TCGen Blog Postings

Groups are the Ruin of Innovation

Brainstorming a solution to a problem  is a quick and easy way for small teams to solve small problems.

However, real innovation (innovation = invention + commercialization) is slow and hard.  This seems so obvious, why don’t we stop the quick fix of a brainstorming, and concentrate on real innovation?  Because we are seduced by the apparent speed and seductive qualities of getting a team together.  And we are seduced by the solving of a small problem.  It is time we step back and see when, where and how groups are best used for innovation.

Because we are social animals, and we like to work with others to come up with concepts greater than we could have come up had we been working alone.  However, inventors are like artists (according to Steve Wozniak).  ”Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me… they live in their heads.  They’re almost like artists.  In fact, the very best of them are artists.  And artists work best alone…”  (From the Rise of the New Groupthink, by Susan Cain).

The Wharton researchers Terwiesch and Ulrich have found similar results, when brainstorming is greatly improved by having just part of the process take place at the individual level (Innovation Tournaments, HBS Press, 2009).  So how do you know when to use groups and when to go solo? Now, how do I leverage this? How can this be applied to my situation?

Suggested steps for solving big problems – alone:

• Passion for solving the problem is paramount! Make sure you have passion.
• Check for platforms/paradigms/schools/discussion groups (real and virtual) – stand on the shoulder of giants
• Invest material, real time into it.  Every day. Real time alone.
• Fail fast, fail often.
• Bounce progress off others.  This is where groups make sense.  Checking/elevating, not creating (at least for big problems)

Start with finding an individual with passion, who leverages existing platforms, and ask them to dedicate real time in it.  When it shows signs of life, staff a team.  This is the second place where groups, not in the forms of a team, make a real difference.  Invention versus execution are two very different processes.

I’d recommend the New York Times piece by Susan Cain called “The Rise of the New Groupthink” to help you understand some of the background behind these principles.

Applying Social Communities to Product Innovation: Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard

What Is the Tool? Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard

The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard is a decision-making tool that provides executives and teams with an objective view of their organizations’ capability to successfully implement social solutions to drive product innovation. The scorecard helps you determine whether or not the team is best prepared to launch a social solution by providing critical questions in ten areas. These include the current use of social technologies outside of product development, level of management commitment, social community resource expertise, maturity of tools, and organizational structure to support the requirements for best-in-class application of social communities. The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard allows you to identify the critical areas that many organizations overlook and the weak areas that you need to address prior to launching a social development initiative.

The scorecard itself is a spreadsheet that you supplement with a group process. Typically, you would get a subset of your executive staff or senior directors together for a real-time meeting session (could be virtual) that would last one to two hours. You instruct your group on the definition of the various dimensions of readiness, and then after the stand-up instruction, each person in the group individually fills out their scorecards, ranking the readiness of your organization without discussion. Then the facilitator collects all the scores and computes the average and the standard deviation. In cases where the standard deviation is high, the facilitator asks some of the low-ranking individuals why they rated a dimension low and similarly why high-ranking individuals ranked it high. After comparing differences, your facilitator asks if anyone would like to change their ranking. This gives everyone an opportunity to vote based on a common understanding.

After performing the self-assessment, the next step is to create an action plan. Your facilitator would take the scorecard and the discussion out of the room with them to plan a tune-up if needed (usually identified by low scores in conjunction with corporate need). After the facilitator holds more interviews and collects further data, your organization will have a prioritized list of initiative areas to improve the readiness of your social innovation efforts.

What’s New?

Social media and the solutions that build on it are taking the enterprise by storm. Many companies use social solutions in marketing and customer support, but they can also apply them to the product development process to increase both innovation and time to market (we’re not talking about using Facebook and Twitter, but actually using professional social collaboration tools). The most important aspect of applying social technologies to product innovation is the ability to create a “community” of technical thought leaders where they can share, build upon, and develop ideas. However, you need a methodology to prioritize and implement these solutions. You can apply social communities internally to harness the innovative thinking and problem solving across the company. You can also use them as an ideation and collaboration platform with your customers. For geographically dispersed organizations, social solutions are a superior method for gathering, evaluating, and managing internal ideas.

The application of new social technologies in the product development space is a new approach for companies, and we expect it to become an increasingly important methodology. Best practices in the area of social product innovation have emerged, and companies that apply these best practices are seeing good results. One common stumbling block for companies is trying to implement a social strategy without fully understanding how to optimize the process or how to integrate it into existing product development processes. The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard solves this problem and allows the management team to provide their organization with their best chance at success.

Benefits

• Provides a new methodology for accelerating innovation and time to market in your product development organization
• Identifies organizational strengths and weaknesses that will impact your probability of success
• Helps you avoid mistakes in the implementation process
  • Creates a framework for managing the implementation of social solutions

Which Business Problems Do We Solve?

Never has it been more important to innovate on an accelerated timeline. Applying social technology in the enterprise is not a fad. It has become a vital tool that goes way beyond its early applications in marketing, customer support, and training functions. The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard will ensure that you get the most out of increasing the quality of ideas within your organization and will help accelerate the rich collaboration that leads to groundbreaking innovation.

What Else Should You Know?

When companies first applied social media to their enterprises, there was a big rush to implement a social strategy. Unfortunately, many companies stumbled because they jumped before they really understood the framework they needed to be successful. They needed new tools, processes, roles & responsibilities, and decision-making models for successful implementation. Getting the most out of social communities also requires changes in how organizations share information and make decisions. It’s critical to understand these nuances to optimize the effectiveness of this methodology. The Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard will ensure that you ask the right questions and engage the right resources before you jump into implementation.

