If it did, would that be so bad; isn’t chaos the place where new and great things are discovered?
I think the most difficult thing for a project manager to do when it comes to innovation is let it happen; in a group, someone will always have an idea for improvement. Project managers want to be able to predict the progress of the project to the plan; how can you do that when someone says, “I think I can come up with a better way to do this if you give me some time to investigate.” What goes through your mind? “Yikes, how much time? What is better, anyway? Who do you need how much is it going to cost?”
If you don’t keep that in your mind, you might find yourself killing a great idea with questions.
I managed a series of projects with my last client and by project number four we were pretty set in the routine of what needed to be done, how much it would cost, when we’d be finished. And we were great at delivery, the problem was with one deliverable. The process we used minimized the customer disruption, but still caused disruption, no one was really happy with the outcome. The deliverable required customers to change a code that couldn’t be translated automatically. One of the team members, new to the team for this project, said, “I think I can come up with a better way to do this if you give me some time to investigate.”
If he reads this blog, he’ll recognize the situation. What I’m hoping he won’t recognize is my internal reaction; “What the @@##!!, do you mean? We’re on track, we can’t divert for an idea. And other similar thoughts.”
What I said was something along the lines of, “tell me about it.”
We had a quick discussion and I asked for this information; how long do you need, who do you need, how comfortable are you that this could work.
The result was a solution that resulted in no customer complaints, little manual support, and overall savings of a week of post launch assistance, as well as a reusable solution for future projects. Man, am I glad I had my internal filter running.
So, the tips for this week are,
- Be willing to listen when someone has an idea, it can be someone new to the team, someone on a completely different work stream or any stakeholder who comes up with an idea.
- Try to find the resources to investigate the idea if it has some potential to improve your project.
- Don’t ever think that a solution is perfect; someone will always have an idea to improve it.
Some resources for innovation online,
The always informative and entertaining Tom Peters has a video
An article on developing innovation
Steven Shapiro’s 24/7 innovation site
Tags: ideas, Innovation, solutions
Project team members only innovate and suggest changes to get a reaction out of project managers… the improved customer experience is only a side benefit
Really though, I think you must incorporate time for innovation into a project plan from the start (as you must also do with vacation, downtime, etc…). This could be different for each person on a project and really depends on the culture of the project team/organization so you need to understand this when estimating time for WBS tasks. It is not always going to be perfect, and must be carefully managed.
BTW – happy to see you started a blog… I just came across it and will stop in once in a while!
Thanks, Jeff, did you recognize yourself in the post?
I take no responsibility as there were others pushing this forward, I just helped with the ideas portion (maybe I should read your blame post below?)
In general though, I know I have this type of ‘constantly look for new ways to do things’ personality which can hard for PM’s to manage. You were one of the ones who did this quite well…