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 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 12, 2010 | Change, Leadership
Creating change in any organisation is a huge challenge to the capacity of an organsations leadership. Over many years of assisting in all sorts of projects, I observe it often tends to become overly complicated, perhaps over-intellectualised, so I have a simple 3 part framework that seems to work, and when a project wavers, it offers a grounding.
- Determine and articulate what needs to change, and why
- Agree and clearly communicate what it needs to change to, and what the end point looks like
- Build a program based on 1 and 2 against which you can drive the change, and measure progress.
This framework appears to work as well for a small change to a part of a processing line to an organisation wide culture change.
However, the danger is that the change by threes approach is inconsistent with the need to embed a hunger for continuous improvement which is a journey for which there is no end point, into the culture, so leadership is crucial.
Oct 10, 2010 | Leadership, Management, Strategy
This is a term I commonly use to describe a management style that I believe delivers the best results to any enterprise.
In one sense, central management is loose, against a clearly articulated and understood strategic purpose, it allows line management to make decisions, determine activity priorities, encourages mistakes by enabling calculated risk taking, experimentation, and just getting things done that delivers value to customers.
On the other hand, management is very tight, there is a rigorous planning and risk management regime that does not weed out risk, but exposes it to scrutiny, there is a culture of quantification, but equally, recognising not everything, particularly new stuff can be easily quantified, and there is a deep commitment to continuous improvement, and all its associated disciplines.
In these circumstances, creativity will flouish without losing sight of the main game, but it calls for the enterprise leadership to give up a key attraction for many leaders, using the office to get people to do whay you say on a daily basis.
Oct 5, 2010 | Change, Communication, Leadership, Sales
Trying to get stakeholder buy-in for an idea that breaks the mould is very hard in most organisations as it challenges the dominating logic of the organisation, what has succeeded in the past, and made it what it is today.
This process can be helped by breaking the internal selling process into two parts:
- Gain understanding of the idea from a “technical” perspective, the what and why, to ensure the facts are clear, understood, and acknowledged.
- Then, seek to address the cognitive issues, the “do you agree with it” things, but having gained an agreement of the technical aspects, the “do you understand it” issues, it is much harder for someone to disagree when all is left is the emotive stuff.