Case Study

NetCo has a strong R&D organization consisting of a total of 5,000 engineers and scientists located in five R&D centers around the world. The EVP of engineering, Bill, is not satisfied with the level of innovation that is coming from his team, nor does he think that they are collaborating effectively. It is critical for NetCo to innovate faster and on a more regular cadence in order to maintain their technology leadership in an increasingly more competitive market. Bill has heard rumblings about the benefits of using social solutions to drive innovation, but the marketing organization has had mixed results, and he doesn’t want to drag the team through a new process without understanding its viability. He applies the Social Innovation Readiness Scorecard method to ensure that he and the executive team have asked the right questions and resolved the gaps before they invest their time in the process.

Visualization

The results of the assessment indicate that there are three areas that he needs to work on before the rollout. He has enlisted the help of his lead program manager to drive the following initiatives with the goal of implementing a social community within three months:

• Implement a third-party social platform: internal tools for collaboration are not sufficient, and Bill doesn’t want to use his limited technical resources to develop an in-house solution. He asks the lead program manager to investigate and implement a third-party SaaS (software as a service) solution.
• Identify a community manager: an unmanaged collaboration community can lead to sub-optimal results. It’s a new skill set for the organization, and Bill cannot delegate it to someone who doesn’t understand how to create and manage a vibrant community. He can either hire someone with this experience or work with the third-party solution provider to include this skill set until he can add someone permanently.
  • Ensure that the community is working on a high-impact, but narrowly focused objective: communities that are too broadly focused will not create the highest-quality input. In addition, once the community loses its vibrancy, the team will stop participating.

By performing the analysis, the team comes up with the scorecard below. The areas where the mean is below three on a five-point scale or the standard deviation is greater than one are shaded. You can communicate the ratings of each of the ten dimensions by giving examples of low versus high levels of performance for each dimension so that your team can provide more precise ratings.

The table above indicates in the right column the relative degree of social innovation readiness where a rating of one would be the first entry, a rating of three would represent the middle entry, and a rating of five would be the last entry. Below are the details for each category to help you assign a rating scale from one (minimum readiness) to five (maximum readiness).

Building High Performance Teams To Drive Innovation

High-performance teams are not desirable in achieving innovation and speed – they are essential. However, most companies underestimate or overlook the benefit and opportunity that come from high-performance teams. In our work with world-class technology companies, high-performance teams are, quite frankly, part of their DNA and contribute to their competitive advantage. There are many examples of dysfunctional teams that have heroically pushed products over the finish line, but what many do not acknowledge is the opportunity cost of sub-optimal team performance, both in hard costs (delayed revenue, higher product costs, and higher support costs for low-quality products that reach customers) and soft costs (poor product reviews, lack of innovation, team fatigue, and low morale).

We have identified four steps for creating high-performance teams that you can implement across your organization. If you are ready to incorporate high-performance teams as part of your company’s DNA and look forward to seeing a measurable improvement in your ability to quickly innovate and deliver winning products to market, here are the four things you should do:

Create well-defined roles and responsibilities for the cross-functional team.

Defining team roles and responsibilities seems like a trivial task that is more bureaucratic than useful. But the lack of clarity around cross-functional deliverables and dependencies is a key driver in missed opportunities to reduce cycle time, increased frequency of unmanaged gaps, and team chaos. Especially as companies grow in size and expand geographically, a critical characteristic of high-performance teams is well-defined roles and responsibilities. Having clarity around who is doing what and when will free up teams to focus on the work required to innovate and deliver products to market. The chapter “Avoiding Gaps Across Functions” provides a tool for graphically defining key deliverables for the cross-functional teams by development phase. This tool will allow you to clarify what your team will deliver in each phase and will help you anticipate and plan for longer-term deliverables. You may also want to consider creating a Team Wheel (from the chapter “Ensuring Project Teams Are Properly Staffed”) for each project to clarify roles at the project level too.

Implement a core-team model.

Implementing a core-team model is the most effective way to optimize a project team’s performance, identify opportunities to reduce cycle time, and ensure that the broader team (often called the extended team) is functioning efficiently. It is particularly critical when the team is large and geographically dispersed. The core-team model consists of four to six functional leads, typically from program management, product management, engineering, design, manufacturing, and quality assurance. They share the responsibility of delivering the project within the defined objectives. With an emphasis on strong leadership skills, the team can serve as an effective nucleus for driving execution, escalating project issues, and managing cross-functional dependencies.  This core team, who meets on a frequent basis, is responsible for communicating to the extended team which is either geographically isolated or in secondary functions.

Empower the core team with a high level of authority.

Many times, executives are hesitant to give teams too much leeway in project decision making, and teams are reluctant to accept the responsibility. In world-class companies, we see a consistent trend of pushing a high level of authority to teams. If you set a culture of team accountability across your organization and empower your team to drive daily decision making in support of the overall objectives of the project, you will see measurable gains in their ability to creatively innovate and shorten cycle time. While there are some circumstances where “command-and-control” leadership is appropriate, we’ve found that if you use it as the norm, it will result over time in lower accountability, demotivated teams, and delays.

In addition to utilizing a core-team model with well-defined roles and responsibilities, implementing the tools of Product Innovation Process, Boundary Conditions Diagram, and Out-of-Bounds Map will allow you to manage to a framework that defines the boundaries of the team’s decision-making authority. These tools will empower your team to move the project forward and provide them with an escalation mechanism when an issue exceeds their authority. They provide a framework for establishing team accountability and are flexible to allow executives to customize the authority based on project risk, team experience, or cost risk. Lastly, driving responsibility to the team is a strategic investment in attracting the best talent. High-performance teams consist of high performers – both individually and as a team. High performers thrive on accountability, so if you push accountability to the team, you will find over a short period of time an increased ability to attract the best people.

Create a culture of trust and collaboration.

