Leading and Managing Innovation

What Every Executive Team Must Know about Project, Program, and Portfolio Management, Second Edition

Russell D. Archibald, Shane Archibald

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138440265
• eBook ISBN: 9781351727419
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

The primary cause of many project failures is that responsible executives, because of their lack of knowledge in project management, fail to demand that their managers and staff properly utilize the well-proven best practices, processes, systems, and tools that are now available in this field. This book remedies this situation by providing executives at all levels with the understanding and knowledge needed to best take advantage of the power of effective project management and thereby lead and manage innovations within their enterprise.

In Leading and Managing Innovation: What Every Executive Team Must Know about Project, Program, and Portfolio Management, Second Edition, the authors present concise descriptions of

• The key concepts underlying project and program management
• The important characteristics of projects and programs
• How projects and programs are best governed and managed
• How to determine if the desired benefits have actually been achieved

The book presents a list of 31 reasonable demands that executives can and must place on their staff members to ensure excellence in the way their programs and projects are created, selected for funding, planned, and executed. Placing these demands communicates to the entire enterprise that top management understands what it takes to achieve the best performance possible and fully supports the continuous improvement needed to ensure continued success.

Leading and Managing Innovation explains how to measure the project management maturity level of an enterprise, benchmark against competitors, and identify where project management improvements are required. It discusses the many ways that an enterprise can derive substantial success and competitive advantage from increasing its project management maturity level.

A helpful quick reference summary of all of the book's key information is included in the final chapter. Armed with this information, you will be well-qualified to give excellent direction to your managers and staff to ensure that your vital capability in the field of project management—and how you manage innovation—is equal to or better than that of your competitors.

Chapter 1

Innovations Are Achieved through Projects

Importance of Innovation

Innovation is the process that transforms new ideas into commercial or other value. It is a vital capability in business, entrepreneurship, design, technology of all kinds, health care, engineering, construction, manufacturing, transportation, communications, economics, sociology—and project management.

Innovation means change—something new and improved—in (1) a business or creative process and/or (2) the output or product of a process. Forward-looking executives want and encourage their managers to be innovative and to continually improve their processes, products, and services.

Innovate or die! In this Digital Age of technological explosion in every field: all types of human organizations must continually innovate to improve and change both their products and services (their reason to exist) and also the ways they operate—their business processes.

Continual innovation in both of these dimensions is required for continued success.

Innovation is:

• Vital to all organizations.

• Accomplished through projects and programs.

All Executives need to know what is in this book to:

• Govern and manage innovation.

• Effectively direct the project management function.

Innovate and succeed!

Systemic versus Incremental Innovation

Systemic innovation differs from incremental innovation, which can be accomplished within a single firm context or within a discrete project context.

Prieto (2011) points out that “Systemic innovation is that form of innovation that requires ‘multiple specialist firms to change their process in a coordinated fashion.’”^*

“Examples of systemic innovation in the engineering and construction industry include:

■ Integrated supply chain management.

■ Prefabrication of building systems.

■ 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) virtual design and construction tools.

■ Building Information Models (BIMs).

■ Project Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and Public Private Partnerships (PPPs).

■ Modularization.

Many of these are characteristic of successful large programs.”

Prieto refers to systemic innovation in the largest industry in the world, the engineering construction industry. In the United States this industry accounts for 9% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Systemic innovation is also required in large, multinational companies as well as in large governmental agencies.

In smaller organizations systemic innovation can also produce useful results, but it is more likely that incremental innovation is more frequently used in most situations.

Creativity and Innovation

Innovation obviously depends on creative ideas. This book does not explore the sources of new ideas but rather focuses on how to transform those ideas into desirable benefits.

As Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers state in the introduction to their 1989 book, Creativity in Business: “One of the main problems in U.S. business today is that there are too many ideas, not too few. Dozens of solutions appear and disappear in chaotic piles of data, crowds of expert opinion, and a jumble of contradictory statistics and reports on every aspect of every issue. The pressure of limited time is increased by indecision and, beneath it all, the nagging suspicion that others will find your efforts insufficient and the results poor.”

Innovation means change:

• In a business or process.

