• Wall Street Journal, Monday, November 30, 2009 10:41 AM

Businesses with the best new product track records do three things well: They create a clear sense of project goals, they nurture a strong project culture, and they maintain close contact with customers throughout a project's duration, according to Mike Gordon, Chris Musso, Eric Rebentisch and Nisheeth Gupta.

The writers, who surveyed more than 300 employees at 28 companies (mostly in the automotive, high-tech and medical-device industries), say that that the teams who embraced these tactics were 17 times as likely to have projects come in on time, five times as likely to be on budget, and twice as likely to meet their company's ROI targets.

Top performers also made sure that they had the right people for the job, with 47% of the successful companies researching employees' skill sets before the project kicked off to ensure the team was well-rounded. None of the low performers did.

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