Teams can only achieve high performance if they work in an environment of trust and collaboration. Anything less means that individuals will shift their focus from the common good to their own survival. A true test is examining what happens in your organization when bad things happen. When the schedule is going to slip, a quality issue has stopped the manufacturing line, or the product cost is exceeding the margin target, how does your organization respond? Teams achieve high performance when they know they can deliver bad news (with recommendations for mitigation and resolution) free of politics and without gaming the data or sugarcoating the message. They achieve high performance because they work in an environment that addresses challenges through collaboration and teamwork. They focus on solving the problem, not finding the guilty and blaming them. And because you’ve instilled in them the authority and trust, they do this far faster than those teams that work in an environment of distrust and blame.

Creating high-performance teams will be a competitive advantage. And in the end, your ability to rapidly innovate and deliver products to market is in the hands of people, and the best way we have found to harness the best of people is through high performance teams.

Can You Manage Risk While Innovating?

Anticipating and Mitigating Risk

Risk Management Matrix

What Is the Tool? Risk Management Matrix

The Risk Reduction Matrix is an elegant way to anticipate, manage, and mitigate product development risks. A common myth is that you can’t take the risk out of invention, but in reality you can significantly reduce risk even in the most inventive programs by anticipating it. The benefit of this new approach for risk reduction is that you can use the entire cross-functional team to create the matrix. Although you may have used a similar tool before, the benefit of this methodology is that there is a specific risk trigger point (a quantitative threshold) as well as a mitigating action plan if you exceed that threshold. When combined together, they make this approach much more effective than the more subjective prior approaches.

The matrix consists of a list of risks versus criteria and assumptions. The risks themselves are in the first column and act as headers for each row, which teases apart each risk. The column headings consist of risk attributes such as likelihood, consequence, and its measure. The likelihood and consequence are on one-to-ten scales, with one being essentially impossible and zero impact respectively. The measure is a quantified metric of the risk parameter (or an indicator of risk). The remaining headings are the risk threshold, the date by which the threshold should be equaled, and finally a short phrase that outlines the action plan.

The cross-functional team creates the matrix in a workshop fashion. The project manager usually leads the session and plans ahead by creating the bones of the matrix where they list some of the likely risks and fill out the rest of the attributes and risk management factors. The project manager can often derive those risks from the list of boundary review conditions. The creation of this matrix should take place during the first 10-15% of a project’s duration.

After creating the tool, you can use it on an ongoing basis by quickly reviewing it at the weekly team meetings. The goal is to walk through any of the critical metrics, add new metrics as they occur, and remove the old ones if their risk has been eliminated. When a trigger point occurs, it is time to review the action plan and put remediation in gear. Based on new knowledge, you may update and modify it. The secret, however, is to act and not wait for “things to get better” on their own because they rarely do.

What’s New?

The new parts of this approach are the use of quantitative trigger points and the creation of an action plan in the clear light of sanity far before the raging red lights start flashing when you have to deal with a risk item that blows up. In addition, by including the entire team (typically five to 15) in the formation of the Risk Reduction Matrix, you get a more robust matrix and team buy-in as a by-product.

Benefits

• Identification of risks before they occur
• Reduction of risk impact due to early detection
• Quantitative metrics that help inhibit the knee-jerk reliance on the subjective
• Accelerated actions because of the clear thresholds and the agreement to follow the process

Which Business Problems Do We Solve?

You might consider risk management the evil twin sister of innovation. Ultimately a break from the past, innovation inherently brings with it additional risks, which you can still manage. One way to manage those risks is through micromanagement, but this obviously quenches innovation. The other way, consistent with the increasing desire to delegate authority and empower teams, is to have the team manage risk on their own. Another way to reinforce autonomy is to line up the risk thresholds with the boundary conditions, which are the summary of the agreement between management and the project team on the critical aspects of the program. If the team does not cross the boundary limits or violate the risk conditions, then they can and should operate independently from micromanagement.

From a larger business perspective, having a risk management system in place helps improve project execution because it can help the team anticipate, prevent, and mitigate risks, which can result in delays or additional project expenses. The team often blows their budget or gets delayed when unanticipated risks fall in their path, and then it is “all hands on deck”. Unfortunately, while the team solves the problem, the schedule marches on and the project expenses go through the roof. By minimizing or avoiding risks, you can minimize or avoid delays and budget overruns.

What Else Should You Know?

The Risk Reduction Matrix is only as good as the inputs in its initial formulation. Having the right cross-functional participation and functional specialists when you create the matrix is essential. Teams often add one or two principal engineers for this exercise to help them come up with a deeper, more comprehensive, and more thoughtful list of risks. While it is important to have the right people and follow a process to fill out the matrix, the assignment of values to likelihood and consequence (or impact) can get out of hand. It is important that you mainly try to identify the high- and medium-impact risks that can possibly happen. If you get stuck in assigning values, try pairwise comparison and cross-check the values you assigned.

Once you generate a quality matrix, your next concern will be the real-time monitoring and updating of that matrix. As time goes by, you should remove the risks that are unlikely to happen. Conversely, you should add new risks when needed to reflect a more current perspective.

The seduction of hope is probably the biggest risk in the application of this tool. Don’t be a “prisoner of hope” because there is an often false belief that the risk will just go away on its own or will be worn down by working harder. Make sure that when a risk trigger is crossed, you take action immediately. Remember when you had a clear perspective at the beginning of the project. What has changed? It is likely that nothing has really changed except that you are now under pressure to deliver and have many issues to worry about.

Case Study

WebCo is about to kick off a multi-site next-generation home finance project that leverages all of the geographies in important ways (and for the first time). Brian, the project manager, and Molly, the product manager, got together after agreeing on the importance of doing a risk management exercise. Their first step was to create a rough draft of the Risk Reduction Matrix. The first draft included teamwork and example likelihood and consequence ratings. Using this as a starting place, they called a team meeting with a global teleconference and invited two architects to participate as well.

