Does your organizations’ IT department gather requirements for new applications, changes to existing applications or infrastructure, or new infrastructure projects?  How is this done?  Meetings perhaps?  Emails? (lots of both) Is it considered effective?  Are the “customers” all local or are they distributed? Do you ever get the questions later on as to who wanted a given requirement, or how important it was ranked, or whether it got into the project?

Requirements gathering is an art.  If you take a look at the normal requirements gathering process, in most organizations, it not easy or neat or efficient.  It is a challenge of engagement, balancing, documenting, feedback, prioritizations, and politics.  When you are working on requirements with “customers” that are across the earth, it is even more challenging.  Further, the flow from the “customers”, through the requirements manager/process, and to those that are doing the project is usually quite constrained – particularly the upstream visibility and interaction from the “developer” to the customer.  The historical record of how the requirements came to be is usually impossible to decipher or get your hands on in a convenient manner.  We can do better.

Below is a schematic that depicts a process leveraging CorasWorks Idea Management and the Channels approach.  The IT department has a management hub to gather and work up requirements and manage all requirements projects.  When a new potential project comes up, they create a Channel community between them and the associated “customer”.  Most often the customer is a single business group or department.  That customer then has the UI for this requirement process right there in their portal – very convenient.  If the potential project is with a cross-functional team, then, you create a Channel from IT to a site being used by the team (it is a cross-functional portal).

Then, the interaction starts.  IT may set a timeframe, say 30 days for the requirements process to happen.  The customers start entering requirements or the IT department can post those that they have.  Everyone within that Channel can review, rate, and comment.  There is high visibility.  The customer (usually many people) can “trade” amongst themselves and the Star Power ranking shows their prioritization.  IT can respond with feasibility information or comments. It is highly interactive.  It is asynchronous - meaning people can engage whenever they want or need to.

IT then processes the requirements in the hub.  They are already initially prioritized by the customer.  They may feed back summary documents or specs to the customer for vetting via the Channel.  Once they are set they push the approved requirements into the project sites that they have created.  The people working on the project can do their work and can interact directly with specific people from the customer on specific requirements.  If you leave the Channel open, new requirements or changes can flow through.  There is a visible and persistent history of what was proposed, said, by whom, decided, assigned, and the status.  Routine updates can be provided via the Channel as the requirements process becomes a development/implementation project.

This scenario is a standard idea to innovation workstream using Cim.  Except these are not individual ideas but a collection of related requirements for each IT project.  They use point-to-point Channels to make it convenient for people to engage from wherever they normally work and to enable a high level of visibility and interactivity for this specific project.  The Channel can be used for the Requirements process, the implementation/development process, and even, future change request management.

The upshot is that this solution can take a challenging and not so neat process of requirements gathering and make it considerably better.  Just add people…

william

So, what are some of the activities that these two departments typically interact on (or, should interact on).  Here are just a few:

• Review and vetting of Marketing Collateral
• Questions about upcoming events
• Vetting campaigns and events
• Customer stories that can be used by marketing
• New market ideas
• Ideas for new campaigns, events, product marketing
• Prioritization of activities
• Information from sales on competition, channel, field and market activity

In May, I wrote an article about the 4 C’s - 4 different types of ways to capture ideas (Idea Communities, Campaigns, Challenges, and Contests).  Last month, I wrote about the two primary ways that ideas flow in an idea and innovation workstream.  These articles address standard idea and innovation scenarios where a larger community of people are engaging with a smaller group of people that own a business process.

However, the situation of improving communication and inter-activity between the Sales department and the Marketing department is quite different.  It is two groups of people that need to work together on lots of things.  It is more of a point-to-point, communication, and interaction scenario.  Hmm…

Below is a graphic of the solution using a new approach that we will call “Channels” (another “C” use).  The objective is to get Marketing and Sales working better together.  What you see here are individuals within each department working in their own separate portals.  Historically, the twain do not meet.  They work in their silos.  To interact they need to go somewhere else.  However, now we introduce Cim and our Idea Communities, and, viola the Channel is born (the green connecting pipe).

Here is how it works.  Each person continues working in their department portal.  A Cim idea community is deployed in the background working as a service.  The Community front-end UI goes into each portal.  The Channel is now in place.  To each department, it appears that they have a point-to-point communication channel with the other department – which, in fact, they do.

Now, they start to work.  A few scenarios:

• The marketing department posts a new presentation for Sales to review.  A number of sales people rate it and make comments.  They upload a couple of presentations that they have done or their own.  Marketing reviews them.  Marketing sets up a meeting to discuss the presentation with all comers and gets feedback – with people logging comments in the virtual workspace.  A few days later marketing comes out with the final presentation which is posted and immediately available.
• They set up a Section for Customer Stories.  The sales folks gradually start to enter stories – it is easy and convenient to do so.  Other reps rate the stories and make some comments.  Marketing reviews it and asks questions.  Marketing then creates a snapshot for the web site and asks sales to review it.
• Over time, sales folks have posted ideas for marketing campaigns and events.  Just before the quarter marketing posts 5 fleshed out campaigns/events and allows sales to vet them for a week (rate and comment).  The deal is that marketing will fund the top 3 rated events.  At the end of the time, marketing posts the quarterly plan for all to see.

