Pipeline Accelerator Insight #1: Limit Innovation WIP to Get More New Products Across the Finish Line in Less Time
The single most important thing you can do to drive immediate results is to limit innovation WIP – work in process. While many leaders try to do more, the real bottleneck is the number of active projects currently flooding your development pipeline. By implementing strategic resource management, you can ensure your team’s bandwidth isn’t stretched thin by too many competing priorities.
Why is this so important? Because the more you work on, the more time everything takes. Part of resource management is just math. If you can run five projects maximum and still run at full speed, then running ten projects of the same size will take twice as long. But there’s more to it than that. The multitasking it causes means that people are also 30-50% less productive.
Most companies run 2-3 times more projects than they should meaning everything takes longer, and less gets done. As this video demonstrates, the cash flow impact of limiting innovation WIP is stunning!
Why Pursuing Too Many Opportunities Delays Them All
Resource management to limiting WIP is tough to do. I mean seriously – put the inactive ones on a backlog and don’t let anyone work on the ones that aren’t active. And enforce it almost daily. And since new product development is knowledge work it can be hard to see when people are backsliding. But ignore this advice and they will slowly creep back onto the radar. Guaranteed.
Want to know what you can do to limit new product WIP and recapture that speed and agility? Download the free Portfolio Accelerator to get a simple Excel tool to identify your optimum project load and maximize your new product cash flow!
Additional Insights on Resource Management – How to Thrive Despite the Innovation Talent Shortage
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