Why is IPD Implementation Difficult?

Original

As one of the industry-recognized best practice systems for product development, IPD (Integrated Product Development) originates from the PACE (Product and Cycle-time Excellence) theory. Its core principle is to streamline the endtoend process from roadmap planning, Charter development, and product development to lifecycle management. Being market driven and treating product development as an investment, IPD aims to deliver high-quality, competitive products and solutions. In the late 1990s, IPD was introduced to China from IBM. Huawei formally signed a consulting agreement with IBM in 1999 to implement IPD, achieving a leap in sales revenue from RMB 12 billion in 1999 to over RMB 60 billion in 2006, thereby confirming its effectiveness. Today, hundreds of enterprises such as Nanjing Estun, Fotile, Hikvision, and TCL have implemented IPD. However, according to Gongchuangli Consulting, approximately 60 % of companies face implementation failure, with “superficial resemblance without true essence” being a common phenomenon. The challenges hindering IPD implementation require indepth analysis from multiple dimensions.

The core value of IPD is clear and significant, with objectives covering five major areas: improving product quality, shortening development cycles, reducing overall costs, enhancing product competitiveness, and improving business outcomes. The purpose of implementing IPD is to refocus product development on market and customer needs, optimize return on investment through full process improvements, establish a management framework covering the entire product lifecycle, ensure decision quality, standardize cross departmental collaboration, enhance development efficiency, and meet standardization and audit requirements. These value propositions are the core motivations for many companies to adopt IPD. Yet, why does such a significant gap exist between ideal and reality?

Deficient change management is the primary factor impeding IPD implementation. IPD transformation is not a shortterm project but a systematic endeavor requiring long-term investment and continuous iteration. However, some senior executives lack sufficient understanding of its long-term and complex nature, often losing patience and abandoning the effort when significant results are not seen in the short term. Simultaneously, some leaders lack the necessary skills in leadership and team building, making it difficult to effectively build organizational consensus and drive transformation. Furthermore, the IPD system requires dynamic upgrades to adapt to market and enterprise development changes, much like IBM’s practice of upgrading its IPD process every two years. Yet, many companies treat the introduced process as “inviolable doctrine,” making no adjustments over time. This causes the process to gradually detach from actual business operations, losing its guiding significance.

A disconnect between process design and enterprise reality is another critical pain point. IPD is not a “onesizefitsall” standard template; it must be deeply tailored to the scale and business characteristics of the enterprise. However, some companies fall into the trap of “blind copying.” Small and mediumsized enterprises directly adopt the complex processes of large corporations like IBM and Huawei, leading to a “small horse pulling a big cart” dilemma. Complex approval procedures and cumbersome documentation requirements far exceed the actual capacity of these enterprises, resulting in low execution efficiency and strong employee resistance. Moreover, some ignore industry differences and their own business characteristics, directly replicating success stories from other companies. They overlook that the effectiveness of IPD relies on high alignment with business scenarios. Process designs detached from reality are destined to fail from the outset.

Insufficient organizational adaptation severely constrains IPD progress. One of the core tenets of IPD is crossdepartmental collaboration, which requires a matrix organizational structure for support. However, many enterprises do not adjust their traditional functional structures after adopting IPD. Traditional functional organizations have obvious flaws: development processes follow a serial pattern, leading to long total cycles and susceptibility to the “bullwhip effect”; thick departmental barriers result in frequent responsibility shifts, causing information attenuation and fostering departmental selfinterest. In contrast, heavyweight teams within a matrix organization can integrate knowledge and experience across multiple domains, share a common goal of product success, shorten development cycles through parallel work, and ensure information sharing and comprehensive decisionmaking. Additionally, difficulties in role transition among middle managers and insufficient capabilities of frontline employees exacerbate implementation challenges. Middle managers need to shift from “commanders” to “resource coordinators,” with some resisting due to perceived loss of authority and covertly obstructing change. Frontline employees lack the skill set required for crossfunctional collaboration, and companies often fail to provide adequate training, leaving employees struggling to cope with the new processes and unable to execute effectively.

Weak R&D engineering capabilities are a core shortfall in IPD implementation. Successful IPD adoption depends not only on process design but also on robust R&D engineering capabilities, including frontend product and technology planning, requirement management, as well as fullprocess engineering capabilities such as quality management, cost management, project management, testing management, DFX (Design for Manufacturing and Assembly), knowledge management, and UCD (UserCentered Design). Many companies mistakenly believe that “introducing the process guarantees success,” neglecting the systematic development of R&D capabilities. This leads to processes lacking practical support, becoming “castles in the air.” For example, some enterprises lack effective requirement management mechanisms, which leaves them unable to accurately capture market demands, thereby rendering IPD’s “marketdriven” principle superficial. Others have shortcomings in quality management or testing management, making it difficult to produce high-quality products even when following IPD processes.

Human resource and capability constraints become prominent bottlenecks for IPD implementation in small and medium sized enterprises. Effective IPD operation requires professional talent support, such as specialized project managers, market researchers, and technology preresearch personnel. However, many small and mediumsized enterprises, limited by funding and scale, struggle to fully staff these critical roles, preventing effective execution of key IPD activities like technology preresearch and market analysis. Simultaneously, some small and mediumsized enterprises have backward technological levels and weak management foundations. Since IPD emphasizes both technological innovation and efficient crossdepartmental collaboration, this capability gap makes it difficult for such enterprises to meet the management demands imposed by the process, ultimately leading to transformation failure.

IPD implementation is not easy; it is a systematic project involving multiple dimensions: change management, process design, organizational structure, R&D capabilities, and human resources. For enterprises to truly realize the value of IPD, they must abandon mindsets of “seeking quick success” and “blind copying.” Starting from their own realities, they need to prepare for long-term transformation: senior executives must establish correct understanding and strengthen leadership building; process design should be tailored and include dynamic upgrade mechanisms; organizational restructuring should be advanced synchronously to build crossdepartmental collaborative teams; R&D engineering capabilities must be systematically enhanced to address core deficiencies; human resources should be rationally allocated, and employee skill training strengthened. Only then can the dilemma of “superficial resemblance without true essence” be broken, allowing IPD to truly take root and achieve its core objectives of improving quality and efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing product competitiveness. Practices by professional institutions like Gongchuangli Consulting also prove that as long as the aforementioned issues are accurately addressed, IPD can create tangible value for enterprises. This has been confirmed in the transformation cases of over 200 companies, including Cambricon AI, FiberHome Technologies, and AVIC.