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The Culture of NPD Processes

We all know that culture influences business outcomes more than any other variable.  Great strategies must be translated into effective business plans and implemented at the operational level.  Yet, if there is a breakdown in communication as a result of cultural conflict, a great business strategy can fail mightily.

Having an open, accepting cultures paramount for success in innovation.  The ability to “fail” allows new product development (NPD) teams to take risks.  Without risks, there is no opportunity for innovative growth.  And, of course, growth drives learning.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking, “Yes, culture impacts innovation success, but what do I do about it?”  The answer is that every organization must adapt their NPD process to their culture.  When there is a logical match between organizational culture and the NPD process, strategic goals for innovation are readily achieved.

Different Organizational Cultures

Culture is an unwritten set of rules that dictate how a group of individuals interact.  At a societal level, Asian cultures are known for group consensus while American and European cultures are better known for independent actions.  There is no right or wrong culture; however, people’s behaviors will reflect the dominant culture.

The Prairie Dog Culture

Prairie dogs share a lot of their living space with other prairie dogs.  They mostly live underground within a complex network of tunnels.  Yet, a sentinel is posted who alerts the group to a threat at which point, the entire community responds as one – diving into the tunnels for safety.

The Lion Pride Culture

Lions, on the other hand, are fairly solitary animals in the wild.  Lion prides have a hierarchy that leads to the paternal head.  As in the movie, The Lion King, the head lion might make poor decisions, but the rest of the pride follows.  Similarly with a good decision, the pride follows along obediently.

Everything In-Between Culture

Of course, between the extremes of a prairie dog clan and a hierarchical lion pride are the vast majority of organizational cultures.  Some companies lean more heavily to one side than the other.  Yet, every organization has a distinctive culture that encourages (or discourages) innovation.

Culture and the NPD Process

One of the biggest challenges of Agile implementation for tangible product development, and in large corporations, is cultural change.  The Agile philosophy pushes decisions to the lowest levels in an organization.  However, many senior executives are threatened by their perceived lack of involvement in these day-to-day decisions.  They wonder how they can take responsibility for profit and loss, if they don’t control each and every decision.

Of course, this lack of trust results in a hierarchical decision framework.  From an innovation standpoint, these organizations find it impossible to adopt Agile processes.  Instead, fear of failure results in a review- and approval-heavy staged-and-gated processes.  It’s not unusual to see “half-gates” in these organizations, as senior leaders micromanage the decision points.

In my experience, hybrid NPD processes like WAGILE and Lean NPD, are excellent transitions for hierarchical organizations investigating improvements in speed-to-market.  WAGILE (read more here) is a great NPD process when the product managers have close communication and interaction with end-users and customers.  Lean NPD is a better approach for organizations that innovate in B2B or wholesale markets, relying on market research external to the core development team.

Culture is the Crown of Innovation

Culture not only drives strategy, but culture dictates the innovation process.  Risk-averse organizations are challenged to transition to Agile, regardless of their desire to do so.  Instead, adopting a hybrid waterfall-Agile NPD process allows the organization to design and deliver new products quicker, cheaper, and better while building on internal strengths.

Want to learn more?  Join the PMI CBC chapter on 17 May for a brief discussion of Project Management in New Product Development.  Register here for this free event.  Also join our monthly Product Development Lunch and Learn webinar on 13 June at 12 pm Central Time to learn more about Project Management for NPD Processes.  Register here. 

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Product Development Creativity

Check out the short video summary (about 1 minute) then read on!

The last few years have brought tumult, upheaval, and an endless parade of changes to how we work and live.  Business in the United States has shifted from small companies to large corporations.  Technology has introduced a permanent “work-from-home” culture.  Some people don’t even shop for their own groceries or go to restaurants or the cinema anymore!

Unprecedented change is scary.  As individuals, we can prepare ourselves for desirable changes, like a new fitness routine or an extra-long vacation.  But as a group, people often resist change.  We want to know the benefits of change and one negative voice in the crowd introduces questions to all.

While debate is good and healthy for any society, product development professionals and product managers view debate and change through a different lens.  How can we creatively address a new market need?

Creative Change

In new product development (NPD), we seek to introduce positive change into influence customers.  Creative solutions to our customers’ problems help them to live better lives and to engage in their own businesses at a higher level.  New product designs force change but success is the adoption of that change.

