How would you advise the CEO to correct the problem? Where would you start? Columbus Instruments Problems have been building at Columbus Instruments, Inc. (CIC) (not its real name) for several years now with the new product development process. The last six high-visibility projects were either scrapped outright after excessive cost and schedule overruns or, once released to the marketplace, were commercial disasters.

The company estimates that in the past two years, it has squandered more than $15 million on poorly developed or failed projects. Every time a project venture failed during this time, the company conducted extensive postproject review meetings, documentation analysis, and market research to try to determine the underlying cause. To date, all CIC has been able to determine is that the problems appear to lie with the project management and development process. Something, somewhere, is going very wrong.