The list and interactivity goes on and on.  There is now a very rich Channel for collaboration, information, and interaction between the departments.  It is easy to use and convenient because no-one has to go somewhere to engage – they work from “home”.  It has high visibility and there is a persistent history.  It is easy to search and there is a simple Tagsnonomy for folks to use to filter information.  Everyone can see the most recent items entered and highest rated. It is a rich, collaborative way of working with rating, commenting, RSS feeds, notifications, file uploads, etc.

Department to department Channels like this can make a big difference.  It starts with accountability that comes from visibility, easy access, and being given a chance to have your say. So, how about a Channel between Sales and Product Management.  Or, a channel between IT and Operations.  After a while you would come to expect that each Department or Business Function will have a number of Channels to other key departments with which they have a high degree of interaction and information flow. 

With Cim, those items (like a really good idea) that should make their way into more formal process like product development or marketing campaign development can be siphoned off and processed via a Management Hub and flow into the implementation phase.  

Okay, formally, I am adding Channels to my list of uses of CorasWorks Idea Management.  It is now the 5 C’s.  The question for you is what other departments or business functions do you or should you be working closely with to improve business results?

william

CC for Community Contributed

Almost universally when I discuss Idea Management people are thinking about the approach of tapping into the large, general population to generate ideas.  The community generates the ideas and they flow into a process that reviews them and moves them forward or not.  They want engagement, input, volume, and the wisdom of crowds.  Let’s call this standard flow CC for Community Contributed.

POV for Process Owner Vetting

Here is the new twist.  Without idea management solutions, ideation is really owned by the business process owners.  Most product managers take pride in their ideas.  Yes, they reach out for ideas.  But, usually they believe they know best. They are paid to be great at it. This is the same for almost all existing business processes - process improvement, best practices, RFP proposal creators, program managers, HR policies, marketing managers creating collateral and campaigns, etc.

Then, here we come with Idea Management and suggest that they open up the process to the crowd and let a big flow come rolling in.  Organizations are doing this and the business process owners are adjusting; sometimes, with resistance.

Now, we take the next step.  The process owners aren’t stopping their innovation.  They are still coming up with features, ideas of their own, decisions.  So, now we get to POV or Process Owner Vetting.  How about the process owners taking their ideas and exposing them to the crowd to get feedback – to vet their ideas.  This is the essence of the POV flow of ideas.

Examples of POV

So, let’s look at a few examples of POV:

- a Marketing manager posts their ideas for marketing campaigns for vetting with the sales population

- the Executive team posts its ideas for company objectives to their mid-level managers

- a Product Manager posts their top 10 product features for their next rev of a product for vetting and ranking by the big community

- a Sales director posts their sales projections by product line for the year for the big community to rate (predictive)

- the IT Department posts every application that they are developing for business groups for all to vet

- the HR department posts new policies to the big community before they go into place and ask for feedback, comments, and questions

- the Best Practices group posts Best Practice articles and then receives ratings, comments, and questions to make best practices that much better

Impact of POV

Ask a business process owner and they tend to be more comfortable with CC.  Why?  Because they can always say no or defer.  But, ask them to go POV and vet THEIR ideas with the community and you’ll get some hesitation.  What if the community doesn’t like their idea?  What if the ranking by the community differs greatly from what they think?  You can sense the refrain “It will take time and I already know what I want to do.”  Yet, organizations are learning that vetting with a general population or targeted segments is a great way to be more effective.  Obviously, this is the whole point of test marketing and user testing that we have done for a long time.  But now, we can also do it internally and at a much smaller incremental cost.

POV scenarios are at least 50% of the way that you can leverage Idea Management solutions such as Cim.  Yet, we are only starting to understand the power of going POV in addition to CC.  The reality is that social tools such as Cim are primarily providing organizations with the ability to tap into the power of people – the power of the crowd.  Learning to tap the power of people starts with looking at your internal business processes and simply asking “How can we tap into our internal people and/or external people to improve our business results?”  Sometimes, the answer is CC to get peoples ideas.  Other times, the answer is POV to be able to vet ideas, thoughts, policies, objectives that you are working on.  You can use Cim to address both flows.

In the 20th century the AC and DC debate about electricity eventually worked itself out and became the vehicle to power growth and improvement in the quality of life.  To follow the analogy you could claim that the power for the 21st century business is people.  Learning when and how to use CC and POV to become a people powered business will take some time and getting used to.  But, the value is there.  

william

First of all, when I get to talking with people about implementing Cim for an end-to-end business process the topic of workflow often comes up.  People have a mental model of  workflow that has been burned in over many years.  In addition, since we are on SharePoint they are used to the model of workflow for processing documents and forms.  It is a good place to start to explain the new model of Social Workstreams.

