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The Evolution of Project Ideas: From Survival to Innovation

December 24, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Miscellaneous

The Evolution of Project Ideas: From Survival to Innovation
By Christopher Butcher

We’ve all been there: a senior executive who has the power to make your life miserable e-mails you at 3:00 a.m. and has an “idea,” like adding a blog to the Web site, integrating some new piece of data from one place to another, implement SharePoint, whatever. Regardless, it’s going to be a lot of work.

What do we do? We want to be innovative, but this just looks like a headache…

Most of us have developed survival strategies that look something like this:

  • Ask questions that you know will cause the person to lose interest in the project
  • Schedule the project when your resources “have time” (which is never)
  • Write a lengthy e-mail in response explaining what might be involved in pursuing the idea, knowing that the person will fall out of their chair in boredom well before they finish and will rapidly move on to other tasks
  • Submit an outrageous off-the-cuff budget and time line and hope they don’t approve it

The end result of these strategies is that as IT decision-makers, we end up picking and choose the ideas that are most appealing to us for whatever reason: we like the technology, we believe it is feasible, or we happen to be in a good mood when the idea crosses our desk.

Let’s be clear: those are survival mechanisms, not innovation strategies. As IT decision-makers, we need to embrace innovation. Dismissing ideas may make our lives easier in the short term, it leaves your organization open to the criticism of being opposed to innovation. In the worst case scenario, you will be seen as lazy, uncooperative, and incompetent. At best, you save the organization time and money by not wasting your time, but you fail at the critical task of promoting innovation and technology acceptance. Given the pace and possibilities of new technology and your role as a gatekeeper, this is a perilous place to be.

An innovation strategy differs from the survival mechanism in that it allows you to both promote and manage ideas. We promote ideas because we never know where the source of innovation is going to be. Good ideas can come from executives, business process owners, and just people who want to do their jobs a little better.

The key to an innovation strategy is to have a systematic way of handling all ideas that cross your desk. Implementing an innovation strategy requires an understanding of the lifecycle of an idea. Structurally, an idea starts with a thought and ends with a project. We can flesh out the stages of evolution of an idea with a few more details as follows:

Stage 1 Idea

  1. An idea is proposed
  2. An idea is evaluated
  3. An idea either becomes an initiative or is parked

Stage 2 Initiative

  1. The initiative is defined
  2. The initiative is evaluated
  3. The initiative becomes a project or is parked

Stage 3 Project

  1. The project is defined
  2. The project is executed
  3. The project is evaluated

Each of these stages and steps can be defined to a high degree of precision. The granularity of your definition depends upon a variety of factors, including the size of your organization, the availability of staff to evaluate ideas, your technical infrastructure, and the general pace of the organization.

Christopher Butcher is Principal and Chief Technology Officer at Heuristic Solutions, a software consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia. In addition to leading the technical direction at Heuristic Solutions, Mr. Butcher serves as a virtual chief information officer (vCIO) at a variety of organizations. His focus has been on aligning information technology projects to the strategic objectives of organizations. Mr. Butcher maintains a professional blog about information technology governance, the CIO Code.

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