Creativity is defined as “the ability to transcend traditional ideas.”  NPD practitioners and product managers are constantly looking for new ideas and concepts to solve problems in a new way.  For example, e-bikes (electronic bicycles) are experiencing huge growth.  The electric motor offers a creative solution for people who are not fit enough for cycling and for the elderly who still want to enjoy the outdoors.

Steps for Creativity in NPD

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A typical NPD process includes the following steps.

  1. Understand the customers problem
  2. Generate ideas to solve the problem
  3. Create prototypes to test solution ideas
  4. Finalize the results and feedback
  5. Refine the product concept

We apply a variety of creative tools at each step to ensure the product development process advances.  We also want to make sure that our customers accept and will adopt the proposed new product solution.  For instance, e-bikes are much, much heavier than a traditional bicycle so people are less likely to travel with an e-bike.

Here are some creativity tools to apply in the traditional end process to gather customer feedback and lead to greater customer satisfaction.

  1. Customer shadowing, empathy map, journey map
  2. Brainwriting, affinity diagrams
  3. Wizard of Oz, paper prototypes, focus groups A/B testing
  4. Voice of customer, statistical analysis
  5. Product roadmap, feature releases, value stream mapping

Product Development Creativity

Product designers cannot sit still.  Change is happening in tsunami steps all around us.  We must adopt new technologies and generate creative solutions to help our customers.  Learning and applying a set of creativity tools ensures we have a variety of new products available to release in the short-, medium-, and long-term to satisfy consumers across the spectrum.  Creativity can be re-learned and practiced in everything we do every day.

Learn more in our free Product Development Lunch and Learn webinar on 9 May 2022, 12:00 pm CDT, 3 Creativity Tools.  You might also be interested in our Deep Dive Creativity Workshop for Product Managers on 27 May 2022.  Check out our course calendar here, register here for the free Product Development Lunch and Learn, and register here for the in-depth creativity workshop.

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Listening for Customer Needs

I’ve always been interested in how people differentiate “hearing” and “listening”.  I remember one of my Japanese colleagues warning me to get a commitment to action from the multi-national team because saying “Yes” in Japan only meant “I heard you”.  I’m guilty, too, of nodding and saying “Yes” occasionally when someone asks if I heard them.

Hearing is the mechanical process of sound waves entering our ears and being converted to electrical signals.  The electrical signal that registers in our brain allows us to “hear” speech, music, and traffic noises.  Animals also “hear” noises – my cat jumps a mile if you clap your hands during one of his many siestas!

Listening, on the other hand, is a qualitative and emotional response to the sounds we hear.  Listening requires an analysis and understanding of the words, a commitment to action, and/or a witty conversational response.  In new product development (NPD), we often refer to “listening to the voice of the customer” during upfront research.  We do not say we only “hear” the customer.  We say we “listen” to the customer – gathering the qualitative and emotional responses.

Gathering Customer Needs

Of course, in product development and product management, customer needs drive design and implementation.  As product development professionals, we also know that customers are challenged to accurately describe their needs.  It is often easier for a consumer to make a complaint or to offer platitudes than to specify needs and wants.  Interestingly, the voice of the customer is more about multi-channel listening than hearing sounds.

What is multi-channel listing in product development?  It is collecting data and information (the voice of customer, VOC) that reflects a customer’s needs and problems.  “Listening” may include focus groups, observation, or journaling.  In this case, listening includes all our senses, not just hearing.

Creative Listening

Some creative ways to gather customer needs include shadowing, A/B testing, and journey mapping.  Shadowing is a market research technique in which members of the product development team follow customers (or potential customers) while they conduct daily activities.  This allows the NPD team to observe all aspects of product usage as well as pain points and competitor product advantages.  Shadowing, like many VOC methods, can generate a lot of data.  So, the NPD team should be prepared with an analysis and sorting method in advance.

A/B testing can be direct or indirect.  Product designers test preference for one or another feature in the new product.  Alternatively, one set of customers is tested for acceptance of Feature A and another set is tested for acceptance of Feature B.  In this method, you will need to ensure the sample size is adequate for the expected data integrity.

Finally, customer journey maps (see last week’s post here) are a great way to connect the customers’ decisions and emotions with the steps taken to research, purchase, and use a new product.  Some organizations structure business functions around the typical steps in the customer journey map.  For example, a digital retailer organizes IT projects by webpage presentation (customer shopping), customer ordering domain, shipping, and returns.