Workflow

While workflow approaches and implementations differ greatly, at a very, very basic level there are typically two attributes to a workflow:

1) The Thing: You are typically processing a single Thing.  This Thing is a document, a form, or a transaction.  It stays the same across the process.

2) Sequence: It is a sequential process that goes from person to person based upon decisions by people and/or business rules of the system. 

Workstream

Workstreams are bigger animals. A workstream, such as most Cim business processes, has two key attributes:

1) Activities: A workstream is composed of a number of distinctly different activities.  Each has its own people, roles, skills, information, and tools.  Each works independently, but, is integrated into a process that defines the workstream.  The integration is loosely-coupled.

2) Gates: The work progresses forward from one activity to another through Gates.  A person or a group of people control when and if the items move forward.  Decisions are often board style vs. individuals and sequential.

The diagram below represents a typical workstream for Cim.  The main stages are represented by 1, 2, and 3.  At the highest level 1 is Ideation, 2 is Management, and 3 is Execution. There are gates between them. The swirling eddies, A, B, C, and D represent activities, usually Social Eddies, that will be discussed below.

The Workstream to Build a House

A good analogy I use for a workstream is the building of a house.  Upfront a team lays out the design and files the plan to get permits to continue.  There is a crew that levels the ground and digs the hole for the basement.  There is a crew that pours the concrete and lays the foundation.  Then, the framers.  Then, the roofers.  Then, the wall guys, followed by carpenters, electricians, plumbing, etc.  Largely, they follow a sequence, but, you can also have different activities going on at the same time.  Decisions are made at various stages (the Gates), often with the help of experts that have to sign off based upon standards (such as getting the local certification for the electricity).

Social Eddies of an Idea Management Workstream

A business process taking an idea through to a business outcome maps to a workstream.  There are various gates along the way such as 1) the initial idea contribution and ideation by the general community (A above), 2) screening the idea to bring it into a formal review process with a group of initial reviewers to rate an idea with relative questions/criteria and or vote on it (B above) , 3) moving the innovation into a formal planning exercise where there is objective data and analysis (C above), 4) approving the innovation and pushing it into a project management team, and 5) the team that develops the innovation or implements it (D above).

Before each Gate in your process there is usually a group of people that participate in an activity (A, B, C, D above).  It is a collaborative process that may involve 100’s of people or a handful.  We refer to each of these collaborative activities as Social Eddies.  In the diagram above, the spinning circles represent these Social Eddies.  (Note: Eddies are an interesting phenomena of fluid dynamics that get created when water or air flows around an obstacle like a boulder in a stream.   It creates a vacuum with often a backflow that goes against the current or creates a circular current.)

Example of Enterprise Best Practices

So, lets look at the Social Workstream for enterprise best practices.

- The idea is contributed (Gate 1).  The general community begins to review it, rate it, comment, and augment it.  Social eddie A has begun.  Popular opinion rules.

- At a point a person or persons screen the idea and decide to bring it into the formal review process.  This is the second gate.  Now, a group of specific reviewers will do an initial review on the proposed best practice using a review form with consistent evaluation criteria (social eddie B).

- At a point a person or group has a meeting and decides based upon the reviews AND based upon the popular rating (eddie A which by the way is still spinning) to move it forward into the Planning stage.

- In the Planning stage (eddie C above) a small group do a deep dive to evaluate the best practice, collect evidence, quantify it, and, present results.

- Based upon this, the Best Practice “board” will then decide on the best practice – fourth gate.  It then may kick off one or more implementation projects, or the drafting of a formal best practice “instructions” document to then drive multiple implementation efforts.  These are represented by the social eddie D.

An important aspect of the CorasWorks solution is that along the way people downstream in the process are able to look upstream.  Thus, a person that is drafting the best practice can look upstream to see a) the formal best practice approved, b) the initial and formal reviews, and c) the original idea and the ideation around it.  An interesting aspect is that since a process like this may span say 90 days, when the person is writing the best practice instruction there may well be many more comments or other information contributed to the original idea or by the various review teams.  Those social eddies may continue to spin depending on the interest level.

Impact of Social Workstreams on the Way we Work

Implementing systems with social workstreams impacts the way we work in a number of ways:

-Loosely-coupled work - Workstreams integrate different work activities to produce outcome – these activities can live on their own and be integrated in a number of different workstreams

- Workstream activity happening in “social eddies” – broader participation, visible, social, continuous feedback (even after gate decision), interactive

- People engage in their Social Eddies – people start to see their “eddie” where they will spend most of their effort

- Potentially expedited cycle times – you don’t have to wait for an item in a workflow to get to you before you can see that it may be coming down the road and begin to participate or decide to expedite it

- Board Decision Style – gated decisions often happen in a board-style, based upon both broad input and precise input

- Disciplined rhythm - Can set disciplined rhythm of decision making (bi-weekly “board” meeting) - not dependent on people or system in sequential process

- Your vote may count less – people are used to having specific power to approve or reject.  In social workstreams, there are often “forcing functions”, such as very high popularity combined with visibility, that lessen an individuals ability to say no or yes.