The team reviewed Brian and Molly’s initial work before the meeting and came prepared. After an hour and a half, they listed the following risks on this initial round: team communication, server responsiveness, data integrity, usability, and financial partnership agreements. The initial table had the following trigger metrics and values: meeting frequency (2x per week), server responsiveness (250ms with a load of 100 users), screen data integrity (100% of screen data acquired no matter what error message), and financial partner signup frequency (15 partners signed per week).

The project team put the matrix on their wiki site and reviewed it on a weekly basis. Although we don’t know yet how the matrix impacted the project’s final outcome, we can say that, six weeks into the project’s design phase, the requirements for the home finance software included mobile device compatibility as well. The team added this requirement to the risk matrix after they had an out-of-bounds review, which would impact the schedule unless resources were added to the team. We can say that both the matrix and weekly review have kept the team’s communication sufficient for this new global approach and also indicated that the new mobile requirement is on schedule.

Visualization

Below is a risk matrix for the case study illustrated above. The “impact and “likelihood” columns are on scales from one to ten, where one indicates zero risk and absolutely no impact on the project. A rating of five in the case of impact means that the risk has one half of the largest negative impact conceivable, such as a two- to three-month slip for a nine-month program. Similarly, a five on the likelihood scale means one half of the typical likelihood, which would be on the order of 50%.

The “metric” is the measurable quantity associated with the risk. The “threshold” is the value you must hit by the time you ship (unless otherwise stated). The “date” is the time by which the performance must equal or exceed the threshold value unless it is the date by which you are monitoring the metric. Finally, the “action plan” column indicates the high-level objectives of an action plan. It may refer to a much more detailed action plan, which should be sufficiently described so that a reader of the Risk Reduction Matrix has a sense of what will take place if you trigger a threshold.

Optimizing Processes: Four Fields Mapping



What Is the Tool? Four-Fields Process Map

Originated in Japan, the Four-Fields Map is a graphical technique most commonly applied to cross-functional processes. Unlike more traditional project planning methods that apply work breakdown structures and critical path analysis, the Four-Fields Map emphasizes the elements of tasks, teamwork, and quality.

The tool describes the execution of a process across four areas:

1)     Phases: discrete states over time that define where in the process the team is executing.

2)     Tasks: significant deliverables within the flow of the process.

3)     People: the functions or individual(s) responsible for delivering the task within the phase. Typically, as the work flows through the process, the individual(s) assigned to the task will be the lead of the process for the duration of that task.

4)     Standards: the deliverables, documents, or specifications by which you will judge the quality of the tasks of the process.

You can construct a Four-Fields Map using the following steps:

1. Identify a target process and define the process objective(s).
2. Identify a flowchart of significant tasks and decisions points.
3. Map the tasks and decision points in a matrix of the product development phases against the team members responsible for their delivery. The tasks are connected to indicate the process flow over time.
4. For each task, record the elapsed time (in days) and the level of effort (in person days) required to complete it.
5. For significant tasks, record the documented standard by which you can determine their quality (in the right-hand column).

What Are the Benefits?

• When you apply the Four-Fields Map to a new process, it provides you with the best chance of getting the process right the first time. Many times when teams need to create new processes, they do it in an ad-hoc and non-holistic manner. This tool supports you in creating a process (with key tasks, ownership, and standards) from start to finish.
• When you apply this tool to sub-optimal processes, it drives process improvement. This tool allows you to examine existing processes to ensure that you have identified all key tasks and that resources are in place to execute at the right time in the process.
• By measuring the quality of critical tasks against standards, you will have a consistent approach for executing the process. Incorporating this tool into key processes ensures that stakeholders know ahead of time how you will measure the success of the task.

Which Business Problems Do We Solve?

The Four-Fields Map provides a clear line of sight for team members and their management for implementing new processes and offers a graphical representation of the deliverables throughout the defined process. In a single view, decision makers and contributors can see the critical tasks of a process, the responsible individuals, and the criteria by which they will measure the successful outcome of a task.

What Are some Considerations?

• The Four-Fields Map is a snapshot in time. As changes occur, you should update the tool to reflect the latest process information.
• Because the tool is focused on tasks, people, and standards, it does not include some of the elements of more traditional project management, including work breakdown structures, identification of the critical path, key dependencies, and oversight by the program manager.
• While the process measures critical tasks against a standard, it does not ensure the quality of the standard.

Case Study

NetCo is ramping up a new project with a significant amount of supplier risk. Their primary concerns are twofold: 1) many critical components are from a sole source, and 2) the product requires a new technology, and the primary supplier does not have high yields, indicating a quality problem. To mitigate the risk, they need to develop a cross-functional process to ensure clear communication of the risk profile and procurement plan and then execute the process to make sure they are well informed of the procurement risk.

Bruce, the new product operations (NPO) manager, creates with the cross-functional team a Four-Fields Map to clearly identify the key stakeholders, their tasks throughout the phases of the process, and the standards by which they will evaluate the quality of the tasks. The end result is a risk assessment plan with a recommendation for procurement authorization from Tom, the VP of manufacturing operations.

Visualization

Managing Project Cadence: Deliverable Hit Rate Chart

What Is the Tool?  Deliverable Hit Rate Chart

The Deliverable Hit Rate tool monitors the progress of completed tasks against a target over time.  Best applied to complex programs with a large number of tasks, the tool is a high level graphical representation that indicates whether the cadence of task completion is on-track for delivering the program on time.

The tool is constructed by establishing first constructing a linear target rate.  The target is calculated by dividing the total number of tasks required to complete the program by the duration of the program, typically measured in months.  At the end of each month, the number of completed tasks is mapped against the target for that time period.  A line chart is then generated to present actual vs. target.

What are the Benefits?

• The Delivery Hit Rate Chart is a high level snap shot that indicates whether or not a large program is on-track for and an on-time delivery.  It is a better alternative that presenting large unwieldy work break down structures or Gantt charts.
• Construction of the tool is straightforward, and provides an early warning when the team is not executing to the targeted number of tasks, thus driving corrective action to get the team back on track.
• It is an elegant solution for communicating a large amount of data in an easy to interpret graphical representation.

