quickly to changing situations and we tend to be more nimble than most. But it’s a challenging time for sure, a time where creative energy must be applied to explore new options and opportunities.
So we’re looking forward to market recovery and emerging in a stronger position based on the changes we’ve made during the down turn.
Mathieu Turpault is a partner and Director of Design at Bresslergroup. He is especially focused on design and user research and the merging of physical and digital design. Mathieu graduated from the Superior School of Industrial Design of Paris (ESDI). Mathieu has won numerous awards including IDEAs, MDEA and ID magazine, among others. Bresslergroup is a full service product development firm focused on helping leading brands innovate and grow share. www.bresslergroup.com.