- Increased effectiveness via the “wisdom of crowds” – hopefully leading to “righter” decisions

- Importance of standard criteria – to make this work, you need to start to establish standard evaluation criteria that is consistently applied and enforced, say through the review forms and board decision criteria

- Greater visibility – the design of social workstreams, such as in Cim, is to provide much greater visibility to the end-to-end process, including status updates to initial contributors as their idea moves through the workstream

The Upshot

A nice, structured workflow is straight forward.  It seems simpler.  In many ways it is.  There are many tools to create a workflow.  But, the value is largely simple efficiency.

An end-to-end process for idea and innovation management can be an extraordinarily powerful driver of business success.  It drives organizational effectiveness.  But, it could get messy.  This is where the tool comes in.  The role of CorasWorks Idea Management on SharePoint is be the enabler to bring you the power of tapping into your social eddies, but to do so in a more efficient and effective social workstream.  It does the loosely-coupling for you.  It gives you your control points and process automation.  It uses workflow in specific places to be efficient.  It provides the upstream and downstream visibility.  It is flexible enough to accommodate the different workstreams and social eddies to support different business scenarios (new products, process improvement, best practices, change requests, etc.).

It will take some time (years) for social workstreams to get comfortably understood and make their way into Visio stencils.  But, trust me, they will.  Why? Because in the future (during the 2010’s), organizations simply will not be able to compete without effectively tapping into the full power of their workforce.

william

The Situation

A lot of time and effort goes into creating information that can be used as knowledge by your internal workforce or external communities.  The process raises some key questions.  What knowledge is needed and being asked for?  How important is it?  What is the process for creating and approving it for publication?  How do we manage the processes for different types of information? How can users find it and access it?  What do users think of the knowledge?  How can it be improved? What has been published?  How often is it used or looked for? How easy is it to change and versionize?  How do we track our knowledge creation process and the user satisfaction?

The tools and approach of most organizations lack the ability to answer many of these questions.  Typically, knowledge creation is a back room process with an end product that is rather dry and passive (aka a document).  Most approaches lack the interactivity to drive forward the value of knowledge.  Often, it gets published without the ability for the users to interact and add value upfront, during the creation, or after it is published.  It is often not easy to find the right information or to know what is important or even popular.  As a key part of the work of most organizations, this is an important process to improve.  

R3 Knowledge Factory Solution

Leveraging CorasWorks Idea Management, R3 has created an end-to-end add-on solution that provides organizations with a 360 degree process for transforming ideas, questions, and topics into knowledge that is dynamic and continuously improved.  It is a product management solution for knowledge.  It leverages the social aspects of Cim to know what is needed by users and to get feedback on the finished knowledge product that is used to improve existing knowledge and also drive needs.  In effect, Knowledge Factory takes a dry, passive process and transforms it into an interactive, dynamic, measurable system for serving the knowledge needs of users.

The Walkthrough

In this walkthrough, we’ll look at a scenario for the HR department.  We’ll assume that they have their own community where users can post ideas, questions, and topics.  It is part of the HR portal.  Users consume the published knowledge via a self-service display in the HR portal or in any other portal in the environment.  In the middle, there is an HR Knowledge Base app where the heavy lifting of creating the knowledge base articles and managing the review and approve process takes place.  Below we show the core modules of the solution and the activities.  Note that the solution is role-based in that different users are working in different contexts from different places across your SharePoint environment.

The HR Community

It starts with the Community.  As shown below, users are posting ideas and questions for the HR department.  Other users can also see them, rate them and comment on them.  This is used to determine the demand for a given topic. Members of HR can also respond to the posts via comments or email in an interactive and visible way.  

Knowledge Mgmt App: Scan, Screen, and Select

Each department or group can have its own Knowledge Management app.  This is where the creating process happens and the knowledge base is located.  From here they can scan the Community posts.  For instance, the HR department can see the posts in the HR Community.  Plus they can see posts in other communities that might relate to their work. They can view the original post and interact – commenting as necessary.  As shown below, they can then select posts to kick off a draft of a knowledge base article – it automatically pulls in information from the post and provides the user with a form to begin the process.  It also maintains a trackback to the original post providing the means for continued interactivity with users during the knowledge creation process.

Knowledge Mgmt App: Create and Review Process

Knowledge Base owners then go about their process to create the KB article with supporting information – often interacting with users.  The end result would be the KB article description, attached documents, links to videos and web pages.  This is then put through a managed review process with notifications. The end result is publishing the article for consumption by users.

