We may take great pride in everything being bigger and better in our great home state of Texas, but things they are a’changin’. (Tips cowgirl hat with a wink.) Seriously. Why would you want to buy more house than you can afford? Why would you want to order more food than you can possibly eat? Supersize isn’t just wasteful, it just doesn’t make good sense. The same holds true for managing product innovation. Stick with me on this, because it is very easy to get enamored with the sex appeal of ideation, open innovation, roadmapping, and managing the product catalog, but sometimes you simply need to focus on the real challenges at hand — consistently picking winning products and improving time-to-market.
With the prevalence of behemoth PLM and ERP enterprise systems, product organizations may feel like they must purchase the biggest, baddest piece of software money can buy to manage their new product development (NPD) project portfolio, but in reality, they’ll never use all of its functionality. It’s a waste of resources and firepower if your organization isn’t at the proper level of maturity. In fact, there is potential risk of harming or slowing down product development.
But how do you know which level of NPD solution is right for your organization? Is there a way to find NPD software to fit the current needs of your R&D teams, while still allowing room to grow?
Planview has been serving the product development market for more than a decade. “Go big or go home” isn’t our mantra. We believe in serving NPD customers with “right-sized” software tools that will help solve their product innovation challenges. It’s why we offer a full range of solutions to fit every need, budget, environment, and stage of maturity. No need to supersize if it’s not the right size.
Let maturity be your guide
When you look at your gated product development processes, your resources, your strategy, and the tools you use to take products from concept to sunset, where would you say you are on a maturity spectrum? If you can determine your current state and roughly articulate your desired future state, you can figure out what type of software solution would fit best. Planview’s Innovation Management Maturity Model will also help give you some clues.
If we boil it down to three general categories based on the challenges you face in getting the most valuable products to market on time and on budget, where would you place your organization?
“I need help with a specific pain point”
Are you having a hard time filling the funnel with powerful, customer-oriented product ideas? Do you face bottlenecks or obstacles around product team collaboration to get work done? Or coordinating all of the moving parts associated with product launch, especially in conjunction with product marketing? What about simple product and release roadmapping? And partnering with external groups to kick off an open innovation program? Are you still relying on sticky notes to visually manage tasks?
Planview has two offerings that could be just what you need, without any training or heavy lifting required. First, there’s Ideation Management to enable the front end of the funnel: idea collection, capturing the voice of the customer, commenting, collaborating, voting, scorecarding, and ensuring the best ideas rise to the top.
Second, Planview offers Projectplace, a collaborative work management solution ideal for open innovation, product launch orchestration, and thematic roadmapping. With the power of flexible Kanban boards and walk-up-and-use Gantt visualizations, everyone stays informed of activities that need to happen across all departments in order to hit launch targets.
“I need a complete, yet lightweight solution”
Do you need to mature your gated product development process to speed time to market, pick winning products, focus resources on the right projects, and deliver visibility to stakeholders? Please tell me you aren’t using spreadsheets to manage the idea to launch process.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but 1990 just called and they want their spreadsheets back. Excel can’t effectively manage the interconnectedness and constant change that comes with projects, resources, stages and gates, deliverables, revenue targets, and product milestones. You end up spending more time beating the information into submission and less time to actually getting products out the door!
Planview offers the perfect anecdote to spreadsheets with Innotas. Innotas is ideal for organizations who want to improve their idea to launch process. As a single source of truth for managing NPD projects, providing insights into resource capacity, and centralizing the gated process, stakeholders stay informed and products stay on track.
“I need a robust, end-to-end solution”
Are you a seasoned product development team with a large set of new products going to market each year, often on a global scale? Is resource capacity drastically impacting your ability to launch products on schedule? Do you need to perform detailed financial and revenue forecasting to produce an achievable roadmap? Are you ready to offer your execs in-market product performance dashboards to inform progress against the corporate strategy?
If having all of that power in one place brings you tears of joy and relief, please know that Planview Enterprise covers the entire product innovation lifecycle, from capturing early concepts and market trends before the commercialization process even begins, all the way through to product end-of-life, and everything in between. Because of its strategic and financial planning focus, it has robust capabilities around product pipeline prioritization, cannibalization, roadmapping, and resource capacity planning for high-growth, global companies. It’s the whole kit and caboodle. When it’s time to focus beyond innovating on products and start innovating how you are going to the full product innovation lifecycle, Planview Enterprise is for you.
All the Planview solutions give you room to grow and allow you to use the tools you know and love, with practical out-of-the-box integrations. No matter where you are on the maturity spectrum, Planview has an offering that solves your issues and experts who can help you find the right fit today to get you where you want to be tomorrow.
To learn more about how to get started in maturing your NPD process, I invite you to learn more about Planview’s solution offerings – find links to more information by clicking on the images above.
