Randy Baker
Hello Class.
Over the years, I was fortunate in being part of the review process for small, medium and large-scale project launch decisions. My experiences for capital budgeting projects requiring large investments involved a gated-review approval process intended to select the best projects while optimizing product-development performance. This gated-review approach to capital budgeting was also designed to eliminate escapes and mitigate risk in the upfront approval stages of the development cycle of a new product by ensuring that the company makes the right decisions at critical points in this cycle. Accordingly, visibility and accountability was needed to ensure team involvement and data accuracy during the capital budgeting process. My experience and observations with this process involved the execution of a lean, scalable, adaptable and structured gate-review process. When the capital budgeting decision involved large investment and multi-site resources, our gate-review process was designed to provide real-time event status reports (by product, by criterion, by supplier, by revision history, etc.) with all the information hosted within a password-protected data-base environment. Thus, providing ready access to authorized personnel on a 24/7 basis from any site (including suppliers and customer personnel if applicable). The system provided automated email reminders, minimized cross-functional conflicts and provided email approvals via electronic signatures for key criterion. Changes were tracked by person, time and date without use of a manual log. The process was visible to senior leadership so that they could respond to issues and plan ahead. This gated review process for our large capital budgeting projects helped to reduce the potential of false-positives (event passes when it should not have) and system-facilitated out-briefs so that the Gate Leads did not have to work all night on charts that may unintentionally manipulate the message.
Thanks for reading, Dr. Randy Baker