KB Self-Service: Search and Social

Once published, KB articles are available in the self-service display.  In our scenario, this would be available in the HR Portal.  It can also be snapped into any other portal/location across your SharePoint environment.  As shown below, this lets users search the knowledge base (with suggestions) and access the information.  Each search by a user is tracked so that KB owners have another way to know what users are looking for.  In addition, users are able to rate the articles and comment which helps other users and the KB owners.  The commenting allows for the HR KB owner to interact with users in a public or private manner. 

KB Top 10 Listings

Think dynamic marketing of knowledge.  Sometimes users aren’t proactive.  They often just want to see what is new and most popular.  Knowledge Factory comes with a Top 10 Listings display that shows users the most recent articles and the highest rated articles (Star Power as shown below).  They can quickly click through multiple knowledge bases all in one display.

Wrap Up

R3’s Knowledge Factory does a great job of providing the complete 360 degree process of transforming ideas into knowledge.   It leverages social interactivity at all of the key points in the life cycle.  In doing so, it actually transforms your process from a “back-room” activity into a dynamic, interactive way that needs are effectively converted into knowledge that has its own cycle of improvement. It also comes with extensive tracking and reporting such as seeing what KB articles are published and what users are looking for.  This helps you to guide your efforts and activities going forward.  You can now have a 360 process for managing knowledge like a product. 

The solution is an add-on for CorasWorks Idea Management.  It is licensed on a single perpetual license per customer depending on size of organization.  The one solution can be used to support multiple departments.  And, the communities and self-service Snaplets can be distributed across your SharePoint environment for maximum visibility and interactivity.

william

I had conversations with two customers last week coming from the two perspectives.  One is a global business software company.  They had tried to engage their customers for change requests (new features) via their web site, but, had limited success.  They wanted a better way to get more ideas and engage better.  The other is a global telecommunications company.  They have existing internal business processes.  They want to use Idea Management to extend those processes to a broader audience to get more input, interactivity, and transparency.

The most general distinction between these scenarios is that the first is focused on external customers whereas the second is on their internal workforce.  With this simple distinction, you will often start to uncover your driver.  But, lets look a little deeper.

Let’s face it, there is hype around anything social. The urge of many is to just go get some of those ideas and show that they want to engage.  It is well placed.  This outreach objective can be an end in itself.  The interactivity, engagement, and visibility amongst the community is indeed an end in itself.  You can succeed by becoming an enabler for your community to interact.  

On the other hand there is the driver for better processes.  These generally start with an internal objective.  You are trying to achieve a result such as a new product, process improvement, better RFP’s, smooth change management, uncovering new markets.   Then, you lay out your process – typically a workstream from idea to review and management to downstream activities to make it real.  Here you are leveraging idea management as the means to engage with those people that you want engaged in the business process.

In sum, what is Idea Management bringing to your business:

- With Ideation as the objective, it is bringing a brand new way of adding value via your community.  This is a new innovation.

- With the business process objective, it is typically making existing processes better and somewhat reinventing many business processes.

CorasWorks Idea Management addresses both of these drivers. Our ideation feature set is very robust and evolving quickly with our new releases.  A key is our ability to support many different scenarios on the front side with relevant feature sets vs. a one size fits all approach.  However, amongst competitive products in the space we are unusually or even uniquely strong on the end-to-end business process side.  This is because our business has been built up around applications first.  In addition, we take a platform approach with CorasWorks on SharePoint. Thus, you can lay out your end-to-end business process knowing that you have pre-integration with supporting and downstream applications/sites across your SharePoint environment.  We go a step further with an integration framework to also integrate external information sources, applications, and services.

So, where do we come from?  If we have to choose we are in the business process camp.  Our focus is on helping customers achieve the business outcome –the results through the end-to-end process.  And, via Cim to allow them to lay in new processes for different business scenarios.  

In sum, we are seeing Idea Management as a broad driver of innovation.  It is getting people managing existing processes to think outside of the box.  These legacy processes simply get more effective at producing better results.  And, it is creating a new process, lets call it Ideation, of engagement that is becoming an end in itself.

All good…

william

It Started with Marketing Myopia in 1960

Ted Levitt is acknowledged to have started the “re-invention” of modern marketing/product management with his paper called Marketing Myopia in 1960 (Harvard business Review).  The premise was that existing marketing was based upon data which really didn’t provide you with the information to think of and develop new products and effective marketing.  Our way of thinking was too narrow, too product centric, too data centric.  A famous line by Mr. Levitt was “people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill.  They want a quarter-inch hole.”  It is not about the product; it is about the customer and what they want.

