Like any activity within your business your product development and innovation activity should deliver on your strategy, goals, aspirations, and plans. To do this it is important that it is structured in a proactive way and where possible is not just reactive to external conditions.

We have developed a document that sets out an approach to plan, manage, and execute your innovation to improve your results and provide a structure that everyone understands and is engaged with. It provides some guidance about the right level of focus at each level to ensure that the both the strategy end and the implementation end are delivering what they need to.

We don’t assert ownership over all of the approaches and as efficient magpies will always pick up anything that is shiny and looks like it would do a great job. Our approach incorporates many ideas from a wide range of fields.

It's Not Project Management

Many businesses approach managing innovation the same way they would conventional project management. The problem is that developing new products and services differs substantially from building a bridge or putting in a new IT system. Innovation needs a different approach to that of conventional project management because:

1. There are Unknowns - you do not have what you are trying to develop and it may either not be feasible, or may not work as desired once tested. Only so much research can be done to mitigate these risks;
2. Change is the only Constant – that you can depend on over the course of your journey and you may have to change to adapt to meet the challenges ahead;
3. You can’t control your Customer(s) and the Market – you are developing something that has to be sold in a market and a customer has to make their own decision to purchase. You can understand the context, but it is constantly shifting with the development of new technology and the change in people’s lives;
4. Regulation and Compliance can Evolve Quickly – the regulatory environment can move quickly, and projects may have to adapt to succeed. Compounding this each market may have its own changes occurring at different times;
5. Getting it Right Takes Time – getting a product or service right can take longer than expected and the last 5-10% of your release can be time consuming;
6. Commercialisation is hard to define – you can plan to take a product to market, but cannot ever fully define how this will happen. Different distribution channels can call for new approaches to production that can impact on your business model.

This list is not exhaustive, but it is important to recognise that you are dealing with a lot of unknowns and the variables are subject to change constantly. Gearing your structure and processes to acknowledge this is the best approach.

An Innovation Management Structure

`A goal without a plan is just a wish’ ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Planning is one of the hardest things to execute when you are doing a lot of innovation. With so many elements likely to change it will challenge even the most well laid plans. To meet this challenge it is important to have a strategy and plan which is capable of surviving change and helping to provide direction where it occurs.

A plan should be strategic and focussed into the areas that are most important to your business and can provide information back when a strategy is no longer relevant or going to work.

It should help to ‘accumulate knowledge’ within the business. This will create value for your products and services by improving their relevance, accuracy, or benefits provided to your customers, users, and stakeholders.

Your plan must be well communicated, be respected by all, and be constantly reviewed to ensure it remains relevant to your business and is accurate.

Strategy & Planning

To create innovation plans that can deliver your strategy but survive change it is important to introduce levels to your planning, reporting and implementation.

We have developed an approach, which has four levels: Strategic (Portfolios); Programme (Plans), Objectives (Projects), Tasks (Implementation).

These levels are important so that you are focussing on the right stuff at the right level. For example discussing the granular detail of a task is not the right level for a governance group or a board unless it affects the strategy that has been set.

The levels also are time based. You need to guide your longer-term plan, but execute critical tasks to achieve your short to medium term objectives. This approach guards against being caught unaware of disruptive approaches or technology that could affect your business.

Changing the way your work is managed and briefed is essential for the management function to be efficient and effective. This simple hierarchy is one we have used on complex R&D programmes.

1. A Strategic Portfolio – this should be directly aligned with the company strategy and should be consistent with it.
   
   1. A top level view of this should be viewable on 1page or 1 presentation slide so it is easy for everyone to understand the trajectory and direction of the programme as a whole and understand how their element fits within it;
   2. A high level outline of the objectives which need to be achieved this should provide clear guidance about ‘why’ you are doing this;
   3. A Resource Projection – at a Full Time Equivalent level (FTE) to understand if your are either under or over resourced This enables a high level understanding to be developed quickly and can be surprisingly accurate.
2. A Programme Management Plan – this should manage the detail of each project as it is released and ideally should be no more than 90 days in duration (given that many things can change in a 3-month period).
   
   1. The project management plan should be objective based and ideally should provide a view on the timescale of the project;
   2. The project management plan can drive cost estimates and budgets (if using MS Project) including the allocation of likely fixed costs;
3. Objective Work Plans (Projects) – these should be more specific and contain the actual work that needs to be done. It is important that these are still directional in nature and enable change and modification as the work develops. It is essential to ensure that the ‘intent’ of the project is well understood and communicated.
4. Task Management – we typically do this through a tool such as Basecamp, which enable fluid collaboration between geographically diverse groups and quick and easy communication.

This approach is both top down and bottom up, as there is a place for both perspectives. In fact both perspectives are essential for the completion of work in a timely fashion. 

