Product Portfolio Management at Valleylab:
Adopting Best Practices
Telelogic & Valleylab
Michael Lester
Joe Sartor
Storyboard Presentation
February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL
Valleylab
Telelogic
Company Description:
Brief Description of Enabling Tool:
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Founded in 1967 as a medical products distributor,
Valleylab soon expanded into product development
by designing, manufacturing, and marketing
advanced electrosurgery systems and accessories
worldwide. Our ongoing research and product
development continues to provide solutions for
challenging surgical problems. We are
unsurpassed in creating products to increase safety
in the OR for both the patient and surgical staff.
New products (less than 3 years old) currently
account for 30% of revenues, but the goal is 50%.
We pride ourselves on customer satisfaction and
understanding the customer’s requirements and
delivering exactly what they request.
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We use Telelogic Focal Point as the tool which
gives us visibility into the product pipeline, complete
with metrics, resource availability, and integration
with Microsoft Project for planned and actual dates.
Strength is in keeping requirements as the “focal
point” in the decision making process. We pride
ourselves on delivering products that the OR values
so we need to keep the requirements of the target
audiences visible throughout our Gate meetings and
in What-If analysis.
Image from Focal Point
Storyboard Presentation
February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL
Valleylab
Telelogic
Illustration of Your Stage-Gate Process:
Detailed Description of Enabling Tool:
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With Focal Point, we capture all information about target markets and their needs and use that to drive the
development of preliminary product plans. Once plans are evaluated against the other possibilities, and those
already in the pipeline, we assess the availability of requirements.
Once we have a picture of achievability, we focus on making it a reality – keeping priorities in front of us.
Integration with Microsoft Project allows the details of the project to managed effectively, and milestones and other
data critical to the decision-making at the gate meetings.
The use of Focal Point is throughout all stages and gates – it has become our central “source of the truth” for
everything from ideas to launched products
Storyboard Presentation
February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL
Valleylab
Telelogic
Team:
Results:
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The team consisted of Valleylab staff (which have
changed since the beginning of the
implementation), Telelogic consultants with
specialization in product portfolio management, and
a 3rd Party consulting group.
Focal Point has been deployed to project
managers, resource managers, project teams and
the executive team.
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We are still only 9 months into our implementation
so we can’t compare previous year performance,
but our decision-making process has been cut
considerably. What used to take 2-3 weeks can be
done in one meeting. That savings is enormously
valuable.
We have recognized an increase in awareness by
the decision-making teams on the impact of
frequent changes on the productivity of the teams.
Lessons Learned:
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We took nearly 2 years to select a tool and really knew from the outset that we wanted to keep requirements as
the focus – the connecting point – throughout the entire process… so we would have looked only for vendors that
could meet that – rather than casting a wide net.
Focusing on the decision-making process first, over automating the resource management and/or project
management was by far, the best decision we made. Automating those processes without knowing that we were
selecting the right projects, or taking too long to make the right decisions wouldn’t have given us the savings we
see today.
Storyboard Presentation
February 20-21, 2007 / St. Pete’s Beach, FL