Which business problems are solved?

Teams that are managing large projects with hundreds of tasks on the work breakdown structures can get lost in the details of partially completed tasks and their interdependencies.  In project reviews, managers don’t want to see the details; they just want to know if the team is on the right trajectory of hitting the target schedule.  The Deliverable Hit Rate Chart is a high level view that will indicate whether or not the team is running at the right cadence for an on-time delivery.  The historical view of tasks completed is also an indicator of the consistency by which the team is executing.  This data is one indicator of predictability, and can be supplemented with specific project information in areas where the team is off-track.

What else you should know

• While an indicator of the cadence of tasks being accomplished, this tool does not discern between priority of, or dependencies on other tasks.
• The quality of the output from this tool is dependent on tasks being at a sufficient level of task granularity.  It diminishes in value if applied only to high or mid-level milestones.
• While the tool does not provide insight on why the team is ahead or behind on task execution, it can provide an early warning to a risk of significant schedule compression, or schedule slip, on the back end of the schedule, and trigger analysis and risk mitigation measures.

Case Study

Netco is delivering a new product to market that requires contribution from thirteen different teams.  There are sixty people working on the project.  Richard, the program manager, has constructed a large work break down structure that includes a low level of task granularity, with milestones, interdependencies and resources. In addition to managing the work break down structure, he needs to provide monthly management updates to demonstrate progress of the team. To provide a high level overview of the team’s performance to plan,  he constructs a delivery hit rate chart.

As seen in the visualization below, the team got off to a good start, but has fallen behind.    This graphical representation can be used to show the contrast between targeted and actual cadence of completed tasks.  Richard can then supplement his management report with specifics from the work break down structure that has driven the under performance of the team, and a corrective action plan for getting back on track for a July delivery.

Visualization

Are Product Roadmaps Now a Waste of Time?

H. Stanley Judd: “A good plan is like a road map: it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.“

What Is the Tool? Product Roadmap

Product roadmaps often serve two masters and fail both. On one hand, the sales team uses them to close a sale because they insert the customer’s key wish into the product plan. On the other hand, product management uses them to assure the CEO that they plan to support their vision even though engineering has not looked at them.

This totally misses the point of the power of a well-executed product roadmap, which can be at its very best a visual explanation of a company’s strategy and therefore helps align engineering, marketing, sales, support, and the C-suite. Besides being a visual tool to communicate strategy, a product roadmap can inspire innovation because it signals the key areas that are the strongest differentiator. It can also inspire execution in that it helps to communicate platform and derivative strategies and how these unfold over time.

A product roadmap is a graphical representation of a set of related products over time (typically two product cycles or 24-36 months) with at most a monthly granularity (but often shown with quarterly resolution). The vertical axis is strategically the most important as it displays the products, how they relate to each other, and how they might relate to the competition in ways that matter. Although one of the most common vertical axes is cost, it can also be speed or the key-feature parameter.

What’s New?

Articulating a common vision for success is hardly a new concept, but it is rarely accomplished in a manner that ensures that all stakeholders and contributors truly understand the vision. A company can often generate a product plan from a variety of sources that have functionally focused views on what problems that company is trying to solve. However, these views are not always useful because they do not incorporate sufficient inputs to be reliable. A robust product roadmap is a cross-functionally created document that is reviewed by the CEO. It is not created to be communicated outside the company, but rather used to focus the company on the sequence of products developed over time.

This is a living document that serves as a repository for project ideas to be placed into the product development process. You should review and update it on a quarterly basis at a minimum.

What Are the Benefits?

• Provides a clear, visual representation of product strategy
• Inspires the organization to think about supporting innovations to drive parameters of importance
• Inspires the organization to see how they might get operational leverage by creating derivative products off of platforms
• Sets expectations for when the organization will deliver products/services to market
• Serves as an organizing principle for decisions around technology requirements, resource allocation, and product positioning

Which Business Problems Do We Solve?

Often individuals and managers in organizations say that there is no strategy, or if it exists, they say it is poorly communicated. An often-referenced product roadmap allows for better strategic alignment and as a result greater engagement. It also helps the executive management team and product marketing with managing the inputs to the new product development process. While a product roadmap should never preclude competitive reactions or innovation from “cutting in front of the line”, it does provide an active plan for what should be next on deck for development. The active use of a product roadmap helps innovation actively in at least two dimensions. The first is that it communicates through the vertical axis what is important to the organization. The second is that it provides a strategic context for engineers, researchers, and other creative individuals to come up with concepts that support, complement, and extend the strategic intent of the roadmap.

Finally, in the world of global product development, product roadmaps communicate the international launch strategy so that the organization plans the timing for entry into different markets and anticipates regulatory approvals, language, communication symbols, and standards.

What Are some Considerations?

In order to be most useful, the product roadmap must anticipate and lead changes in the market, in the channels, in the supply, and in the competitive landscape. So “shooting in front of the duck” is important because in most industries you have to anticipate what your competitors will have when you come out with your product 12 months from now. You should also be very careful not to focus too much on the competition. It is much more important to focus on supporting your vision and unique selling proposition than trying to guess every little move from your competitors. Often product roadmaps are useless because the focus is on some banal graphics of bubbles on an arrow. A product roadmap should be a scaled graph of at least two dimensions.

Case Study

WebCo is experiencing great acceptance of their initial product launch and is now focused on multiple offerings of the product for a differentiated performance/value market. They are constructing a strategy to divide the product offering to compete between a high-performance/high-feature offering and an entry-level product. To ensure that the market does not consider them a “one-trick pony”, they want to construct a product roadmap to communicate their vision for the success of their offerings. They also aim to ensure that the teams and technology are in place to deliver a successful portfolio of products over the next five years.

