Trying to manage innovation projects with traditional project management software is like forcing a square peg into a round hole.
You can push harder. You can sand down the edges. You can pretend it fits. But innovation doesn’t move in straight lines, sit neatly inside one function, or follow a predictable script. It expands, pivots, splinters into parallel paths, and pulls in teams across the enterprise, while its impact cascades across strategy, resources, and growth targets.
When you cram that living, breathing ecosystem into tools built for tidy, linear execution, you don’t make innovation easier to manage… you make it harder to see, harder to align, and harder to scale.
At some point, every innovation leader faces the same challenge: translating the intricate, interconnected web of innovation projects into the language of business. Innovation managers need clear priorities and rationale, so they can focus on activities that actually contribute to strategic targets. And business stakeholders need clarity and demonstrated results, or they’ll shift the resources you need elsewhere.
Other departments can easily measure progress and demonstrate results with generalized project management solutions, but those tools weren’t built to handle outliers like innovation projects. Progress in the innovation pipeline is inherently difficult to measure, and the work itself doesn’t neatly fit into a checklist of linear tasks.
That’s why traditional project management solutions are a trap for innovation leaders. They come preconfigured to be compatible with a range of basic project types, like a shape sorting puzzle. That’s fine for other departments, because their work fits those concepts of what a project is and how it relates to other tasks. They come in the basic shapes the tools were built for. But these specific ideas about what a project is will immediately create problems when applied to your innovation portfolio, where your process is unique to your enterprise.
As you attempt to map out projects, the software’s limitations cause you to misrepresent your work, provide an incomplete picture of the work being done, and/or create time-consuming workarounds to make the innovation pipeline decipherable to stakeholders. Your innovation projects don’t fit the tool, so you end up working around your software, not through it .
If you find this frustrating, you’re not alone.
Let’s look at how to fix it.
In this article, we’ll examine:
- Why innovation projects don’t fit the “box” of traditional project management solutions
- The fundamental problem with trying to use generalized project management tools for innovation projects
- How this informs our approach to innovation project management software
Let’s start with the reasons why general-purpose project management solutions aren’t right for your innovation projects.
Why innovation projects are different
It’s easy to assume that tracking progress and representing work on innovation projects should be like any other aspect of the business. But innovation projects are inherently more complicated than other projects. Their relationships to each other and even who is responsible for them are anything but straightforward.
Here’s why innovation isn’t a good fit for standard project management solutions.
The sliding scope of innovation work
A “single” innovation project is typically part of a family of dozens or even hundreds of interrelated projects, and the project hierarchy doesn’t necessarily ladder up to a single overarching parent. Some subprojects may be wholly dependent on a parent project, while others may be more like fully-fledged projects themselves.
That may sound like a scenario typical project management can handle. But you already know: the scope of an innovation project isn’t just messy. It often changes.
Commercializing a new product, or a new variant of an existing product, could involve developing original materials or formulas, testing a series of new ingredients or processes, reconfiguring manufacturing lines, acquiring and launching new partnerships, creating promotion campaigns, and a slew of other related projects. And the inception of a new product or initiative can occur at any one of these junctures, with major milestones in one project opening or closing the door to entire branches of innovation projects in your portfolio.
Say you successfully develop a gluten-free recipe for a flagship product. Or a more durable material you needed for a new product. While this research and development work may have been tied to a specific innovation project, success here could enable you to explore gluten-free or more durable versions of other products in your catalog. Or perhaps through the R&D process, you learn that the original product isn’t compatible with the new material or ingredients, but you have other products that would be better candidates.
The scope of a single innovation project can change multiple times throughout the innovation lifecycle. And you shouldn’t have to redefine or reclassify a project every time new developments arise.
The matrixed innovation environment
Innovation roles are distributed across teams, departments, and business units throughout an enterprise. This matrixed role structure means that innovation projects themselves are matrixed, with a single project having multiple subprojects and corresponding project managers in different parts of the business, based on the needs of the project. Depending on the scope of a project and how your organization is structured, a single project can be a shared responsibility across multiple territories or even continents.
