Home » Stage Gate & Portfolio Management - Innabler

The facts

One of the most common ways that companies attempt to improve this level of maturity and to manage risk is to implement a structured or “gated” process. However, such a process introduces a huge administrative burden to the organization, which results in the lack of adhesion to the process.
As product lifecycles continue to shorten and product development efforts become increasingly distributed, it is essential that organizations take their staged-gated process to the next level, incorporating principles of lean, rapid, and profitable NPD, and transforming their 1990s stage-and-gate processes into those better suited for today’s fast-paced and competitive world.

Identified problems:

Process not used – structured NPD process isn’t adopted because it is hard for people to learn and use it as it does not represent the reality
All different project types follow the same process model - there are no differences between the data required even when the project type is completely different
Consistent delays in time to market – Projects take much longer than they should due to excessive deadlines and deliverables
Poor cross-functional collaboration and coordination – several times, team members are not aware of their responsibilities and deadlines
Lack of metrics to track process effectiveness – companies have no idea how long their time to market is or which points in their process cause delays
Missed steps and excessive rework - without guidance, key deliverables can get overlooked or be incomplete resulting in rework or poor product decisions
Too much dependency on IT – every time there is a need to change a simple step or deliverable in the model IT has to be involved
Lack of valuable alerts and notifications – team members and project owners aren’t automatically informed about what is going on and alerts are limited and not business triggered (event triggered only)

No one understands what resources are available and when they can be used on projects
Resource requirements aren’t known in advance, leading to bottlenecks that delay projects
“Project gridlock” syndrome: too many projects going at once with resources over-assigned, leading to stress, burnout, & turnover

Not enough highly innovative projects in the pipeline
Bad investments in low-value, non-strategic, conservative projects
Too many projects going too far into the process
Low overall portfolio NPV

Ineffective or inefficient Gate Reviews - when decisions are made, they aren’t based on consistent criteria because there are different “truths” about the same reality. Whoever has the most power makes the decision
Lack of market-driven focus - information is biased toward some criteria for instance, “can we do it? over business criteria “should we do it?”
Incomplete project data – decisions are often made based on “gut feeling” rather than actual market or portfolio data. NPD team members often spend excessive time tracking down disparate documents and accessing multiple data sources in order to make informed decisions and complete their tasks on the project
Lack of valuable and fresh reports - limited reports and statistics only.

Inconsistent project data - all too often, the information in one system conflicts with data in another and the project is stalled while these inconsistencies are reconciled
Low traceability - it is difficult to understand what happened and who decided what when trying to perform a review analysis.
Confidentiality problems - software doesn’t allow total complete information confidentiality as it uses generic/dept/group passwords and all the group/dept members can access the same information
Business risk due to lack of compliance – lack of a defined process magnifies the business risk due to regulatory issues
Complex Document approvals

Main Benefits

Innabler’s solution avoids profit leaks by enabling excellent NPD execution and synchronization. processes for every project as it mixes best practice NPD templates with integrated idea management, product portfolio management, project management, resource & time management and process/workflow management capabilities that will help streamline and optimize the entire cross-functional idea-to-launch process.

Help shift spending from losing to winning products

Managers can make better investment decisions about which projects to fund and which to kill, based on solid metrics and an integrated view that guarantees a single “truth”. Improved focus on the right projects, prioritization and decision-making as a result of portfolio review where all “active” projects can be analyzed collectively to derive a project portfolio that is achievable given the available resources of the organization and balances overall portfolio risk and return. Using scenario planning, portfolio reviewer’s can create and compare alternate portfolios to assess the impact of different project selections, timings and even development approaches that alter the funds and resources available.

Integrated Front-End

Generating ideas and being able to turn those ideas into revenue and profit are two entirely different things. Our solution enables easy examination of the fit between newly generated concepts and roadmaps and other plans, ensuring that the ideas selected for development are aligned with market, technology and growth strategies. It enables the evaluators to see not only which ideas ranked more highly than others, but also to see which ideas were subject to the greatest conflict. The evaluators may then focus their discussion on those ideas in which there was the greatest disagreement amongst the evaluators, and reduce the amount of time spent on ideas that all parties rated high or low. This allows a large number of ideas to be evaluated quickly and objectively, with the most valuable ideas moving forward to the full NPD process. Our solution also enables use of the idea portfolio to assess how able the team will be to achieve their strategy in the long term. By looking into the number of ideas that are being submitted for primary target markets the team can step up the ideal level of support for ideation in those areas.

Better Resource Allocation

Ensuring success by eliminating bottlenecks and aligning resources with the company’s strategic priorities and making resource requests visible.

Flexible all-in-one solution

Our solution makes it possible to model the processes that are really used or intended to be used, supporting all of the projects in a companies’ portfolio, not just their traditional Stage-Gate projects. Inogate’s solution supports several processes models and logics at the same time, even post-launch processes that feed back to the front-end processes to complete the innovation cycle. Our solution supports unlimited different process models. Each model will have different tasks/deliverables according to the type of process and their objectives. And much more, inside each process there can be optional packs of deliverables so that the project uniqueness can be kept. On top of that, each user, depending or their role and permissions will have different deliverables, projects and processes active.

Improved communication and visibility

Reduces the time spent tracking project status, reporting on projects, sharing work products and collaborating on tasks. Through personalized dashboards and reports, the leadership team can constantly monitor the composition and health of the product portfolio and rapidly communicate course adjustments to address internal and external changes. This immediately increases the visibility of this content for executive decision-makers as well as other parties across functions. In our solution is always very clear who as to fill in what. Each single deliverable has a clear view that everyone can see is their own assigned work. Users can opt between a Gantt view as well as the traditional Staged–gated view.

Help reducing time-to-market

Increasing efficiency by reducing the time required creating deliverables, start-up projects and access information. Lower administrative time and burden is achieved through information reuse as each data that is submitted once in the system can be used automatically in every deliverable, preventing people from having to insert the same information twice or more. Because our solution follows a workflow, it is always clear what is the task to be done at each time and who is the person/group supposed to do so. There are also clear metrics that will define when the Project is ready to move on to the next Stage or not. It will also send an alert to inform project managers when a deliverable is not being worked on or when it is incomplete, some days before the deadline.

Peace of mind

Our solution is a role based software meaning that each role accesses different information. Moreover, users are grouped in groups that may not have access to each others information. This means that the combination of roles and groups give a big range of possibilities to define what each person is able to see or not. A powerful set of alerts and notifications are not only used for keeping everyone informed about the process but also about business performance (business triggered notifications). Also, in our solution only the System Administrator and the Process Designer role are able to modify the process or the deliverables templates and stages and any other deliverable can be blocked to prevent further changes. Integrated document version’s management guarantees that all the versions of a document are automatically saved, by date/time and are stored for traceability. Also “Document routing and approval” automatically sends a document for serial or parallel approval, to predefined persons, if needed. The system records the time at each person has given their approval. One can always see the approving and routing history. Only our solution enables you to design and implement your own New Product Development best practices. Systematically and efficiently steer ideas through your innovation lifecycle, customized to your own view of the world. Use pre- configured stages such as “new,”“in process,” and “under review” – or create your own. All these features can be customized and linked to multiple pre-defined models, including Stage-GateTM, PACETM and others And you can enjoy simplicity at the start and sophistication only when you need it. You don’t have to use all of its capabilities at the outset. Start simply, explore new capabilities for greater levels of process maturity, according to your strategy and pace of transformation without any kind of new implementation or customization. Solves the gaps in the Process Governance & provides ownership and control to the Business Process Manager while pleasing IT and senior management.

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