They are branching from their roots as a direct-to-consumer company to add a high-margin product line that would be oriented toward financial planners. Their unique selling proposition (USP) is ease of use and simplicity of operation, which they need to have for both markets. Their other USP is connectedness with other financial institutions so that you can get your statements electronically and track your income and expenses. Their primary problem is how they can leverage as much of the core platform as possible and still provide additional features for the financial planners. The action is to go through a product planning and product road-mapping activity where they have looked at the USPs of the two products and clearly understood them to be selling price, user experience, and the number of financial institutions. This process is owned by Ray (the CMO), supported by Fred (the CTO), and approved by Rajiv (the CEO). In order to speed up the market analysis and the creation of the chart itself, Ray has borrowed Molly, a project manager who has really good research skills and can help with document creation.

The outcome is that the CEO has created and approved a product roadmap. One of the benefits is that they have clearly defined the USPs as the number of financial institutions they can exchange data with, the monthly subscription cost, and the simplicity of the user interface (maintained for the more complex product sold to financial planners and measured as the average time to do three tasks on the website). The second benefit is that everybody involved in supporting the roadmap has done resource planning at a high level. Finally, the company uses the roadmap in monthly all-hands meetings to communicate product updates to the entire company so that everyone feels more connected and relevant.

Predictive Metrics – Measuring the right things to ensure project success

What’s New?

Companies are measuring the wrong things and ending up with the wrong results. Many times we get stuck on measuring what’s easy instead of what’s useful, or we focus on validating whether we succeeded or failed instead of measuring the elements that would tell us that a project is getting ready to go off the rails. Predictive metrics are the solution to that problem, and the Predictive Metrics Tree is the tool that helps ensure you’re measuring the right actions to achieve your program goals.

What Is the Tool? Predictive Metrics Tree

The Predictive Metrics Tree is a simple tree diagram, generated in Power Point, that provides a direct line of sight between the project goal and the 3-5 key metrics that, when defined and frequently measured, will best predict the likelihood of achieving the desired goal.  Predictive metrics are fundamentally different that results metrics in that instead of measuring an outcome, the organization measures a process or behavior that drives the result.

Constructing a Predictive Metrics Tree is a cross functional group process, typically done by the project leadership.  The critical aspect of constructing predictive metrics is ensure, with all the moving parts associated with delivering a product to market, that the team is sharply focused on the 3-5 elements that will have the biggest impact on whether or not the overall program goal is achieved.  This process consists of crisply defining these four-elements, which are order-specific.  The last step is frequently measuring and managing the resulting predictive metrics.

1. Project Goal: The cross functional team will define goal of the project.  Typical examples in product development include delivering a project against specific schedule, cost quality and revenue targets.  The project goal is a shared objective that is time-bound and measurable.   It is derived from a broader organizational and/or corporate goal. This is the result metric that typically is measured, as opposed to the predictive metrics discussed in this chapter.
2. Key Drivers: Key Drivers are derived from the project goal.  Once a goal is established, the project team will identify the 3-5 key actions that will have the greatest impact on successfully achieving that goal. It is important the team bound the number of drivers, to ensure that they can sharpen their focus in the high impact areas, and avoid the ineffective method of “measuring everything.”
3. Initiatives The initiatives are the key actions within each driver that will ensure that the goal is achieved.  By identifying the key initiative within each driver, the project team continues to narrow their focus to gain clarity on the most relevant actions or behaviors that will drive the successful outcome of the stated goal.
4. Predictive Metrics:  Predictive Metrics are the processes or behaviors that measures progress to the goal.  For each Initiative, the project team will identify one element that has the biggest impact on determining is progress toward the Initiative.  It is critical that each Predictive Metric is crisply defined.  The failure to do so, will introduce an element of ambiguity, leading to inconsistent measurement.

Once a suite of 3-5 predictive metrics has been defined, they should be tracked on a daily or weekly basis.  Typically, this is done in the weekly project team review, or in a weekly management review.  Typically, a predictive metrics dashboard is constructed as a single Power Point slide, and is included in the review.  These metrics give the team the best chance of identifying if progress is not being made toward the stated goal, and allows the team to take quick action to rectify any identified issues.

What Are the Benefits?

• Disaster prevention: Increased confidence that this early warning system will provide the best opportunity to prevent disasters or get a project back on track
• Better decisions faster: With an early indication that a program is heading for trouble, the leadership team can make data-based decisions and avoid “fire-drill” thinking and behavior.
• Increased focus: Measuring things that matter – not just what is easy to measure
• Less is more: Measuring 3-5 elements instead of dozens allows the project leadership to focus on the most critical areas and not get consumed in meaningless number crunching or metrics tracking.

Which Business Problems Do We Solve?

• Identifies where projects are about to come off the rails and allows early decision making and action to keep it on track.
• Ensures that you’re measuring the most meaningful elements to drive a project to success.
• Creates a greater competency within the project team to focus on predicting outcomes instead of just measuring results.

What Are some Considerations?

This is a new way of thinking for most organizations. It requires a fresh approach and the fortitude to abandon the old way of managing metrics. Most organizations focus on what they can easily measure, as opposed to what they should be measuring to optimize the probability of achieving the project goal.

Case Study

The Clean Tech startup has secured funding to deliver the 1.0 release of their product. The funding was allocated based on four key drivers – (1) release the software, (2) scale the technical staff, (3) scale sales operations, and (4) raise the next round of funding. The Predictive Metrics Tree provides a direct line of sight between the corporate goal (shipping the 1.0 release) and the predictive metrics that will allow the management team to visualize any early warning signs that would prevent the team from achieving their goal. See below the model and how each predictive metric ties to the corporate goal.

In each case, the predictive metric is clearly defined and should be measured and reviewed on a frequent basis (in this case weekly). All four of these metrics can be tracked on Excel and updated in a matter of minutes.