This division of responsibility and ownership makes complete sense for your organization, but can get extremely challenging (or even impossible) to manage on a traditional project management platform. You want to accurately reflect the matrixed environment of innovation work, but you have to do it within a framework that doesn’t understand it or allow for it. You may need to compromise by creating duplicates of projects or assigning them to a single role, even when that’s not how you’re actually operating.
Intricate, sprawling interdependencies
When an innovation project succeeds, fails, encounters a delay, or gets ahead of schedule, the status change ripples throughout your portfolio, impacting numerous other projects as well as the objectives and key results (OKRs) they’re connected to.
Traditional project management tools can handle in-line changes—but can rarely be configured to automatically account for every shift in the enterprise that could affect them. Innovation management operates on a vastly different scale: not only can projects affect each other across territories and business units, but even the nature of these interdependencies themselves can change. One project being put on hold can impact upstream, downstream, and adjacent projects all at once.
Even seemingly unrelated innovation work needs to share the same supply of specialists like chemists, developers, or engineers, who often have limited control over or visibility into how long each “task” will take. For more closely connected work, specific milestones of a project can be directly tied to the initiation or termination of other projects. A status change could mean giving the green light to a string of subprojects, or trigger pre-planned scenarios for alternative paths to a desired outcome. Maybe your new product isn’t viable. Now it can’t contribute to your market share goals, and your new path forward has just become the top priority for the entire innovation pipeline to keep those goals on track.
That’s not how traditional project management works, so its tools aren’t designed to accommodate ad hoc adjustments to your entire portfolio—or even to see a project within the context of your portfolio (and when it comes to innovation, the portfolio itself can be difficult to accurately define). Between the changing scope, the matrixed environment, and intricate independencies, you can’t effectively manage all your innovation projects without some degree of strategic portfolio management. And that’s well beyond the scope of traditional project management.
Why traditional project management tools can’t truly handle enterprise innovation projects
The problem isn’t just that innovation projects are different. The problem is that because they’re different, traditional project management software (PMS) doesn’t facilitate them very well. And you create more work for yourself and/or misrepresent the work you’re doing by shoehorning innovation projects into a solution that wasn’t built for them. Here’s where the limitations of PMS cause problems for innovation project management.
Rigid project predefinitions
Traditional PMS is designed to streamline the process of getting things done. And the more project configurations a project management system supports out-of-the-box, the more cumbersome it becomes for the vast majority of projects. Providing too many options makes the software less useful for common use cases. So understandably, these general-purpose solutions trade flexibility for convenience, supporting only the most common types of projects and basic project hierarchies.
Need a parent project with some child projects? No problem. Need an entire family tree—no, a family forest—of innovation projects with grandchildren, great grandchildren, in-laws, and step-nephews? That’s not going to work. While complex project hierarchies and intricate nesting frameworks are commonplace in innovation portfolio management, it’s unusual enough in general project management that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a software solution that supports the way your enterprise’s innovation projects work.
Traditional project management structures help people organize their project in useful ways, assembling the basic project components into a clear system anyone can follow. But you already have a system. And so these same structures that are intended to help organize projects suddenly impose limitations that only exist within the software. Each innovation project is deeply intertwined with your portfolio, but that will often get lost in the predefined structures and project types the software supports.
Strict project attribution models
A traditional project management system makes it easy to see the tasks that belong to specific people, departments, teams, or business units. Every project has an owner, and when multiple parties are involved, that usually needs to be addressed with subprojects. But if projects exist in as matrixed an environment as your innovation pipeline, you need more sophisticated attribution models.
Your options there are going to vary widely, and while you’ll have more choices with a project portfolio management software, you’re not likely to find one that supports your enterprise’s innovation portfolio process out-of-the-box. And you certainly don’t want to reconfigure your innovation processes just to make them more compatible with a tool.
Limited interdependency visibility
Since traditional project management has trouble representing the complex relationships between innovation projects and the broader portfolio, these generalized solutions can only give you a limited view of how innovation projects depend on and affect one another. You may be able to see how a group or individual project affects others, but when a project status change impacts other work, the software can’t connect them in meaningful ways.
That means you won’t get automated alerts. You can’t automate approvals to trigger based on changes to another project. And you won’t have visibility into the implications for growth targets, constraints, or OKRs.
As you explore your innovation portfolio or look to provide clear status updates, you’ll want filtered views of specific project types, work in particular territories or bespoke programs, and other categories—but traditional software can’t facilitate these.