Learn More

Listening is tricky business and even more challenging when our customers cannot explain -in words – what they seek as new product features and benefits.  We use market research and design thinking tools to listen to the “voice of the customer”.  Our skills as product development professionals include multi-channel listening, meaning we must hear and observe our customers interacting with a variety of product solutions.

Join me on 9 May 2022 for our free monthly Product Development Lunch and Learn webinar.  This month’s topic is 3 Creativity Tools and you can learn how to better “listen” for customer needs.  REGISTER HERE.

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Project Management Skills

In the past few weeks, we have been exploring the similarities and differences in roles between project managers and product managers.

To wrap up this series, we describe specific skills to master for each role.  In this post, we will discuss project management skills and next week, will take a look at those necessary for success as a product manager.

Strategic Project Management Skills

Project managers must view the outcomes of their work from a strategic perspective what is the goal of the project?  How does this particular project advance objectives of the firm?  Why is it project important now?

Businesses undertake projects for just three basic reasons.

  1. Improve revenue (growth)
  2. Reduce costs (savings)
  3. Stay in business (competition, regulatory)

Project managers with a strategic viewpoint will reinforce growth, cost reduction, or regulatory compliance in their work.  It is important to understand why you’re doing a project before developing detailed plans.

Tactical Project Management Skills

All business strategies are converted into tactical plans and operational activities.  Tactics describe how an activity, or task will be done, how it will be completed, and when the product or feature will be released.

Project managers are experts at tactical skills, such as creating and managing project schedules, monitoring actual cost versus budgets, and mitigating project risks.  In fact, much of the role of a project manager in new product development is to monitor and manage risk.  This is the purpose of any staged-and-gated process or the WAGILE approach to develop new products with speed and agility.

Projects often require significant capital investment and resource commitments.  Senior executives do not make these decisions lightly.  So, a large part of the project manager’s job is to reassure senior executives at their decisions were appropriate.  (Of course, it is also important to inform them if the project is completely off the rails and was a poor decision.)

For example, if a product roadmap indicates a next generation product release by year-end, the project manager will develop a schedule with appropriate resourcing with the following tasks.

  • Proof of concept (2 months)
  • Customer feedback (1 month)
  • Generate product specs (1 month)
  • Design and produce prototype (2 months)
  • Customer feedback (1 month)
  • Finalize product specs (1 month)
  • Initiate manufacturing (1 month)
  • Quality check and ramp up production (1 month)

Operational Project Management Skills

As indicated earlier in this series, project managers are often responsible for much of the day-to-day execution of a project.  This means that project managers need strong technical skills to help team members in trouble-shooting and mitigating risks that can impact schedules or budgets.  Project managers are also responsible for reporting project status from project initiation to close-out.

Thus, project managers need to master communication, negotiation, and leadership.  While all successful new product development team members should be good at communication, negotiation, and leadership, project managers utilize these skills up and down organizational strata as well as peer-to-peer.  For instance, knowing what level of detail to communicate to whom can drive a successful dialogue and help project managers enable decisions.

Project Management Skills

Successful project managers demonstrate mastery in many skills.  Join us on 11 April at noon CDT (1 pm EDT) for an open discussion session of project vs. product management.  Learn more here and REGISTER HERE.

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Product Manager and Project Manager Roles

Societies mature and in a competitive free market, job specialization results from those advances.  Long ago, a family raised its own food and used the by-products for other uses (e.g., cattle delivered beef to eat, leather for shoes, and fat to make soap and candles).  Today we have farmers and ranchers raising meat and produce that we purchase at the supermarket, and we buy our shoes at different stores depending on special needs (e.g., running shoes at a sporting goods store and dress shoes at department stores).

Specialization also trickles into our job functions.  Previously, project managers juggled strategic and tactical objectives, balancing business needs with the day-to-day implementation of project tasks.  Moreover, the project manager was also typically responsible for people and talent management, including development and learning plans for project team members. 

Project managers, like the family of bygone days, also managed multiple tasks – negotiations for contracts (with help from purchasing and legal), quality planning, and risk management.  In this way, project managers “owned” the project and understood benefits as well as costs.  A highly skilled and experienced project manager zooms in and out from a macro-viewpoint to detailed tasks and activity implementations as needed throughout any given workday.

