By David Stokes, New Product Development and Innovation Professional
OK – so you’ve got some basic process ready for the teams to use. But the project teams are currently flat-out on projects using the old process (or in a lot of cases, no process) – remember the video showing people trying to build the plane as it is flying!
“In-flight” projects, ie: projects that are already underway
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If a project is already a fair way into the project, the last thing they need is to be told they need to go back and redo the process because what they have done does not follow the new process
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Also, the option to telling them that they don’t need to go back, but from this point on they need to follow the process can be problematic, particularly for parts of the process depend on things being done earlier on in the process, which of course haven’t been done because they were following the old process (or no process!)
Firstly, make it known that all new projects from that point on will need to follow the new process. And be selective on which in-flight projects you choose – only if they have started only very recently and would not suffer if there were a couple of things they need to do to be using the new process.
Immersion workshops
For those first few projects, the process is going to be new for everyone. Also, the process you’ve come up with hasn’t been used yet and may need some refinement as any issues are identified. So, give those project teams enough help and support to learn about the new process. Some training wouldn’t go amiss here, giving people an understanding of the benefits of the process as well as what that process is. You are going to be putting some people outside of their comfort zone, so help them as much as you can. We used something we called immersion workshops where for those first few projects, we had sessions to take them through the process they are about to use and give them some hand’s-on help to get up and running.
Once those project team members start using the process and get more familiar with it, they end up working on other projects where some of the team members might not used the process yet and they can help the others. So, everything going well, as time goes by, more and more people will become familiar with and used the process. But make sure that for those first few projects, they have a “good experience” of the new process – it makes it really difficult if people have some bad experiences and then start telling everyone else about their problems. People will then be very wary of using the new process......
What is the new process?
So you’ve come up with this new process, but if people can’t easily find it, eg: information about it, templates, etc, then certain people may just give up trying to find it. Making the process and the necessary things that they need to use easily accessible is important. So get it up on a common shared drive or even better, an intranet website where everyone knows they can go to get information about the process.
Anyway, that enough for today.
Happy hunting!
