Our Services – Guided Planning & Execution Track

Facilitated project mapping and planning workshops to ensure your projects start on the right track: accompanied by coaching to make sure they stay there – Designed to move you from worrying about new projects to being confident that they are headed in the right direction as a part of a predictable stream of new product growth and bottom line impact

The Guided Planning & Execution Track starts your product development project off in the right direction, and makes sure it has the plan, the milestones, and the support necessary to keep it on track.

Purpose of the Guided Planning & Execution Track

To ensure that your new product development or technology development projects start out in the right direction with a clear plan for proving feasibility and then moving into development and a commercially successful launch.

Benefits and results

• Delivers a project plan that reduces time to revenue and increases the probability of reaching your desired financial impact
• Makes sure the team stays on track thereby protecting the sizeable investment you make in strategic new projects
• Provides a realistic picture of the investment required and the potential return to allow for prioritization alongside other alternatives to maximize your new product returns
• Gives your management peace of mind that the project team has a clear plan and provides rapid visibility when changes in course become necessary

How Guided Project Planning & Execution is structured

We start with a workshop where the primary goal is the creation of a project plan that the entire team to is committed to achieving. During the workshop, we work with your project team and appropriate supporting staff to clarify their targets, develop a map of all of the obstacles they face, put together a plan for overcoming them, and communicate the assumptions required for success explicitly. They’ll also develop a Guided Innovation Map, or graphical project plan, for getting around those obstacles and a crystal-clear picture of the key assumptions that must be proven true for the project to succeed.

The format is highly interactive and designed to get everyone engaged and taking ownership for their part of the plan; this helps draw out quiet or passive aggressive members that might otherwise withhold critical information. The entire workshop usually takes 2-3 days at either your facility or a nearby conference center of your choice; workshop participants should be on site for the session.

We customize the agenda for your situation, but it normally includes the following:

• A pre-workshop session where we prepare by reviewing program documentation and  interviewing the project manager and several project team members.
• A project review session, where the project manager and cross-functional project leads lay out the key objectives and program requirements and team members ask questions for clarification; project sponsors and stakeholders should attend this part of the workshop to lay out goals and guidelines.
• An obstacle identification session where the team identifies all of the potential hurdles that the project could face including technical, manufacturing, commercial, and legal or regulatory issues.
• A review of commercial and project success predictors to make sure all key obstacles have been considered.
• A project planning session where the team identifies all of the tasks required to overcome the identified obstacles and highlights the critical assumptions for success.
• A mapping session where the team builds a graphical project plan for getting around each obstacle and verifying assumptions as early as possible.
• A final review session where the team evaluates the detail-level project map and creates an overview-level map for management approval.

With the Guided Innovation Map as their guide and communication tool, the team will be ready to create a project proposal and provide company leadership with a clear roadmap for the project and its various stages. We can also customize the workshop to include facilitated development of the project proposal.

As part of our commitment to delivering a successful project, we continue to work with the project manager over the course of the development program; this includes bi-monthly coaching calls and monthly project team reviews that are conducted over the phone or in person. Throughout the program, we assist the PM with innovation tools that help them deliver a successful project and continue to provide an independent perspective for the management team.

Our unique promise

All of our work is backed by an unconditional performance promise – In fact, we guarantee that if you put our five-step approach to work, you will see improvements that far outweigh your investment or we’ll work without any additional payment until you do.

Are you about to start a new project without this level of clarity?

If your team is wondering how to get started, we can work with them to create a plan that will get them moving in the right direction and help them stay there throughout the project.

If you’d like to know more about what our clients have achieved, you can read about the results that we have been able to deliver.

If you’re ready to get your team started down the right track, you can call me, Mike Dalton, directly at (262) 672-2700. Or if you prefer, just visit the contact us page and we’ll call you for a simple no obligation discussion.

In this discussion, we’ll find out a little bit about your objectives and the new product development issues that your business is facing; if there’s a fit, we offer a complimentary in-depth strategy session to understand your problems and opportunities and to explore how we help you get more impact from your innovation.