Oct 24, 2010 | Collaboration, Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy
Creating and managing a development portfolio is a critical factor in the success of most commercial enterprises, but one that is done poorly in many I have seen. Some recent with a client struggling with the challenge for his organization served to clarify my thoughts, and assisted his organisation to develop a portfolio discipline that appears to be working well.
Success is much more than just using a few tools, of which there are many, it is about how the enterprise at its core deals with ambiguity, trade-offs, and the challenge of being frustrated and wrong a lot of the time, whilst being sufficiently resilient to keep on batting, and batting hard. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind” and nothing creates chance like persistence tempered with learning from each experience.
Below are some of the things that appear to me to be of importance
- Have a clear strategy. Without a clearly articulated business strategy that has commitment from those responsible for implementation, how can you possibly have a Product development and commercialization portfolio with any hope of success?
- Self awareness. Know what you do not know as well as what you do know, and where the knowledge about what you do not know may reside, particularly if it is with a competitor.
- Externalities. Understand the forces driving developments that may create opportunities in the industries you target, and the commercial and competitive imperatives that drive the decision making of individual customers and potential customers in those industries.
- People. Have access to great people, both internal and external in a variety of ways to extract a range of informed views and data upon which to build a case. Use the emerging communication tools to link these people and leverage their knowledge and experience
- Sponsorship. Ensure there is a senior level executive sponsor for each project that emerges from the pack. This person should have the passion, knowledge and position to carry the case for resource allocation, risk management, and strategic fit to the senior decision maker in the enterprise.
- Endless polishing. Keep polishing the portfolio, it will never be a completed exercise, it is a live entity always, and needs TLC. Part of the polishing is creation of a “carpark” which captures ideas, issues, technologies, and all the sometimes random stuff that can create that “Eureka” moment when things suddenly come together in a new way. Revisit the carpark regularly.
- PDCA. Be prepared to experiment, trial, look for insights, learn by doing, but be aggressive about performance, and relegation and promotion to and from the carpark, and further through the development process, and learn from all that experience.
- Customers. Engage customers as early and as often as possible, after all, they are the ones whose problems your product is supposed to solve, and they are usually full of problems and improvement ideas, some of which may be of value to you.
- Dare to be different. No successful new product did the job just the same as something that already exists, that is just a price-fight, differentiation is fundamental to success.
- NPD is everybody’s job. Product development and idea evolution happens holistically, not by functional line, and it must be a priority for every stakeholder in and around the enterprise, not just something that requires attendance by the marketing personnel at a meeting every second Tuesday at 10am .
There you go, sounds pretty easy!
Oct 21, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership, Strategy
Achieving transparency is at the core of a lot of what I do in the fields of demand chain development, strategic alignment, and mentoring leaders. Transparency enables emerging problems and issues to be identified, and addressed quickly, efficiently, and with a minimum of waste in the process, and for opportunities to be grabbed.
However, the downside that sometimes evolves, particularly in closely defined cultures, is that it also enables blame to be pinned on an individual or team, and this is hugely counter productive.
Once transparency is used as a finger pointing exercise, it will not get a second chance, as people learn quickly that it will be counter productive to bring problems to the notice of others, when they run a risk of being the messenger that gets shot.
Oct 20, 2010 | Management, Operations, Personal Rant
If you ever needed a lesson in the pitfalls of negotiating under pressure, take a look at the mess created by the agreement of the terms of the revised Mining Resources Rent Tax between the large miners, and the Federal government . If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny.
In simple terms, the deal which set MRRT rates was with the Federal government, but the states own the resources, and already do, and will continue to levy, a royalty payment on tonnes extracted.
The miners thought the MRRT rate was inclusive of any increase by the states in Royalties, so they had a reliable ceiling on the total tax paid, the Feds say no such condition was agreed, and the states are cash strapped, and looking for revenue, where better than the miners in a boom.
All parties stuffed up royally by making assumptions in a pressure cooker negotiation, and not articulating them in the discussions, and written agreement.
This is easy to do under pressure, but these guys are supposed to be experts, so it is unbelievable that such a basic oversight occurred. The lesson is that whatever you do, take some time away from the scramble and pressure of “completing” a negotiation before an agreement is executed to ensure all the bases are covered.
Oct 19, 2010 | Customers, Leadership, Management, Marketing
The scary thing about competition is that someone always loses, even if it is only an opportunity. Many would like to believe that we should all be friends together to save the pain, but outside the public sector, it does not happen like that.
Successfully competing is down to delivering superior value to customers at a cost less than the customers best alternative. To do that in this connected world where transaction costs are disappearing the whole enterprise needs to be focused on what it is that the customer values.
Sounds pretty simple, but how rarely I see it
Oct 18, 2010 | Management
The corporate obsession with planning, appropriate in principal often becomes just an exercise in managed optimism.
Many times I have witnessed, and been party to budgeting and planning sessions that are driven by a notion that all the bad stuff that has happened this year will not happen next year, and that the stars are at last aligned to a give us a “big one”, the bad stuff is behind us. This may sometimes be right, but other bad stuff usually takes the place of last years bad stuff, but we seem to be able to often tell ourselves that it won’t.
We often spend so much unproductive time planning — read kidding ourselves, that we get nothing useful done. A mate of mine, Tony Cassone has a truism he has been shouting for as long as I have known him, “son, you get one out of 10 for talking, the other 9 is for doing”
Once again, Tom Fishburne nails this tendency to corporate rose colored glasses with his biting “waterfall planning” cartoon.
