Monthly Archives: July 2009

Innovation

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Innovators are, above all, problem solvers.  They don’t sit in front of a workbench and say ‘I wonder what will happen if I add this widget to this whatsit – Oh look a self-sealing-stembolt!’  (There are people who do that – they’re called research scientists and 99% of the time they are just proving that widget plus whatsit = deadend.  That’s a valuable part of the process of understanding our world and when it does lead to something that works it can be earth shattering but it’s a very inefficient way to innovate.)

Innovators see problems in the world around them all the time. They see the status quo as something to be challenged and improved upon rather than something to be accepted and put up with. They see a need, have an idea of how to combine matter and energy to fill that need AND they are also able to implement it.  Inventors create stuff – innovators make things change.

A great way to kick off your innovation process is to attend my one day workshop, Frameworks for Innovation.  This highly interactive and intensive course can also be tailored to suit your particular needs.

My role in the innovation process can include:

  • helping you generate new ideas with the tools and methods used by world class companies;
  • working with you to refine your vision into a purpose that can be shared with your customers, your stakeholders and your team;
  • managing the process of developing detailed requirements and plans including functional and non-functional specifications, tender documentation, establishing milestones and decision gateways and communications planning;
  • co-ordinating the timely delivery of your requirements through your team, your contractors and your suppliers;
  • pro-actively managing risks and issues as they arise and ensuring that you have all the information you need to choose from alternative courses of action;
  • providing quality assurance for you through testing and regular reviews;
  • ensuring that your innovation is implemented when and how you want and that it delivers the expected results.

New Technology

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From the business (ie non-technical) perspective the introduction of new technology should be a symmetrical process.

symetrical IT project process

The process should include all of the following stages:

  1. Vision – what the business will achieve through the technology.
  2. Business Requirements – what the business actually wants to do with the technology.
  3. Functional Specification – a translation of step 2 into terms describing what the technology needs to do in order to enable the business to do what it needs to do.
  4. Technical Specification – a translation of step 3 into what specific technology will be used for each element.
  5. Building – assembling all the software and hardware described in step 4 into a system.
  6. System Testing – testing that all the software and hardware does what was described in step 3, individually and all together and fixing as necessary.
  7. User Acceptance Testing – testing that the business can do what was defined in step 2 and fixing as necessary.
  8. Implementation & Review- implementing then assessing whether the business is achieving what was defined in step 1.

Project cost and time over-runs, failure to acheive expected benefits and general dissatisfaction with new technology are often a result of a failure to fully complete one of these steps.

Managing Change

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It’s impossible for business change to be wholly confined to systems and processes – people are always involved too and therein lies the key difference between project or programme management and change management.  The first two are primarily concerned with delivering tangible changes while the later is focussed on enabling the people impacted to accept, adapt and take ownership of their new environment.

Resisting change is a part of being human, we all opt for the familiar and secure over the unknown and high risk most of the time. Change = Risk. Individuals are naturally risk averse or risk seeking to different degrees and that’s something that a change manager can’t do anything about.  So to manage change effectively we need to use other, more accessible levers.

In order for change to achieve the desired results each individual involved must

  • be dissatisfied with how things are right now
  • share a vision of what things can be like in the future
  • understand the first, concrete steps that they can take towards that vision

AND

  • the product of all of these three must outweigh the individual’s resistance to change.

This is the Gleicher formula (usually written as: D x V x F > R where D = Dissatisfaction, V = Vision, F = First steps and R = Resistance) which is one of the fundamental theories of change management.