Your growth hinges on how well you get new ideas, products and services to market, and manage them through their lifecycle.

These processes are the crux of customer experience and competitive advantage. They are also the most complex cost intensive, risk laden organizational processes.

Does it take too long for your new products or services to reach the the volumes you planned? Do your people struggle to juggle the trade offs, organizational disconnects and effective use of critical resources? Is execution is a series of mini crises? Do you have complex, uncertain work practices and processes with inefficient project methods?

As your organization has grown, it has probably accumulated work practices, processes and behaviors that no longer fit current organizational structures. Has it has become harder to get the organization to coordinate effectively to meet the everyday challenge of getting better products and services in the hands of more delighted customers?

This paper discusses the challenges you might face when overhauling and improving your product-to-market or idea to cash performance. Getting this right will have a high impact on your market performance and reduce the sources of organizational conflict, operational stress and the costs of DOME (Duplication, Omission, and Misguided Endeavor).

Concepts to Crises

Changes to products and services often reveal failings in organizational processes, systems, project methods and structures. The challenges shown in the panel trigger a crisis management response which deals with the symptom, rarely the cause. Crisis milestone management may be the 'stuff of life' for many but often turn into the 'millstones' that delay customer take-up.

These crises will often trigger 'mindshare' around well intentioned improvement initiatives. They may create a quick win, but not a BIG WIN. Initiatives are either too functionally focussed and fail to bridge hidden organizational barriers and process constraints in other functions, or they merely create new problems elsewhere in the value stream.

An overhaul requires you to take an end to end view of the process to convert and idea to cash and ensure the improvements are properly phased and sequenced.

Prioritizing Interventions

The scope, complexity and interconnected nature of your processes and practices could make prioritisation difficult. Problems reside amongst the processes for:

- Capturing, nurturing and selecting your ideas for development

- Executing development projects

- Integrating new products and services into the business and your channels to market

- Managing products and service though their lifecycle

The challenge is to ensure your hidden barriers to performance are revealed, and that root causes are fixed in the right order, and do this while running the day to day business.

Revealing the Hidden Problems

We facilitate workshops with people in the value chain to quickly surface perceived problems, and build buy in to fix them.

People need to identify the activities where they experience or witness these problems and identify their upstream causes. They need to easily 'see' or confidently describe how the organization creates and delivers value and understand the downstream effect of the work that they do.

A clearly understandable operational blueprint or map, that describes how the organization performs the activities and uses information to create and deliver new value, enables people to become very objective about cause and effect. This helps change vague or uncertain problems into objective and tangible 'problem statements'.

The next step is to define root causes and the high impact interventions that eliminate multiple problems and have most impact on the business goals.

We frequently find that this exposes any misalignment between strategy and operational plans. Differences of interpretation of strategy and/or the execution plan, lack of agreement on what drives customer value and value to the business, confused accountabilities, conflicting goals, all extend the time to design and introduce new services, and erode their potential customer value.

We suggest you get a facilitator to resolve these leadership gaps or disconnects. This is critical to ensure the plans for new products and services are not built on quicksand.

Summary

Most organizations have huge opportunities to change the performance of their business by improving their 'concept to cash' or 'product to market' practices.

A well designed project to overhaul 'idea to market', 'product development', 'product change and management' work practices will identify the right targeted interventions to fix problem root causes and transform market performance.