So how much time do you think your new product projects spend waiting on resources and management attention? What if you found out that, even ignoring evenings and weekends, your projects spend 50% or more of their time waiting?
Recently over a cup of coffee, a coaching client of mine explained how he found himself in that exact situation. He analyzed several projects, and what he discovered provides a masterclass in the pitfalls of innovation project management.
The Hidden Cost of “Glacial Innovation”
“Mike, I’ve got to tell you what just happened with a post-mortem we did on several key projects that we struggled to finish last year. I was absolutely shocked by what we found.
Initially, I was encouraged to see that the amount of work charged against each lined up pretty well with the estimates,” he said while fiddling with the paper jacket on his cup. “Then I realized the discouraging part—each task could have finished much, much earlier.”
“Really?” I said recognizing a pattern I’d heard elsewhere. “How so?”
The Multitasking Trap: Why Engineers Can’t “Split” Time
“Well, when we started looking across multiple projects, it was obvious that in order to keep everything moving, each engineer was splitting their time across multiple projects.”
“So what undesirable effect did that cause?” I asked.
“It meant that all of our projects were taking longer than they should.”
“And why is that?”
“Wait time,” was his immediate answer. “We’re actually spending more time waiting for tasks to be worked on than it takes to complete them!”
How Task Switching Kills Momentum
“When an engineer works the way you’ve described, how much of their time is spent on real engineering vs. just keeping all the plates spinning? Plus, what happens when you work on something intensively and then have to abandon it for a few days?”
“You definitely lose a lot of the momentum every time you switch gears,” he agreed.
“Yep. As much as 50% of your time goes to non-value adding activity by the time you reach four active projects.”
Visualizing the Impact on Cash Flow
I walked over to the conference room’s whiteboard and grabbed a handful of markers. “Let me sketch something out that you might recognize.”
First I wrote out on a single line:
AAAA$ BBBB$$ CCCC$$$ DDDD$$$$ Total $$$$$$$$$$
Then on the four lines below that I drew:
A w w w A w w w A w w w A $
w B w w w B w w w B w w w B $
w w C w w w C w w w C w w w C $
w w w D w w w D w w w D w w w D $ Total $$$$
“Line 1 represents the cash flow when you focus. You run Project A for four weeks, finish it, and start seeing cash flow immediately and that starts compounding with each launch.”
“The bottom four lines are when you try to juggle them all. One line per project and the w’s are waiting. The time when your team is working on something else. When you spread resources across too many projects, you can see massive waiting time added to every single project. What’s worse is that none are delivered as early as when you focus and finish.”
That’s serious lost cashflow that you can never get back because the time is gone.
The Solution: “Defrosting” Your Innovation Pipeline
“A typical project takes us 18 months,” he noted. “Just cutting the number of simultaneous projects in half would earn us an extra 9 months of cash flow on each project. That’s millions of dollars.”
Most companies run two to four times more projects than they are capable of executing at full speed. While counterintuitive, putting 25-75% of those projects on ice can defrost the entire system and get products to market in much less time.
Bottom Line: Getting More Products to Market Faster
Spreading your resources across too many projects means that everything moves at a “glacial” pace. By making the tough choice to prioritize, you don’t just finish projects—you maximize the lifetime cash flow of your entire portfolio.
The easiest way to get started is to download our free AcceleTrak™ NPD Bandwidth Accelerator. An Excel template that allows you to build a mini-portfolio. You can use it right away to see how loaded your portfolio is and then take action to accelerate your execution.
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