This basic idea has been explored and expanded over the last 50 years.  In the high-tech industry, Geoffrey Moore in his classic Crossing the Chasm (1991) applied this approach to a new theory of high-tech market development.  In it, he talks about target-customer scenarios vs. classic demographic market segmentation.  Clayton Christenson takes it further in his popular book Innovator’s Solution (2003) to talk about circumstance based marketing as the core for disruptive new product innovation.

In effect, all three authors are saying that new products and markets don’t get discovered by reviewing quantitative data or doing data-oriented segmentation.  The secret is by qualitatively learning what job a user would “hire” a product to do for them.  This is what a market really is, those people that would all hire your product to do x for them.  The results are often surprising, and, the basis for extreme innovation.

A great number of marketers will tell you that they understand and agree with this theory.  Some practice it.  It is hard.  It’s practice takes time: work to collect the qualitative information and to evaluate and understand the circumstances, and then, the time to figure out the products.  Mr. Christensen even goes as far as to say the following:

“corporate IT systems and the CIO’s who administer them figure among the most important contributors to failure in innovation.” 

Wow! In a nutshell, he states that this is because IT is the owner of the data and usually good at serving it up, but, fail to have systems to serve the needs of this other type of approach to market/product innovation.  But, these days we have a whole new set of tools, like CorasWorks Idea Management on SharePoint, and we have the potential to use them differently.  Sometimes simple applications can really fuel powerful innovation.

A new start - Cim for User Stories

So, you are in marketing/product management and are a believer in the theory of these authors.  How can you apply it?  Let’s try a different approach leveraging Cim on SharePoint. 

Imagine that you do not go out and ask your 5,000 employees to give you their ideas for new products.  Instead you set up a User Story campaign.  You ask them to write up stories from actual customers about how they are using your product. You give them 30 days.  Using Cim you make it very easy for your salespeople, customer service reps and any customer facing people to tell a story.  They can read each others stories. They can rate them, comment on them, and cross-reference them.   You can offer rewards and incentives.  You’ll get stories, and, they will amaze you.  Then, you start to categorize them, evaluate them, explore them.

You can then build “Personas” around the characters in the stories.  You can go out and present the Personas to your people and have them vett them and the stories as to which jobs they are doing are most valuable.  Now, you are really leveraging your people and engaging them.

Next, you can go back out and ask your workforce to write up stories of what those same customers are doing without your product.  How do your customers try and get things done?  Your rep could ask someone “What task do you do during the day that is most cumbersome, or time consuming?”  You can also ask your people to write stories about fictional characters and what these people might want to do in a given day.  You also can write stories and vett them through the same Cim community with others.  The new market innovation process is really an iterative process that expands and develops on the stories.

You are now collecting wonderfully valuable qualitative stories.  Some of real people and some fictional.  You are getting the feedback from your broad workforce.  You may even make them public to customers and ask them to actually tell you which stories apply to them.

You are stopping short of asking your people to tell you directly their product idea – it starts to become implicit in the stories.  You first want to understand the job people may want to get done.  Then, you begin to frame it into the product that would address the circumstance.

Going there and Getting There

All of these steps, are built on small focused campaigns.  They build and evolve your market approaches.  They are part of a program that uses qualitative information to fuel circumstance-based innovation.  Your employees learn to engage, to share stories, to know what questions to ask and what to look for.  They become engaged in the process.  You get a volume of information that you never would have the time or budget to get.  It is unfiltered and provided by non-experts that don’t live inside the same box as professionals.  This process will then feed into and/or complement your New Product activities.

Cim is a great solution to enable you to tap into your workforce to add User Stories to your mix.  It is easy to create new campaigns.  It is easy for users to contribute with and engage with others.  And, it provides you with what you need to manage the back-end work of reviewing, categorizing, prioritizing, approving, and, rolling back out new campaigns to continue your process.  It gives you a platform to iteratively engage with your internal workforce and external communities.

Its been 50 years since Mr. Levitt’s original article – we now have the tools to work with unstructured information, engage with others and execute on the theory.  In many of our customers, it was IT that pushed to bring SharePoint into the organization.  In my opinion, they are off the hook Mr. Christensen.  Now, it is up to those of us that want to leverage solutions like Cim on top of this new platform to drive innovation.

william

A little setup… New products and services are important and typically represent a major investment.  Thus, many organizations have a rather involved review and approval process.  There are typically a host of supporting activities in the decision process. In addition, the workstream for new product innovations must continue further through development and go to market activities to result in a positive business outcome.  The process differs by industry and by company or even by product line.  They tend towards more complex scenarios that have greater integration challenges. Cim addresses this scenario with its flexible design and the ability to engage people in different ways throughout the full process.

Basic Idea Management for New Products 

We’ll start with the simplest scenario.  Typically, organizations have some sort of approval process for new product investments.  With the addition of idea management you are adding the ability to tap into your workforce (internal or external) and engage them in your process.  The basic workstream is as shown here.