To further illustrate in the visualization below, examine the predictive metric “Resumes Screened.” Many managers would be tempted to measure the initiative “10 New Hires” with the metric “number of new hires this week (month)”, which is not predictive or useful. Alternatively, if you measure the number of “Resumes Screened”, then you have an early indication of whether or not you’re going to hit the goal of your initiative (10 New Hires). As that predictive metric is measured on a weekly – or more frequent – basis, managers can quickly reinforce with hiring managers to budget time to screen resumes. Over time, you can set targets for the number of resumes that you’ll need to screen to hit the goal of the initiative.

PIEMatrix: Projects as Processes, not Tasks

Paul Dandurand, PIEmatrix CEO: “Efficiency saves time and cost, whereas effectiveness is the power to grow the business.”

by Paul Dandurand, PIEmatrix

www.piematrix.com

What’s New?

This chapter will describe the attributes of new cloud-based software called PIEmatrix. This may inspire you to learn more about new technologies in the market and their contributions to making business life easier with visualization and knowledge sharing.

PIEmatrix is a growing company that provides solutions for turning complex projects into smart, dynamic, and repeatable processes that drive effectiveness. What’s new is that PIEmatrix takes a process and visual focus on project management. This means the approach to projects is not task focused like other traditional tools, but rather drives the right path for a successful project outcome with better processes.

What Is the Tool? PIEmatrix

PIEmatrix is a simple and powerful web-based platform that companies can deploy across their organizations’ functional areas, such as HR, product marketing, sales, finance, operations, etc. It’s made visually easy for non-project experts and therefore friendly to people outside of IT.

In new product development (NPD) functions, projects are iterative in that after you complete one project, you then go at it again with a follow-up product and so on. In addition, organizations that have short time to market need processes that are very similar from one project to another to be efficient. Because these types of projects are repeated, companies can establish standard processes for execution that drive effectiveness.

These repeatable processes would include common phases, steps, roles, and deliverable file templates. Furthermore, since all projects are relatively complex, they can have multiple process streams that run in parallel. For example, an NPD lifecycle could have the first process for project management, the second for product ideation, prototyping, and development, and a third for compliance preparation and regulatory auditing. All of these are done in parallel across the phases of the project’s lifecycle.

The PIEmatrix model visually displays these process streams as stackable“layers” and the phases of the lifecycle as “pie” slices, hence the name “PIEmatrix”. “PIE” represents the top-view slices like that of a pizza pie, and “matrix” represents the layers that intersect the slices like flipping the pie onto its side and seeing the cheese, sauce, and crust in each slice. The layering of the stacked processes can be viewed as subprojects. This makes it easy for certain team members to visually focus on their own subproject (process layer) during execution without being overwhelmed by the entire complexity of the overall project or program.

PIEmatrix has a dashboard that visually displays the project pies graphically on a single page showing progress and milestone indicators in real time. The simple color codes show the progress of different states. Dark green represents what is completed, and light green means in progress. Yellow means risk (check it out before it gets worse), and red means trouble (solve me today).

Finally, PIEmatrix is made for all the people working on or having some stake in the project. It has easy-to-follow steps with knowledge tips for assigned work. There is a built-in team collaboration system with messaging and email notifications. It also provides personal to-do lists and calendar pages for a quick view of what’s hot on your plate this week.

What Are the Benefits of this Graphical Technique?

• Creates an “alive” organization that adopts best practices very quickly
• Increases efficiency because it provides a lightweight process framework
• Produces effectiveness since the work being done has the right steps for success
• Allows management to simultaneously see the big picture and dive into the details
• Provides an executive dashboard for free as a simple outcome of project reporting

Which Business Problems Do We Solve?

This tool solves many business problems that have prevented companies from getting innovative products to market more quickly. These problems include unpredictable project execution, insufficient project metrics and program management, lack of consistent and smart product development processes, underutilized cross-functional teamwork, and the age-old problem of repeating mistakes (lack of organizational learning).

Predictable project execution is achieved by applying the core principles of planning and execution with best or proven practices. Planning can be improved with this tool because there are both a set of standard processes for launching a project and a set of processes for project planning. PIEmatrix has a built-in planning tab for managing process steps, dates, and people assignment. This is done either in a Gantt view or a people-list view.

The PIEmatrix structure is perfect for process streams on large projects where different groups focus on different processes, yet they are still dependent on each other. The cross-functional dependencies are clearly represented by the layers of pies that comprise the total project, and it is easy for management to see where there are possible breakdowns and act before they occur.

Finally, because it is easy to incorporate new learnings into the PIEmatrix framework, it encourages teams to do so. Because all teams use the same model, the teams that pass through the phase where the new learnings were inserted must now adopt it. Knowledge dissemination is instantaneous.

What Are some Considerations?

Implementation of a system this comprehensive can have risks if the upfront investment is not done properly. It’s recommended that a targeted quick-win project be done first in a contained group (functional). This presents a focus on what to target for the first process. Expect a fair amount of time to invest in building complex, key processes. The best approach is to start with a simple process for immediate execution. The teams can then add more complexity to the process over time. The PIEmatrix real-time dynamic deployment feature makes it really easy to enhance the best-practice process continuously over time.

If the organization has a high degree of process sophistication with documented processes, then this is not a large barrier. However, if an organization is not accustomed to process management, it will require some effort (and behavior change) to get PIEmatrix deployed across the enterprise.

Most importantly, it takes leadership to instill a culture of discipline, recover from stumbles, and continue the path toward improvement. Having top leadership support is essential for success.

Case Study

A large software organization was using this tool in their engineering department to manage employee-training programs around the world to help solidify the recently installed global development process. The key problem was that employee turnover (changing to new jobs, shifting out of engineering, or leaving the company) had a significant impact on the consistency of training quality to engineers and managers. The firm chose PIEmatrix to help capture the organizational knowledge and minimize the impact of the loss of knowledge as people moved on.