Most importantly, this limited visibility into interdependencies makes project management software useless for a critical innovation process: scenario modeling. As you plan contingencies and compare opportunities, you need to be intimately familiar with how projects relate to each other and the portfolio. What-if scenarios are only helpful when you can see the full implications of a decision, including resource conflicts and dependencies. And you should be able to do that from the tool you’re using to model and track work throughout the innovation pipeline.
The fundamental flaw
All of the problems with using traditional project management solutions for innovation trace back to the same underlying issue: these tools are built with preconceived concepts of what projects are and how your enterprise manages them. They come with cookie-cutter frameworks for how projects relate to each other and what it means to complete a project.
And that’s why they create more problems than they solve for innovation managers. Every enterprise is different. Every innovation process is unique. And these concrete definitions around projects will become obstacles to your success.
When you use a system that doesn’t reflect the way your enterprise runs, stakeholders can’t extract everything they need to know about the innovation portfolio from looking at the system. People have to make up for the software’s capability gaps. Someone has to translate your enterprises’ processes into a representation that works in the system, and vice versa. Practically, this means that more innovation labor is spent not on the actual work of innovation, but on running information between teams and stakeholders.
This intermediary human layer may require dedicated roles or significant time investment. Every update may need external summary documents or presentations to clarify what’s missing in the software. And this reliance on manual processes introduces the risk of human errors, conflicting data, and outdated information.
Choosing a traditional PMS or portfolio project management software (PPMS) means committing to this additional work and accepting the risk that your innovation portfolio and your strategy will be misrepresented and misunderstood.
But you don’t have to settle for that. You can strategically manage your innovation portfolio and accurately represent it to stakeholders—just not with a traditional PMS or PPMS.
Manage your innovation projects with Accolade
Innovation projects are inherently different. To manage them effectively, you need tools that are inherently different, too.
Accolade is the only solution designed to help you strategically manage an enterprise portfolio of innovation projects. It’s purpose-built to empower innovation managers with the visibility they need to oversee and report on projects in the context of the innovation portfolio. Here’s where it shines.
Accolade is hyperconfigurable
When you model your innovation portfolio in Accolade, you’re not limited to preconceived notions of what a project is. You define what a project looks like, how it’s structured, what progress looks like, and what it means to complete work. Instead of selecting from a narrow list of project types, you define the types of projects your enterprise takes on, and the processes and workflows each type follows. As the scope of projects change, Accolade lets you define how it changes without breaking the system, creating redundant projects, or requiring workarounds.
No one has to act as a go-between to fill in the blanks or clarify how your innovation process actually works because you have total control over what it looks like in the system. We work with you every step of the way to fine-tune your solution until it’s a perfect fit for your portfolio.
Accolade recognizes interdependencies and their implications
No matter how intricately connected your innovation projects are, Accolade lets you model their relationships and reflect how changes to one project impact the rest of the portfolio. You define the types of relationships between projects and how each of them relates to strategic objectives. Make a change to any project in your innovation portfolio, and you can see the change ripple across your portfolio in real time—no manual updates needed.
Accolade lets you manage your innovation portfolio as a true growth function
Accolade doesn’t just empower you to model your innovation portfolio. Because you can model the entire portfolio and its intricacies, you can optimize your portfolio for growth in ways that simply weren’t feasible before. At any given time, you can visually trace delays and conflicts back to their sources, wherever they exist in your portfolio. And since you can see every interdependency and accurately represent each project’s relationship to OKRs, you can explore unlimited “what-if” scenarios to make the choices that have the greatest impact on growth.
This is true growth innovation: an innovation management philosophy that helps our customers get significantly more mileage out of their innovation portfolio strategies. A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study™ on Accolade revealed that the average Accolade customer is able to launch one major net-new product every five years, achieve a 15% faster time to market, a 10% decrease in project management budget, and a 1% increase in profit margin from product enhancements.
With Accolade, stakeholders won’t just see the progress you make in the innovation pipeline. They’ll see their investments in innovation as an essential part of your organization’s ongoing growth.
Want to see what your portfolio could look like in Accolade? Book a demo of Accolade and discover why it’s the only true solution for strategic innovation portfolio project management.