- Ideation – Ideas are captured from a broad audience in a standing product idea community.  The community rates, comments, and enhances the ideas with supporting information.  Ideas can be stack ranked by the activity of the community.

- Review and Management – Then, there is the back-side management site (the flip side).  Here your smaller new product management team does their work.  They screen the ideas, select candidates, review and enhance them, put them through their formal proposal and approval process and oversee the portfolio of approved innovations.  This work is complemented with supporting reporting and management features.

Increasing the Flow and Focus

One of the most common extensions to the basic approach is to increase the flow of ideas and their relevance to an objective.  This is typically done by planning and executing proactive campaigns, challenges, and contests directed towards your workforce.  They typically are for specific time periods and specific new product objectives.

As shown here, the flow from multiple communities comes into the same management site.  An important aspect of the Cim solution is the ease with which your management site (or sites) can be modified to meet differences in your management process and accommodate changes, such as when the flow is greater and different.

Implementing YOUR End-to-End Solution

As mentioned above, your end-to-end process is probably unique and changes from time to time or even by situation.  Cim adapts to this reality.  It delivers on the elements above and provides the foundation to enhance and extend YOUR process to incorporate the other supporting and downstream activities that transform ideas into innovations.  A little definition first:

-  Supporting Activities – These are the activities that are required to support the decision process.  Leveraging our native process integration, add-on CorasWorks-based apps and/or supporting SharePoint supporting sites can be hooked into the process.  Examples are sites/apps for Market Evaluation and Planning, Market Testing Campaigns, Subject Matter Review Teams (Engineering, etc.), Finance Review, supporting collaboration sites, and sites or external services providing necessary data and information to make informed decisions.  The objective is better decisions and pre-planning.

-  Downstream Activities – Once a decision is made to proceed - what happens?  Similarly, you can have integrated downstream activities.  You may have Implementation Teams to implement straightforward product changes.  Or, you may spin up a new product development site.  Or, push the innovation to one or more Program Management Offices.  Or, add the new development project to one or more management portfolio dashboards. These may further leverage CorasWorks, such as using our Project Portfolio Management solution.  Or, you may have your own native SharePoint sites or third party sites/applications that are integrated (and run on SharePoint or externally).

Below is a schematic that shows the workstream from idea through the downstream activities leading to your business outcome.

Benefit of Role-Based UI’s in a Distributed SharePoint Environment

Trying to meet the needs of a complex business scenario in a single UI has challenges such as fragility, constraints of one size fits all design, and less friendly and relevant user design.  Cim on SharePoint provides different role-based UI’s allowing the user to work in one place and do their work - such as working on Market Evaluation.  The modules are integrated across the distributed environment so the right information is available to users where they work.  Thus, users don’t have to navigate the environment or even know about the other elements  And, their UI can be optimized for the work they need to do.  With this approach, a SharePoint environment becomes a natural foundation for the more complex scenarios of new product innovation.

william

Intro

The customer who came up with it is a very large government systems integrator.  They have built a project-oriented proposal management solution using CorasWorks on SharePoint.  It is very sophisticated with complex layers of security to support government security requirements and multiple vendors.

Their objectives are straight-forward – win more proposals and make money delivering.  How?  By tapping into their broad workforce to get good technical, delivery, operational ideas, input, and information up front and throughout the proposal process to improve their proposal, increase their chance of winning and their success in delivery and making money doing it.  Their approach is to use Cim to improve their process.

Basic Workstream Description

The flow works like this.  The RFP comes in from the prospect.  They then kick off a proposal site for the Response team in their existing system.  They begin their normal process.  Now, the change in process comes …

- The response team prepares a challenge site using Cim to get input from either a broad audience or a more select but large audience depending on the proposal.

- They set a limited timeframe for the initial response ideas, say 2 weeks to a month, to get input.  People contribute, vet, augment, rate, comment, etc.  Again, this may be a broad open challenge community or a private but larger community for invited participants.

- They then have a Screening/Review step where they screen the input.  The ones they like or need they push into the Response team site to use in the process of preparing the proposal.

- As new issues or topics come up in their proposal process they go back out to the community?  For instance, as they get through the process they may need to go back to test their assumptions on Resource Availability and Cost.  Thus, it becomes a supporting iterative application to augment the overall process.

The Diagram

Here is a diagram that lays out the basic workstream. It differs somewhat from a straight-through idea workstream like Process Improvement because the Proposal team kicks it off from the start.  In effect, the community element is a subset of their their overall proposal process.  It is an option, a tool they can use to broaden their chance of success.

The Demo Example

In our Cim demonstrations, we now have an example of this scenario.  Our scenario is commercially oriented - the ACME Widget Company has put out an RFP for vendors to propose their services/products that will help ACME reduce energy consumption at its manufacturing facility.

Below is a screenshot of the RFP Response Challenge community.  We are showing one idea that has been proposed.  Note that the contributor has attached key documents required by the process as specified by the response team.

