Phone: 503-293-3557  Toll Free: 800-577-3528  Fax: 503-293-8499

                               Improving Technical Productivity

                                                           PRODUCT ENGINEERING - R&D - I T - SCIENTIFIC

     Home   |   Workshops   |   Services   |    Products   |   Resources   |   About Us   |   Contact Us                                                            Site Search

Consultant Profile - Preston G. Smith, Ph.D., CMC

 

Core Competencies:

  • Fast Time-to-Market

  • Proactive Risk Management

  • Flexible Product Development Methodology

 

Dr. Smith began specializing in rapid product development in 1984 as an internal consultant, became an independent management consultant concentrating on time to market issues in 1986, and earned Certified Management Consultant (CMC) standing in 1990. Preston has consulted on highly effective new product development techniques and time to market over a wide variety of industries in many countries. He is known for adapting techniques that have proved valuable in one industry to another industry.
 

Prior to 1986, Preston gained broad engineering and technology management experience over a period of twenty years through employment with

  • North American Aviation (now part of Boeing)

  • Pratt & Whitney Aircraft

  • IBM

  • Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies)

  • General Motors Research Laboratories

  • Ensco (a government transportation safety contractor)

  • Institute for Defense Analyses

  • Emhart (since merged into Black & Decker)

 

Although Preston may be best known for his many publications, his daily activity centers on onsite consultation and training in new product development using a results-oriented approach that he has honed over the years.
 

His book titles include Flexible Product Development: Building Agility for Changing Markets; Developing Products in Half the Time: New Rules, New Tools; and Proactive Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development.
 

For professional development, Preston participates in one industry or professional conference per month, on average. He develops his consulting skills by participating regularly in meetings and conferences of the Institute of Management Consultants.

Some product development techniques Preston is best known for include:

  • Project economic trade-offs, such as the cost of delay

  • Flexible product development (valuable when a project is subject to many changes)

  • Proactive project risk management tools

  • Continuous improvement of the product development process (and viewing product development capability as a competitive advantage)

  • Effective cross-functional development teams and the trade-offs involved in using them

  • Co-located and dispersed (virtual) product development teams

  • Iterative (non-sequential) product development processes

 

Dr. Smith contributes to the product development profession while keeping up to date on its literature by serving as book review editor of the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He is a founder of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN).
Preston holds a Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford University, and is a member of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and the Agile Project Leadership Network.
 

Auxilium, Inc. Headquarters   10260 SW Greenburg Rd.   Suite 400   Portland, OR  97223                   Privacy Policy