Innovation portfolio planning — from a Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan interview (here) on The McKinsey Quarterly site (registration required) — starts with a plan to build capabilities (earlier post here). Of course, building these capabilities require projects and programs.
Once you’ve designed your master plan, you can launch a series of initiatives aimed at achieving your goals…. The thing that really stops innovation is risk. CEOs can be terrified of organizational disruption because it can put at risk a company’s ability to meet quarterly earnings, which in turn is often what causes CEOs to lose their jobs. So part of what you need is a bridge so that they can be innovative but also keep their jobs.
The addition of program and project portfolio standards to the PMI standards inventory has been welcome. The PM community needs to master these disciplines in order to drive good practices like the stage gate approach Bryan outlines below:
[S]tage-gate your investments in organizational innovation, [so] you can first learn what works and then scale it, without taking excessive risk. None of us are smart enough to see in advance the ultimate answer, because the real answer lies in discovering the operating detail to make new ideas work in practice. You can see the broad directions, but you… can’t even understand the secondary and third-level consequences of the design decisions you make. Those have to be discovered through trial and error.
Filed under: Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Organizational Change Management, Performance Management, PMO, Portfolio Management, Program Management, Project Management, Strategy Management | Tagged: capability building, Gary Hamel, Lowell Bryan, stage gates, The McKinsey Quarterly | 1 Comment »