Below is a generic visualization of a stack of five projects in a five-phase project management system. The Axis project represents an initiative to capture post-mortem project data across the company using a project-history approach. The Axis project has an issue because the train-the-trainer materials are not complete yet (red indicator), but otherwise all the projects are running without issues. The Finance Integration, which is to train all project managers on how to create project budgets, is ahead and has completed nearly two thirds of the Define slice (phase). On the left-hand side of the visualization, there are navigation bars that can lead you to metrics and project data summaries.

Parametric Schedule Estimation “Lite”

Marcus Aurelius: “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”

Contributed by Wayne Mackey

http://pdcinc.com

What’s New?

There are environmental and internal changes that make schedule estimation take on a new level of importance. Parametric schedule estimation takes advantage of this new realm by rapidly providing (in less than 15 minutes) schedule estimates by phase (based on historical data) that can be more accurate than a bottom-up Gantt chart and always engender a more rational discussion than ad-hoc “guestimates”.

In general, things have gotten quicker in this so called “Internet age” where the world is a lot less forgiving when it comes to being late. Beyond just late schedule, extended enterprise design and development require synchronization of disparate tasks to optimize cost and quality. With the standard being raised in many areas (even in overnight shipping), predictability is now very important. The internal evolution of organizations has also enabled a new way of looking at predicting schedule in that many organizations are now using some form of phased development system with the overall timeline broken into a handful of key intervals. This provides a framework for measuring time in a more granular fashion – not just time to market, but time elapsed in a given phase as well.

What Is the Tool? Parametric Schedule Estimator “Lite”

The Parametric Schedule Estimator “Lite” is a tool that guides the estimate of the amount of time a project takes in a given phase by using experience combined with the “critical few” key drivers that impact schedule. There are five to eight inputs per phase for this simple model, which predicts the duration of each phase based on the range of typical times and the technical complexity of the design.

This spreadsheet-based tool has the phases running down the rows, and the time estimates and complexity inputs are in the columns. In the first column, under each phase are the critical few schedule drivers that come from your organization. The knowledge of the organization is tapped by collecting the drivers from the most experienced project managers in the organization. Examples of these drivers for a software project might be the number of interfaces, complexity of system integration, percentage of testing that is automated, and number of geographies. In the second and third columns is the historical range of these drivers (in number or in percentage) represented as low to high. The fourth column is your estimate of the complexity of the project, and the fifth column is left open for comments. The historical range of months is also indicated for each phase. After entering all the estimates for the drivers in a phase, the project manager applies judgment to indicate what the duration of the phase would be, given the various answers to the individual drivers.

The purpose of this tool is twofold. The first is to help inexperienced program managers be more successful, and the second is to help communicate the schedule duration to management. The tool also provides an alternative to the time-consuming bottom-up Gantt chart (although it is recommended that both be used in many situations).

In a pinch, the program manager can use this tool alone. However, the results will be more accurate if the cross-functional team works together to come up with the estimates. In the case of very complex systems, it is possible to decompose the estimation into software, hardware, accessories, etc. After coming up with the individual estimates, the program managers for the subsections should provide an integrated estimate, taking advantage of parallelism that is available in most programs.

What Are the Benefits of this Numerical Estimation Technique?

• Improves the predictability of schedules
• Reduces conflict between the team and management, thereby moving the emotional debate to a more rational discussion
• Can start out simple and gain accuracy over time
• Is a great way to capture knowledge, especially given the turnover in most organizations
• Establishes a common language and one familiar visual tool for schedule estimation

Which Business Problems Do We Solve?

Most fundamentally, this tool helps ensure better customer satisfaction and greater competitive advantage. Fast and predictable product development helps satisfy customers who have come to expect a new product every nine months or less. The tool also helps inside the organization by predicting the milestones important to operations and the field.

In the area of product development, the Parametric Schedule Estimator reduces waste inside the organization because of increased predictability. Deliverables can be scheduled efficiently so that they are made available once ready.

What Are some Considerations?

There are several factors that can limit the accuracy of the method. The most important is that if the design paradigm changes, you may not have correct or sufficient baselines to estimate from (for example, if you just started to do remote development or implemented an agile software process). Another factor is that the estimation is inherently subjective, so the estimation quality is dependent on the skills of the team doing the estimate. However, in our experience, we found this tool almost twice as accurate as an average program manager, though less accurate than the best possible program manager.
Case Study

A technology organization with about 200 contributors was having trouble with morale and projects that kept slipping in their attempt to get new product lines to market. Because they are in the consumer electronics marketplace, the ability to have them available for the fall is extremely important. In January, the CEO asked the team to plan a follow up on their product line with a new release for the next selling season. The team was given the market requirements document, and the CEO asked if they could hit it. In the past, it was simply a yelling match where engineering agreed to a deadline and then (unfortunately) did not hit it. This time around was going to be different.

Using the most experienced project manager and the engineer who started the company, the organization decided to put together a parametric estimation process. They collected data over the last three years of releases dating back to the start of the company and determined the drivers (by phase) and then the range of dates from historical data. This constituted a rough draft that they piloted by having several additional project managers apply this to former projects. After doing this pilot, they ended up adding a driver that looks at resources available versus required, and they changed some of the historical data range. Then the estimation process was applied to the project being planned. The result indicated that the project would miss the fall by one quarter. Armed with this data and the market requirements document, the project team was able to convince management to shed some features to ensure that the product would hit the timeline.

The result was even better than predicted in that the team not only hit their deadline, but was also able to manage some slips (internal to the phases), which increased confidence and decreased costs by avoiding a costly third prototype build.

Visualization

The above visualization shows the blank table template. This needs to be modified for your drivers and projects. It can be helpful in many cases to have different estimation charts for hardware, software, accessories, etc.