Success Story: Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture in the Netherlands is one of the most innovative companies in the healthcare industry. The challenge for Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture is to build partnerships with third parties and collaboratively deliver a substantial contribution to innovative products in the Healthcare sector. These new products are of strategic importance to Philips. Taking a market oriented approach allows Philips to become very successful in a relatively short time.
structured way. This in fact is the foundation based on which Philips plans, designs, develops and tests. Additionally they need to ensure that relationships and dependencies between requirements and between requirements and test cases are captured and are traceable. Furthermore the requirementsbased approach has to be intuitive and usable for all concerned.
One of the key factors enabling this is a requirements-based approach. Working with requirements provides three important advantages for Philips: • • •
Finally, Philips Venture Handheld Immunoassay wanted a professional way of working right from the start, supported by adequate tooling. Embedding the requirements-based approach in the organization and a set of best practices with good examples are essential to achieve this.
Smart and efficient collaboration with external parties on innovative products; Securing the 'voice of the customer ‘ in the new products; Delivering a highly reliable product, including the challenge to meet very stringent quality requirements for the medical sector.
Quick start Synergio’s “Start-at-the-end” paradigm seamlessly fitted with the needs of Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture. Synergio successfully trained the Philips project team to adopt the requirements-based approach. As a result, all team members are now able to formulate SMART requirements. In addition the entire team has a common view of the end result, eliminating misinterpretation.
Basically Philips is a good example of how working with requirements delivers better results. Read how Edwin Bekx (requirements engineer), Jurgen Mollink (Project leader) and John Schalken (R & D director) achieved this with the help of Synergio and TopTeam.
Why working with requirements? Philips Healthcare Incubator develops innovative products for the healthcare industry. During “incubation” market needs are investigated and the products which potentially satisfy these needs. For each potential product and project the structure and operation are critically examined. As a result Philips felt the need for a requirements-based approach.
In record time Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture had a strong foundation, created by a clear description of the desired end result. Soon came the next question: how can we use requirements in a smarter way?
Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture has a strong need to clearly describe the end result in a
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Better results with requirements Synergio distinguishes between three efficiency levels for working with requirements: 1. Having requirements; 2. Using requirements; 3. Reusing requirements. Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture followed a rapid growth path under the guidance of Synergio consultants. With each successive project, the requirements were better used and reused. Because multiple products are based on the same technological platform Philips was able to achieve an enormous efficiency improvement.
“Having” requirements The first project in which Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture applied Synergio’s “Start-at“Start the-end” paradigm was Drugs Of Abuse (DOA). The objective of this project is to develop a handheld device that can quickly detect if someone has used drugs, similar imilar to the current breath test for use of alcohol while driving. The project started in April 2008 by developing a prototype of the handheld device and by formulating the requirements. Soon the new way of working proved to be successful. The he requirements quickly revealed the discrepancies between the needs of the different stakeholders,, which could now be resolved early in the project. “Having Having” requirements appeared not to be the end goal but only the beginning. Philips started to use the requirements, requirement initially to apply requirements-based based testing.
“Using” requirements In June 2008 a new project, called Cardiac, Ca was
launched. Philips Venture Handheld Immunoassay started the development of a handheld device that enables rapid blood tests making it possible to determine whether someone has suffered heart failure. This device is especially useful on ambulances. Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture applies the "Value Proposition House" methodology to structure the innovation process. Part of this methodology metho is to capture the "Voice Of the he Customer" (VOC). This allows Philips to quickly identify the "Critical To Quality” (CTQ) requirements.. The requirements were subsequently used to establish the project plan and to steer the project during execution. execution In addition the requirements of the DOA project were used, Philips’’ first step in reusing requirements.
“Reusing” requirements The third project, called PTH,, started in December 2008 and aimed to develop a handheld device to perform blood tests to detect anomalies in a
patient’s calcium metabolism to investigate the functioning of the patient’s parathyroid. After surgery on the parathyroid it is important for a surgeon to know whether abnormal glandular tissue had been properly removed. This is a good indication to determine if the operation was successful. Because Cardiac as well as PTH is based on blood tests, the requirements were reused to a large extent, dramatically improving the time to market and efficiency. A thorough analysis of these requirements delivered a set of reusable "platform" requirements that can be reused for future projects. With this clear understanding of generic platform requirements and specific application requirements a huge acceleration of the requirements gathering phase can be achieved when developing new devices using the same platform.
project these were easily to adjust for the PTH project.
Achievements Using Synergio’s "Start-at-the-end" paradigm in combination with TopTeam, a professional requirements tool and the support of Synergio’s consultants, Philips Venture Handheld Immunoassay achieved excellent results in record time: •
A "Top" tool for the team When using and reusing requirements a professional requirements tool proved to be crucial. Philips Handheld Venture immunoassay uses TechnoSolutions’ TopTeam. Working with TopTeam not only enables Philips to store requirements, but create and manage baselines, maintain traceability, perform impact analysis in cases of change requests. In essence it enables Philips to manage the entire requirements life cycle efficiently and easily. One of the first needs of Philips Handheld Immunoassay Venture was to manage changes to the requirements. Synergio configured TopTeam to quickly and effectively use TopTeam’s “Work items” functionality. Philips is now able to determine exactly which tracking items are related to which requirements and what status they have. In addition, management reports can be generated that provide insight into the status of the project. TopTeam also helped to reuse the requirements of the Cardiac project in PTH project. By creating a base set of platform requirements in the Cardiac
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First time right Using a requirements-based approach, the "Voice of the Customer" was clearly described to form a solid foundation for the right products. This saves Philips Venture Handheld Immunoassay from extensive re-work and allows to remain focused throughout the project on what is really important. Increase efficiency Requirements can quickly and easily be reused in projects. Project members can work simultaneously on requirements. The requirements are used for planning, designing, developing and testing the products. Better manageable process By applying the most important relationships between requirements and between requirements and other (work) products the interdependence remains visible, enabling quick discovery of omissions. In addition the consequences of limitations related to realizability or feasibility can be quickly determined as well as the impact of changes. This enables Philips to deliver a highly reliable product.