What is Project Management doing up with Innovation?

Now that you are convinced that innovation is a key to maintaining success in your business, you need to think about how to give actual substance to an innovative idea.

For a new idea to get the original spark to the actual realization of financial and strategic results, there are three aspects to consider:

• The idea itself, it is really innovative, feasible.
• Timing. — a good idea with wrong timing would lead to failure.
• Execution of such idea; It is not enough to generate a brilliant idea at the right time with the right context, you need to transform that idea into a concrete product that your target customer will adopt without doubts.

Different approaches to Project Management describe a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to design, execute and control the development of a unique product, service or result. That makes Project Management a powerful lever to transform an inspiration from the world of ideas into a tangible reality.

We are talking about applying methodologies (Prince2 , PRiSM, PM2) or best practices like PMBOK, that is, structured processes and knowledge, to an innovative environment. But innovation and new ideas arise in an ever-changing context, while methodology relates to the systematic application of methods to a field of study.

How can we apply so structured approaches to solve situations that were not even imagined when such procedures were designed? Do we face a problem?

In a typical problem-solving situation, we shall retrieve previously learned knowledge and apply it under these new or varying circumstances. Using previously learned information will prevent us starting from scratch by reviewing current approaches and lessons learned, applying those approaches to analogous situations, and continue so to design the solution for this current problem. However, the situation is far from idyllic; Innovation is framed into what is known a VUCA environment (AKA Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous situation).

In addition to being focused on creating something new, Project Management can conveniently address the challenges of those four fickle features of a VUCA environment.

Let´s see if we can do it:

Uncertainty. — This is a recurrent feature that appears in any project and in general, is mainly coped by planning and specifically through risk management.

Just two tokens: In the case of the PMBOK, up to 22 processes are enlisted in the Group of Processes for Planning; that makes about 50% of the total number of processes. Plus, there is an entire Knowledge Area devoted to risk management. Risk understood as “an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs has a positive or negative impact on one or more project objectives such as scope, schedule, cost, and quality.” ISO organization has a specific standard for risk management: ISO 31000, as well that is being applied in projects. So, Project Management provides sufficient means to face uncertainty.

Volatility. — When you manage projects, one of the first lessons you learn is that “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy”. No matter how hard did you worked on details for planning, once execution started, uncountable issues arose that force you to modify the original plan. Being aware of this, most of the approaches to Project Management count with a complete set of processes for monitoring and control every possible aspect of the project, compare with the original plan and apply necessary measures to retain project under control.

Complexity. — I don´t think this is an issue for Project Management approaches. Most of the Methodologies and/or best practices available are well versed on tools for coping with complexity, especially those related to Scope (WBS) and time (Sequencing, scheduling,…)

Ambiguity. — Not to be confused with uncertainty; traditional Project Management approaches are analyzing every angle of uncertainty. Ambiguity relates to having more than one meaning for some situation/concept or to the possibility to understand a phenomenon in more than one way.

Ambiguity, as uncertainty, is a source of deviation in projects. Deviations are identified through Monitoring and Control processes and are neutralized by issuing change requests that must follow an integrated change control processes in order to maintain consistency within the project. QED

This was the easy part of the game, though necessary to justify application of PM approaches; the hardest arises now that we must decide which tools and techniques will help us to identify such deviations and consequently analyze, consider impact on each knowledge area, design solutions, request changes and decide how to proceed with those requests.

But this would be a good topic for a further post.