Recent Introduction of Product Management

In the last several years, a new role has surfaced in many businesses.  That is the role of a product manager.  Conceptually, a product manager handles a project’s strategic linkages between the business or customer needs and the technical development and design teams.  Ideally, the project manager then can focus solely on execution of day-to-day tasks.

With continued job specialization, product management is sometimes further classified by in-bound and out-bound product marketing.  To gather customer and business needs, product managers must analyze consumer behaviors, market trends, competitors, and so on.  But product managers also work as brand or category managers, helping to determine product features and release roadmaps.  The former represents in-bound marketing and the latter out-bound product management.  In both cases, product managers remain attuned to customer needs above all else.

The Need for Product Management

How do you know if your organization needs a product manager?  One organization with which I have worked recently had conducted R&D activities, product development, and customer interactions through individuals called “project managers”.  As their business has evolved, they were purchasing and re-branding many different product solutions from outside vendors.  The role of project manager changed to product manager.

In this situation, individuals originally spent the bulk of their day-to-day activity monitoring budgets and tasks to convert a new idea into a saleable product.  They Interacted closely with their manufacturing facility to ensure quality and proper inventory levels.  They established schedules and supervised technicians and specialists who gathered experimental data to continually improve product designs.  Small teams often visited the factory (located in the same building as the project team) in order to ensure product development progressed at the right pace.

As the company transitioned to more off-the-shelf and out-of-the-box product solutions, the role of the project manager was not as crucial as that of a product manager.  No longer were the factory development trials critical path items.  Instead, they assessed quality by gathering samples from the outside vendors.  Because the firm’s product cycle follows the school year, timetables and schedules for off-the-shelf products are set without negotiation.  Coordination activities adjusted from day-to-day to year-long sales cycles.

Product managers learned forecasting and sales techniques to balance the technical expertise they had previously established as project managers.  In this way, the product managers truly served both the business and their customer.

What is Your Role?

Learning to distinguish between the roles of project management and product management is important for today’s complex business challenges.  Learn more at our free webinar on Project vs. Product Management 11 April at 1 pm EDT/12 pm CDT.  Register here for our monthly product development lunch and learn.

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Understanding Customer Needs

Every new product development professional carries a toolkit for the job.  Just like a carpenter carries a saw, hammer, and clamps, product managers use market research, processes, and planning to finish a job.  Carpenters choose specific saws and blades depending on the fineness of work.  A quick cut of a 2×4 board does not need the same degree of precision or quality as cutting maple veneer for a kitchen cupboard.

Product development professionals select different tools and apparatus to match the outcomes of their job, too.  Market research to gather data on market opportunities is different than the customer insights necessary to establish a pricing strategy (read more here).  While saw blades provide various degrees of fineness and integrity to the carpenter’s job, we similarly use market research tools to better understand specific customer needs throughout the new product development process (see the figure below).

Opportunity Identification

The first phases of new product development focus on opportunity identification.  In early stages of product development – whether you use a traditional staged-and-gated, Agile, or WAGILE approach – you must study and observe customers.  What is the problem they need help solving?  What are the limitations or constraints they face in addressing a given pain point?  What is the solution worth to them?

You may use tools like observation, interviews, or questionnaires during this stage of product development.  Essentially, product managers are researching the needs and desires of customers as well as available product solutions.  If the market is very crowded with competitors, product development may take a different pathway.  Market research is invaluable to determine needs of existing and potential customers.

Design and Development

During design and development of a new product, we begin to identify potential concepts that we feel will address the customer’s pain points.  We specify the requirements and features of that solution, thus allowing the engineering teams to craft a working product.

Market research tools deployed during design and development include concept testing, AB testing, and QFD (quality function deployment – read more here).  The goal is to determine a narrow set of features that will deliver the expected consumer benefit while also creating value (profit) for the firm.

Production

Finished products move into production which includes manufacturing and servicing the product as a normal part of the business.  For example, after a carpenter finishes the job, a homeowner continues to perform maintenance.  We sometimes have to fix things – like a loose knob on the kitchen cupboard – but we also do maintenance to ensure long time enjoyment of the product.  Wiping spills from cupboards keeps them clean and shiny, preserving the wood quality for a long life. 