• In the output or product of the process.

All Significant Innovations Are Achieved through Projects

We hope to persuade the reader of this book that this is a valid statement. When that persuasion occurs, then it is obvious that all executives in every kind of human enterprise need to know the characteristics of projects and how best to govern and manage projects, programs, and their portfolios.

Some notable characteristics of innovation are:

■ The starting point for innovation is the generation of creative ideas. Innovation is the process of taking those ideas to market or to usefulness.

■ Innovation concerns the search for and the discovery, experimentation, development, imitation, and adoption of new products and services, new processes, and new organizational arrangements.

■ Innovation is the conversion of knowledge and ideas into a benefit, which may be for commercial use or for the public good; the benefit may be new or improved products, processes, or services.

■ Innovation is the process that transforms ideas into commercial value.

■ Innovation = Invention + Exploitation.

The generally accepted definition of a project is “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.”^* Programs are “a group of related projects,”^† but in recent years the concept of strategic transformational programs^‡ includes both projects and operations (or other activities) within their scope.

A Project is:

A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.

A Program is:

A group of related projects.

A project is the best—perhaps only—method of achieving innovation

Structured, Well-Managed Innovation

The alternative of simply throwing an idea on the table at a staff meeting and seeing if anyone will start making it happen will not get the job done.

Innovation begins in every case with an idea generated by an individual, or sometimes by a small group of people collaborating to solve a problem, to develop a new product or service, or create and satisfy a customer need.

Transforming that idea into the reality of something new—a new or improved process, service, or product, or even a new enterprise—is rarely, if ever, the result of one person’s effort, even though one person will lead the effort as the project manager.

This transformation requires a structured approach to bring together all the skills and other resources needed in a structured team and to define the resulting project or service in terms of its objectives, scope, cost and other resources, and its schedule for completion.

Project Management at the Basic Level:

• Uses a structured approach.

• Brings together all the skills and resources needed.

• Defines the Project in terms of objectives, scope, cost, resources, and schedule.

• Delivers the intended results and value.

This is project management at the basic level.

Steve Jobs, the Computer Mouse, and Innovation through Project Management

Thirty-four years ago Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh computer with the mouse. Jobs is a great example of an effective innovator and project manager—even though he was sometimes described as tyrannical and cruel to many on his staff—and also a genius.

In fact, Jobs was truly Apple’s Chief Projects Officer (CPO) (discussed in Chapters 2 and 5).

The transformational innovation of the computer mouse (with several other innovations introduced in the Macintosh at the same time) was not invented by Jobs, however.

As reported by Gladwell^* (2011), Engelbart had the mouse idea, which was then developed by Xerox PARC up to a point, and then made practical and marketable by Jobs and Apple Computer with the help of an industrial design firm and a creative team of people within Apple.

The computer mouse development and market introduction exemplifies the need for effective project management when it comes to implementing innovation.

Gladwell’s 2011 article in The New Yorker magazine is titled “Creation Myth—Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Truth about Innovation,” and the truth he presents is this: it takes a project with a good project manager to achieve significant innovation.

Sometimes Innovation Involves Multiple Parties and Steps:

• Engelbart had the idea.

• Xerox PARC developed the idea.

• Jobs “finished the job” with the help of an industrial firm and internal design team.

How DARPA and Google Achieve Significant Innovations

“Over the past 50 years, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has produced an unparalleled number of breakthroughs. Arguably, it has the longest-standing, most consistent track record of radical invention in history. Its innovations include the Internet; Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) computing; global positioning satellites; stealth technology; unmanned aerial vehicles, or ‘drones’; and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMSs), which are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Innovations Are Achieved through Projects
• 2 The Essence of the Key Project Management Concepts
• 3 Categories and Characteristics of Projects
• 4 Project Portfolio Management
• 5 Project Management Offices (PMOs)
• 6 Managing Individual Projects
• 7 What Executives Must Demand to Achieve Effective Project Management
• 8 Maturity of Organizations in Project Management
• 9 Development of the Profession of Project Management
• 10 Summary: What All Executives Need to Know
• Appendix: Project Manager Duties and Responsibilities
• References
• Index
• About the Authors