Innovation project Management

As far as I have experienced, Innovation cannot be successful without being structured as a Project. Companies can develop their day-to-day activities in a fuctional way, this is, each department just doing their job and a manager that integrates the activity of all these departments.

But innovation projects (which are, as I already commented in some other article, the ones that are going to guarantee the market position of the company in a long-term basis)must be structured as projects.

A project can be defined as a group of activities developed in a concrete period of time using several resources and oriented to get determined objectives and results.

There is a lot of Project Management bibliography, but when we talk about small projects there are three phases one has to consider:

DEFINITION AND PLANNING PHASE, oriented to clearly define the objectives of the project and the results expected (which are not usually the same: a project can be “develop a new service”, and results expected could be “enter a new market segment” or “increase sales”), the deliverables that will generate the project, the management structure, the project team and the project planning, once a business case has proved that the project makes sense for our organization.

PROJECT CONTROL AND FOLLOW-UP PHASE, mainly including activities like risk and problem management, change management, documentation management and (last but no least) financing and economical management.

CLOSING PHASE, basically oriented to analyse the project profitability, to prepare knowledge transfer and to evaluate the performance of people in the project.

Common sense is key for project success (just like for any other business activity), but it is amazing the amount of innovation projects launched by companies without a business plan to support them. Let’s start by planning and a lot of money and emotional pain will be avoided!