Likewise, once a product is launched, we perform maintenance to fix bugs or quality issues not identified pre-launch.  Long-term profits are maintained as product managers ensure cost-effective and reliable manufacturing is in place for the product.

During production, market research entails lead user panels, for instance, to identify next generation features.  Focus groups are used to uncover needs of non-users.  For example, how can we transition the product to more markets?  Which market segments demand a premium version of the product?  Can we make it less expensively but still maintain quality and customer satisfaction?

Market Research Tools

Market research tools help new product development practitioners understand customer needs.  We deploy different techniques depending on the stage of development and the desired fidelity for the data.  We use qualitative market research to gather thoughts, feelings, and opinions of customers while we use quantitative market research to validate and verify product specifications statistically.

Learn more in our New Product Development Lunch and Learn sessions.   On 14 March, the free webinar discusses customer insights and market research tools.   Register here.  For more information on Customer Insights, also check out Chapter 2 of The Innovation ANSWER Book, 2nd edition and Chapter 3 of The Innovation QUESTION Book.

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Similarities Drive Behaviors

Recently, I watched “Four Weddings and A Funeral,” a movie from the mid-1990s starring Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell.  While the overall story covers the two main characters falling in love, I found an underlying theme more interesting.  The question posed, early in the film, is whether someone can find their mate-for-life and future spouse at a wedding.

At first glance, this seems like an odd proposal.  As a child, I went to lots of weddings.  We lived in a small community where my dad was an influential businessman, and I had a lot of older cousins.  Weddings were boring, formal affairs – you had to be quiet and eat with the proper fork.  Further, being much younger than everyone else, no one cared to talk with me.  Very boring!

But, in “Four Weddings and A Funeral,” the wedding guests were friends of about the same age and did, indeed, find true love at the weddings.  The wedding guests shared mostly similar educations, similar incomes, and similar interests.  When you throw a crowd of people together with these characteristics, bonds are sure to form.

Customer Behaviors

As a new product development practitioners and product managers, we must recognize that our customers are like wedding guests.  They often have similar expectations which drive similar behaviors.  Our customers probably share similar needs to get a job done, share similar interests, and share similar value propositions.  It is our job to figure out these needs and turn them into beneficial features.

Traditional market research uses different methodologies to identify customer needs and to segment customers into similar categories.  These market research methods might include interviews, focus groups, or surveys.  These tools help us to convert qualitative ideas into quantitative concepts that are transformed to new products.

An Example of Similarity

Consider grocery shopping.  While supermarkets have small margins, most have successfully segmented their customers by similar shopping experiences.  There are big carts available for the customer who shops only once a week for the entire family.  There are hand baskets for customers who just want to grab a few items in a quick stop.  Finally, there are customers who send their grocery list to the supermarket and idle their car in the parking lot while a clerk loads their trunk.

Supermarkets, thus, recognize similar behaviors of these three segments of customers.  Products and services are marketed in different ways to each segment, yet individual customers within a category or segment approach shopping in a similar way.  Selling 24-packs are geared to the once-a-week shopper and impulse items at the register are aimed at the light shopper.

Similar Behaviors

Can you find your spouse and lifelong love at a wedding?  Probably, if you share similarities to the other wedding guests.  Can you market products to specific categories of customers?  Absolutely, if you segment similar shoppers.  Can you learn to identify customers similarities?  Yes, if you join me on 14 March for a free webinar on market research tools.  Register here.

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Is Agile a Digital Version of Waterfall?

I first encountered the terms “analog” and “digital” in high school physics.  While I probably remember more about the pranks my classmates played on our teacher, the terms analog and digital repeatedly popped up in my engineering education.  For those of you who had a high school physics teacher NOT named Mr. Founds, we’ll touch on the definitions of these two words and investigate how they relate to product and project management.

Analog vs. Digital

Analog – in layman’s language – means you can select whatever value you want.  Think of an old-fashioned radio tuning dial that turns back-and-forth.  As you seek a particular frequency, you first hear static, then a mix of static with the music, then the music comes in strongly.  If you turn the dial too far, you’re back in the static zone.

In Houston, I enjoy listening to 89.3FM.  With a digital device, there are exact increments, and your radio “dial” will lock onto specific stations.  So, in my car, I tune from 89.1 (static) to 89.3 (music) to 89.5 (static).  The “digital” increment on my car radio is 0.2 on the FM frequency.

