I spoke at a conference recently that focused on building project management competency. The theme of the event was Energize, Transform, Succeed. It was a high energy and engaging time.
The topic of my presentation was “Why Great Projects Fail: How to Move Your Team from Concept to Concrete Results Every Time.” One of the questions I enjoyed asking these professionals was about where the processes that they depend on for their day-to-day work break down. You see, as much as we’d like to have a universal process, the truth is this: the tools you utilize daily were built for the current business scenario. For example, many firms have “templates” for running the financials on a given project, but rarely does the person who inputs that data realize what the template is based on and when it might give inaccurate results.
The actual answer to the question I posed to the group is that, for most firms, their templates work great for incremental projects that utilize similar resources to produce an outcome for a known distribution channel. But when we take on a new opportunity that flows outside these boundaries, we need tools that are set up to capture the uniqueness and opportunity.
In short, our core tool box has blind spots built in – and we can easily miss them.
Why we Build for the Known Unknowns
It is simply human nature to build processes and activity that serve the core business. The core business is set up to both optimize what it does and eliminate waste, and most “out of the box” projects take the business in a direction that is inefficient during exploration.
The opportunity and the dilemma comes in when we do something for a new customer group. When we grab our usual “tool belt,” it has many “rules of thumb” that will keep us from exploring potentially profitable areas, or lead us to overinvest without good data on what the real issues are.
How do we get big investments in things that flop? This happens when the core firm assumes its internal “engine” will always get good results – leaving us with things like Google Glass or an Amazon Fire phone.
There are a long list of products and services like these that were built by quality firms using great processes that missed their market goals badly (see link here).
Finding the Unknown Unknowns
When we are working outside our firm’s core, we are taking on much more risk than meets the eye. In addition to the first order risks (those that are directly traceable using our standard thinking), there are “interaction” risks. Interaction means two or more seemingly small items
combining to create a major issue client side. Unfortunately, we see these in the market frequently, and when they happen and are found in retrospect, they always look obvious. In reality, however, they are anything but obvious.
For example, with people enjoying the aesthetic and lightweight feel of carbon fiber components, there has been a massive uptick in their usage in cars, motorcycles and bicycles. Carbon fiber parts are strong and light, but there can be a serious downside to using these components as well: users need to keep them free from nicks and scratches that can cause the structural parts to fail catastrophically (see article here). These same knicks and scratches would be no big deal if the part were steel or aluminum.
So How do we Find These Areas?
Let me offer three points to get you started.
1) Use a process that takes you into the unknown unknowns
I have built a stage into the STRIDE process specifically designed to find the interactions. We call this phase “reality” and utilize a design of experiments approach to not only find first order, but also second order effects. In the “R” phase we take the known risks and do specifically designed experiments to find hidden risks and new data. This structured learning systematically reduces the firm’s exposure.
2) Utilize experts from outside your domain
When we are working the reality zone, we are sure to include subject matter experts from outside the firm to review, and if possible, handle and install our prototypes. It is amazing how much you can learn from five minutes of observation with a skilled person who is an expert from another business. The fresh insights developed by someone asking basic but important questions never fails to yield new and important insight.
3) Make your first field deployment contained with a knowing test client
Having a client partner that is knowledgeable in sorting out new designs is an invaluable element of getting to market well. I recommend you work out a joint test plan using Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FEMA) that explores all the key elements of reasonable real world applications.
I hope this article has helped you think through the risks and rewards of releasing new-to-the-world products and services. If you would like to talk more about how to robustly engineer and establish new offerings, please feel free to reach out to me. You can either set an appointment using this link or give me a call at 847-651-1014.
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