New Product Development Methodologies

Many organization have new product development methodologies that provide a standard framework for planning and managing development efforts.  If your organization doesn't have one, you should consider using something like this one..

The engineering development life cycle is a subset of the overall product and process development cycle.  The formal development effort may come under the definition, implementation, and testing phases.  The development life cycle, shown here for a software project (using the old waterfall approach) shows the distinct activities that need to happen either in series, with overlaps, or iteratively using a spiral methodology.

This figure provides the framework for understanding the relationship between the major milestones in the project approval process and the design reviews that are part of a normal engineering development methodology.

More about engineering design reviews.