Waterfall Project Management

Waterfall project management has fallen out of favor in recent years.  I believe there is a place for waterfall project management, especially in the space of tangible product development.  In general, waterfall suggests upfront planning and a detailed list of features and requirements for the new product.  Usually, detailed schedules are created during early project planning phases, with assigned tasks and resources.

Agile Project Management

While extensive upfront planning can work for projects with low levels of technical uncertainty and low levels of requirements uncertainty, waterfall fails to be flexible and adaptable to changing customer needs throughout the project lifecycle.  When the schedule is disrupted, the plan must be re-created and tasks dependent on other tasks fall behind schedule.

Agile project management promises flexibility by planning just the minimum work necessary to build a minimum set of features (often called an MVP, minimum viable product).  Teams and tasks are designed to be isolated from interruptions (dependencies).  Autonomy and empowerment are key to success in Agile implementations.

Agile is Digital Waterfall

The drawback, I believe, of many Agile implementations is a heavy emphasis on the ceremonies and artifacts of the process.  Instead of using these elements as tools to assist development work, some Agile teams use the ceremonies and artifacts in the same way waterfall teams use upfront planning tools (e.g., Gantt charts and critical path analysis).  The sprint increment in Agile becomes a set of planning meetings that could have been handled with a larger, upfront activity in waterfall.  In essence, sprints tune the radio at specific frequency increments while waterfall can spin the dial to get close to the final result.

WAGILE Product Development Meets in the Middle

Some of the equipment I used in engineering school had a combination of analog and digital tuning.  You used the digital selection to get to the right range of data (e.g., the left end of the radio dial) while you used analog tuning to get to the specific reading (e.g., 89.3 FM).  Other pieces of equipment were the opposite – using analog selection to get within range and digital selection for a specific, known incremental value.  Regardless of the device, the benefits of combining analog and digital were obvious and well above analog-alone or digital-alone.

WAGILE product development is much the same.  We use a hybrid project management model, picking the best aspects of waterfall and of Agile.  (Thus, the name – WAGILE.)  Overlaying incremental feature development with frequent customer interactions onto a disciplined, risk-balanced staged-and-gated process can lead to faster development times and increased customer satisfaction.

Learn more in the upcoming WAGILE Product Development workshop (15 & 17 February).

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Hybrid Product Development Today

Today, many of us are working in very different environments than two years ago.  A lot of people are permanently working from home (“remote”).  Others are going to the office a couple of days per week.  Still others are doing the same job, at the same place, as they have always done (truck drivers, hospitality workers, factory and assembly plant personnel).

Learning to work in a new way can be stressful, but we are also living in a time when technology helps to bridge gaps.  With video conferencing, we have face-to-face conversations with our coworkers and can easily share documents or files.  While some of us might be in a shared space looking at the hard copy, others participate equally from remote locations looking at the same electronic document.

What Does Hybrid Mean?

Hybrid, therefore, means a blend of geographical working environments, facilitated by technology.  But what does hybrid mean culturally or for our work processes?

Unfortunately, as “Zoom fatigue” is a real symptom of work burnout, we know that our hybrid work cultures must adapt.  It is a very different atmosphere to welcome a new employee to your campus and to show him around the office building than it is to dive into work tasks as the new employee logs onto her first meeting.  Trust, especially emotional trust, is critical to tackling higher risk tasks and projects.  And, trust is hard to build in a hybrid culture.

Consider converting five minutes of each meeting to team-building.  Use the time to create social relationships with your hybrid teams.  Talk about sports, hobbies, or travel.  You want to generate a culture that shares openly and will lead to trust.  Sharing personal life interests alongside our professional engagements supports relationships among team members.

Our processes change in a hybrid work environment, too.  We no longer have quick hallway conversations.  Instead, we hold scheduled meetings and discussions (lots of them!).  Hand-offs and transfers of tasks between functions and departments are more complicated, especially if the receiver does not have the appropriate project background (why, how, when).  Shared files and chats can help to facilitate processes.  Even better, document your workflows, roles and responsibilities, and follow the agreed-upon processes.

Creativity in a Hybrid World

While relationships, culture, and processes are manageable in remote and dispersed work environments, creativity becomes even more challenging.  Again, tools are available for us to use technology, to share ideas, to capture concepts and activities, and to interact with fellow team members and customers.  I recommend using a facilitator to help your team focus on the work instead of the ever-changing technology.  A group like MAFN (Mid-Atlantic Facilitators Network) can help you find a skilled technical facilitator.  In that way, you can capture creative ideas, without interrupting ideation.