The full end-to-end solution

With the systems integrator customer mentioned above they have a CorasWorks based Proposal Management system.  That makes it a nice, end-to-end, pre-integrated solution.  However, you can also use simple native SP collaborative sites for Proposals or any that you have customized with or without CorasWorks.  CorasWorks natively integrates and allows for the downstream integration (pushing screened ideas into the proposal sites) with any SharePoint based site.  In addition, you can integrate this process as a bolt on to other third-party Proposal Management solutions such as Privia from Spring CM.  This can be done either through a non-invasive approach where you can easily see or access the selected information from the third-party app or actually push or pull the information into the database of the third-party app.

Summary

The goal of the proposal process is to win more proposals and to be able to profitably deliver on them.  Easily being able to tap into a broader group of people in your organization (or partners and vendors also) and integrate their ideas, input and information into the process improves your chance of success on both objectives.

william

The Scenario

Imagine that an organizational has three main process areas that they are driving forward: Information Worker Productivity, Sales Processes, and Manufacturing. This Process Improvement Workstream implements a 3-phase process that cuts across the SharePoint landscape and drives an end-to-end process supporting all three.   

Below is a graphic of the 3-phase workstream.  It starts with the Process Improvement Community (a Standing Idea Community) in the Idea Portal.  This is where you capture ideas and collaborate.  You then have a Review and Approval Management Site.  This is where you work through the ideas to approval and add to a portfolio.  Then, you have three different implementation teams.  The approved ideas are pushed into these sites for implementation. 

From an implementation standpoint in this scenario, you would be using the off-the-shelf modules of Cim for the Community and Management phases along with native SharePoint team sites for the implementation phase.  We also leverage Windows Workflow Foundation to kick off notifications based upon rules at each phase of the process.  In the following sections, I’ll walk you through the deployment for each phase.

Process Improvement Community: Capture and Collaborate

In the Idea Portal you would deploy a Cim Community module that is tailored for Process Improvement ideas.  The tailoring might include a custom tagsonomy and custom fields for contributors.  The general community of users go here, contribute ideas and tag them.  Then, the community rates, comments, attaches documents. Ideas get rated based upon their Star Power.

Below is a screenshot of an idea that has been contributed.

Process Management Site: Screen, Review, Approve, Manage Downstream

This site plays a pivotal role in the process – interacting upstream and downstream and doing their work in the middle.  You start with the deployment of the Cim Portfolio Management site.  From here, this smaller team works with ideas from the upstream community.  In the middle they play their role: screening the ideas, selecting them for review, finishing off the ideas to propose them as projects, and voting and approving them.  Then, they are set to push the approved projects to downstream teams for implementation which they then track as part of their portfolio.  

In the screenshot below, a manager has selected an approved idea and is pushing it into downstream team sites.  Note that they are only filling in a few fields in the form.  As part of any CorasWorks workstream, the Action uses information from the existing approved idea along with the few fields they fill out to complete the necessary downstream information.  You’ll see the complete result in the team site below.  They do this work from their Management site, without having to go anywhere else.

Downsteam Implementation: Work Team Sites

Now, it is time to implement.  In this scenario, we have three implementation teams for process ideas.  We have set up these work sites using standard native SharePoint team sites.  This is where the teams work on incoming approved process improvements.  The approved ideas appear in their team sites as tasks.  They manage their own work team.  Each team is able to organize their content and internal work as they please.

Below is a screenshot of how the incoming items look to users.  They have everything they need to implement the process idea.  In addition, they have track-back URL’s to the approved project in the Management site and further upstream to the original idea in the Process Improvement community.  While working, Windows Workflow Foundation is used to automate notifications based upon the information that has flowed downstream.

Summary

This Process Improvement Workstream provides you with an end-to-end solution.  You implement it using Cim off-the-shelf, with a bit of WWF for notifications, and some team sites.  It is a great way to start, but, it is just the beginning.  You can beef up the process with more robust downstream modules such as the Project and Program sites from CorasWorks PPM.  You can extend the Management site to incorporate additional supporting processes (eddies if you will in the workstream metaphor) such as supporting sites for specialized Review Teams to flesh out the ideas before approval.  You can also have different communities to segment the ideation phase say by division or purpose.  And, of course you can follow the same workstream approach to implement other workstreams for different business scenarios.

An important aspect when designing workstreams such as this is that they do indeed cut across a SharePoint landscape.  You have different modules in different phases in different departments usually implemented as different Site Collections and even Web Applications.  CorasWorks connects across all of these boundaries to enable you to have a fully integrated, end-to-end process where people can work from wherever they work.  In addition, as described above CorasWorks solutions natively integrate with any other sites in SharePoint and with Windows Workflow Foundation to drive notifications and updates.

This particular workstream is pre-packaged for Cim users and can be provided as part of your Cim Jump Start.  Look for more business scenario snapshots like this in the future…

william