Cracking your next product implementation
Posted by Grant Brewer on 30 May 2007
The strategy development and the design of products or services has been completed. Now onto your next leadership challenge: surviving a successful product launch. Surviving is a good choice of words, because product or service development and the subsequent implementation can be a real challenge. Often, the organisations focus on the product design and development because this is seen to be the innovative and glamorous process. This is at the expense of the good product implementation, without which a good idea never sees the light of day.
Any project to implement a new product is going to be a challenge, will suffer changing requirements and hostile deadlines. Good managers know that this is a reality, yet understand how to manage the expectations and demands so that the collective effort results in a better product or services for the business and its customers.
The strategy development and the design of products or services has been completed. Now onto your next leadership challenge: surviving a successful product launch. Surviving is a good choice of words, because product or service development and the subsequent implementation can be a real challenge. Often, the organisations focus on the product design and development because this is seen to be the innovative and glamorous process. This is at the expense of the good product implementation, without which a good idea never sees the light of day.
Good implementation teams have all the characteristics of good business teams: they communication, they have a sense of belonging, they collectively have the right skills for the job whilst playing to the skills of each individual, et cetera. So what else should you think about to create a high-performance implementation team?
Plan, plan plan. You can almost never plan enough. A product implementation is a project: it should have a clear end point. Somewhere between a quarter to a third of your project time may be spent planning. Planning happens on many dimensions and should go beyond a list of tasks and deadline dates except on the most straight forward projects. The key in the planning it to get the right people doing the right things at the right time. Planning can be a very innovative process itself. Finding creative ways to get the job done efficiently and rapidly is as much an art as a science. One common trap to avoid is to allow the team to become too focused on the software tools. These applications are powerful and can make great planning easier, but they are only support tools. Planning is what people do – no project software will resolve the difficult conflicts of interests, goals and personalities that challenge implementation projects.
Get the requirements & objectives clear. Lack of common and clear objectives is one of the major reasons why projects fail – one group of people think it has been a success and another (usually more senior executives and project sponsors) think it has failed because they are measuring success against a different expectation. So it absolutely vital that there the correct executive is sponsoring the product implementation and that all the necessary support and resources are made available to the project team.
A clear sponsor or product owner should also be capable of making key decisions so that implementation tasks don’t stop pending decisions. Similarly, the objectives should be clear and reasonably static so that the product implementation project has a consistent end point. Many implementation projects struggle to complete successfully because the goal posts are always moving. As executives see one set of project features they start adding ideas and requirements. If these new ideas are not managed carefully they risk derailing a successful implementation. It is important to understand that these new ideas should be managed and not rejected. Every project today is going to have changing requirements so the idea of change needs to be embraced rather than rejected. However, the good implementation teams understand how to deal with the ever-changing requirements and are better at managing the new ideas into the project pipeline. This results in executives that feel that their ideas are being incorporated into the project, but that also understand the trade offs required to prioritise one set of features over another. The key is account for the implications of change in the project plans and activities, and to make people accountable for the changes that they create. For example: “That is a good idea. We can build that into the point of sale experience in time for the launch if we move something of similar complexity out. What would you suggest we delay in order to make time for this idea?”
Keep reminding your teams, sponsors and executives that projects operate under a simple set of constraints. The quality of the work done needs to matched against the costs and the time taken to implement. These constraints act to limit how many product features can be implemented in any given time and budget without lowering the quality of the end product. Realism is an important characteristic often absent from implementation project plans and the subsequent status meetings. Quality should also be seen in quite a broad light, particularly in product implementations. Quality is not only about the quality of the actual tangible product, but also about the training that makes staff capable of selling or servicing products. It is also about the overall organisational capability to delivery on the brand promise associated with the product and the alignment between a new product and other products or liens of business. An integrated business approach that enables the best customer experience is what you’re after and that doesn’t come by forsaking quality in order to implement sooner or at a lower cost.
Measure success. This implies that both the team and executive sponsors agree on a set of objectives. The key is to share the objectives and measures of success – have them printed and hang them on the wall, or add them to all project status reports. Having the goals in the public (within the organisation) creates opportunities for feedback where someone disagrees. An extension of measuring progress against the goals is to communicate. Almost every Strategym column has suggested that leaders communicate more and that they do so in a continuous conversational style. The same applies in product implementations.
It is open, honest and transparent communication that will ensure that the implementation project is well understood and doesn’t surprise executives or other project teams. Although a products features could surprise, its implementation shouldn’t be full of surprises – good or bad. Remind yourself not to rely only on email. Make communication a personal experience, so walk the project corridors even when it seems to be taking up too much time. Email isn’t always the time saver it seems!
Any project to implement a new product is going to be a challenge, will suffer changing requirements and hostile deadlines. Good managers know that this is a reality, yet understand how to manage the expectations and demands so that the collective effort results in a better product or services for the business and its customers.
Cracking your next product implementation was published in Intelligence Magazine as Strategym #49 in June 2007.
Categories
Essays | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
Tags
implementation (10) | product strategy (2) | operations (2) | product design (1) | high performance (1)
Trackbacks
Comments
-
27 June
2007Hello Grant. My name is Cat – Catherine. Perhaps you remember me from Greenside? My e-mail is .
— Posted by Cat
-
13 August
2007Yip — I remember. Catch me on facebook.
— Posted by Grant
The trackback URL for this entry is http://grantbrewer.com/trackback/13/VPdaK7Fd/