Finally, our approaches to creativity in a hybrid world must take advantage of all we have learned to generate ideas within teams over the years – regardless of technology.  Join me starting on 11 February for a special-request, three-part Creativity Master Class.  Register here.

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Innovation Project Planning

Project planning is a best practice.  We all plan big projects at work that involve construction or R&D effort.  We create project plans when there is a requirement for integration of many functions and the coordination of multiple tasks.

Types of Project Plans

Traditionally, project plans are created based on the scope of work.  We estimate the tasks necessary to complete the project and calculate the duration of each activity.  Next, we assign resources by function and name to each task.  The output is a pre-determined project plan with a critical path of tasks and expected resources that show how quickly the project can be executed.

In an Agile framework, project planning uses progressive elaboration.  As in traditional project planning, we determine a list of requirements upfront.  However, in Scrum (the most common Agile implementation for innovation and tangible new product development, NPD) we determine product features necessary to satisfy the end-user’s application.  A rank-ordered list of features prioritizes project execution based upon developing the most important features first.

Scrum estimates are usually relative and compared to tasks with known duration and cost.  For example T-shirt sizing (small, medium, and large) is a common way of estimating Agile projects.  In this example, relative sizes are based upon known standards and each feature development is estimated relative to that standard. 

Visualizing the Project Plan

In traditional project management, the output is typically a Gantt chart showing task relationships and duration.  The critical path represents all tasks that must be completed on schedule to prevent the entire project schedule from slipping.  These tasks are often resource-constrained, as projects rely on experts to do specialized product development work.  In other cases, vendor-supplied equipment and customer use tests can be limiting factors.

In Scrum, the project schedule is not usually illustrated as a whole.  A product roadmap shows major feature releases for the product, often in conjunction with other products, services, and applications.  Task level planning is done by the team using the prioritized feature list.  Team members score the difficulty (and duration) of tasks needed to complete a specific feature.  A technique called “planning poker” helps the team reach consensus on the “size” of these tasks (e.g. relative sizing of small, medium, or large).

For operational work of the NPD team, a Kanban board (sometimes called a Scrum board) shows tasks assigned to the sprint.  As work is completed during a Sprint, a symbol of the task (usually a short description written on a sticky note) is moved from columns on the Kanban board indicating workto-do, work-in-progress, testing, and completed.

At a higher level, all of the “story points” or scores of the relative estimates for product design are added.  As each feature is completed, its score is subtracted from the total.  Thus the “burndown” chart shows an estimate of work remaining in each Sprint.  The burndown chart may be used in conjunction with the Kanban chart or these tools can be deployed separately.

Adjusting the Project Plan

Of course, no project plan is accurate or perfect.  The minute we put pencil to paper, the schedule is apt to change.  In traditional project management, a Change Control Board reviews major project changes according to the advice of the project manager.  In Scrum (Agile), changes to the project scope are expected, resulting in the iterative nature of the system.  Tasks not completed in one sprint are added to the “backlog” of the next sprint.  This is reflected in a lower-than-planned burndown rate as well as increased work-in-progress on the Kanban board.  NPD teams must be concerned if this backlog is too high.

Planning Projects

Innovation projects, construction projects, and engineering projects all require planning.  We must anticipate the requirements, the schedule, and the cost.  These estimates help decision-makers and project leaders determine investments and to assess tolerable risk levels.  Project plans indicate whether a project can achieve benefits that outweigh costs.

Consider the following elements as you plan your next innovation project:

  • Scope of work,
  • Number and complexity of features,
  • Necessary tasks and activities to do the work,
  • Resources available and skilled to do the work,
  • Realistic project schedules indicating duration (not just effort) of each task,
  • How to assess changes, and
  • Risk management.

Learn More

Project planning is foundational to effective project selection and should be directly linked to Product Portfolio Management for innovation work.  Please join me starting 7 February 2002 for a once-per-year unique opportunity to apply 100 Days to Effective PPM in your teams.  Register here.

If you’re interested in learning more about hybrid project planning (traditional waterfall blended with Agile/Scrum), please join me for WAGILE Product Development on 15 and 17 February 2022.  Register here.