Reporting Structure

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it." Lord Kelvin

We have always recorded and reported on our use of time relative to its place in the development process. This is important to understand, learn from what you do, and implement improvements to your process to become more efficient.

As a company that sells services we have to record time well, but we have not looked at it as a compliance tool, but rather, a learning one. Imagine if you could produce 50% more innovation in your business?

There are many approaches to reporting, the key is reporting on what matters to identify the problems that you might face in advance and planning to get around these. Budgets are important, but monitoring your progress against milestones, deliverables, understanding risk is equally important.

A reporting structure should be established at the outset and should not be less than two weekly. Our approach is to run budget reports weekly (predominantly around resource usage) to ensure that we understand where work is at and how we are progressing against the plan.

Reporting should consist of the following:

1. Time – the cornerstone and is likely to be the largest cost associated with an innovation project (although not always);
2. Budget – this should include both time/cost and other related project costs which could include prototyping and testing
3. Milestones – milestones are important to ensure that there is a yard-stick to measure progress against. These should have deliverables or measures attached to them to ensure that progress can be established;
4. Deliverables – deliverables are the poor cousin to the top three in many projects but provide the true judgement of progress
5. Risk – on-going risk assessment should be undertaken to ensure that market related, technical, or compliances risks are monitored. Risks can be removed if they are no longer deemed to be risk or if the environment changes.

This can be a chore, but if set up correctly can be 15-30 minutes of reporting a week and will provide a very clear view of where things are at and what may need to be done to either correct a problem or change tack to prevent one from occurring.

Managing Scope

This idea of managing scope is not a matter of saying ‘she’ll be right’. It is an approach where you agree on what is critical (mental note – not everything can be critical) and focus on those things. The MoSCoW approach is effective when paired with a milestone review.

• Must – it must be done in the current step to the next milestone
• Should – it should be done in the current step to the next milestone
• Could – it could be done if things go well
• Won't – it will not be done in the current block but may be done in a future block (this is generally to ensure a common understanding of important things that cannot be indexed into the current block)

There are other approaches, but the general tenet is that everything cannot be at the same level of priority and that there must be an agreed, effective way of delivering on time, to budget and at a high quality level.

One of the reasons that this is even more important in product development is that time to market is a factor that cannot be underestimated.

This is twofold; firstly end users will start to provide significant feedback as soon as a product hits the market leading to a more rapid evolution (as you cannot foresee how this may unfold); secondly delaying you time to market delays revenue generation and can cause significant problems for a company whether in start up mode or established.

Time, Cost, Scope & Quality

Traditional project management was waterfall based and very chronological. This approach is not responsive to change. A more contemporary approach is embodied in the concept of agile development. First developed in the Software industry, it is equally applicable in the development of many other products.

Figure 1 Agile Project Management

It is generally accepted in project management that if you fix the three cornerstones of scope, time, and cost at some point you will hit the brick wall. Agile injects in the additional axiom of ‘quality’ and promotes the idea that (from a business perspective) that it is time, cost and quality that are fixed (as business critical factors) and that scope is the key variable that can be managed within the programme.

Tools

We use a variety of tools, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. Experience suggests that there is no one tool that can deliver what we need. We tend to pick the tools that benefit each aspect of the process.

1. Portfolio Planning
   
   1. Mindjet Mind manager – to capture ideas and start to form them into a structure
   2. Microsoft Excel – to provide FTE views of resource over time quickly
   3. Microsoft Word – Write the story about your programme
   4. Adobe Illustrator – to create illustrative views of the approach
   5. PowerPoint & Keynote – for communicating to the wider team
   6. Evernote – collecting ideas and providing a repository for them
2. Programme Planning & Costing
   
   1. Mindjet Mind Manager – can speed up planning and costing and then be exported to project
   2. Excel to Develop FTE and High Level Aggregated budget costing
   3. Microsoft Project (PC) – to develop project plans and objectives with both resource and fixed costs and push reports to Excel including budget report monthly etc. Still the best planning tool available and considerably better than the alternatives
   4. Omni Plan (MAC) – to develop projects plans and overviews but is still routed through MS project as cannot provide a budget.
3. Objective Work plans
   
   1. Microsoft Word to write out the intention and details as it needs to be more narrative
   2. Microsoft Excel for developing schedules
4. Tasks Management & Collaboration
   
   1. We prefer something dynamic and social such as Basecamp (there are also other options – but simplicity is the key the tools must be extremely easy to use and not be complex)
   2. File Sharing tools such as Dropbox (Preferably connected to a collaboration tool)
5. Reporting & Time Management
   
   1. We use Harvest for collecting time and reporting on it, we have not seen a better tool for this
   2. Excel for providing either Earned Value or Budget Reporting – allowing for constant reforecasting as you move which is essential
   3. Mindjet Mind manager – has some nice tools for doing tasks management and is nice and fluid which we like (although not fully tested)