How to Set Launch Schedules You Can Actually Trust

“T-minus, uhhh, whenever until launch …”

Not the awe-inspiring countdown you’d expect from NASA before propelling a ship through mankind’s heavenly limits. Nor is it the countdown you should tolerate from your enterprise before propelling its latest innovation onto the market. Launch uncertainty is no way to meet your business aspirations. 

It’s true, innovation is notoriously unpredictable. It’s hard to know for sure what ideas will emerge from your R&D teams, how much they’ll cost to execute, and how they’ll perform in the market. 

Unfortunately, it’s also hard for enterprises to know exactly how long it will take to finish a new project. In fact, in a survey of 300 innovation leaders, 83% of respondents said that they miss their launch dates at least sometimes. Another study found that nearly half of all product launches are delayed by a month or more, and those delayed launches are less likely to meet their internal targets.

And that’s just the projects that actually cross the finish line. It’s not uncommon for some “zombie projects” to drag on unfinished for years beyond the date they were supposed to go live. 

Because of innovation’s unpredictable nature, it can be easy to dismiss this problem as unavoidable: “That’s just how it goes.” But doing so means accepting problems that can be solved and mitigated, and foregoing the benefits of doing so. 

That’s why Wellspring commissioned Forrester to research how our highest-performing enterprise customers approach their innovation strategy and pipelines. What it found became the basis of our growth innovation framework, and companies that use this approach have reported surprising results to their pipeline throughput: 

• Growth innovation gives enterprises an average increase in throughput by one significant new product launch every five years.

• Growth innovation accelerates time to market by an average of 15%. 

Launch schedules don’t have to be merely aspirational. You can set realistic innovation timelines and stick to them.

It requires a radical change of innovation management methodology, but it’s worth it.

4 Ways Launch Lag Hurts the Enterprise

Launch lag is a common malady in enterprise innovation, but all too often it’s accepted as inherent to the trade. When launch dates consistently get pushed back, the enterprise’s ability to innovate suffers:

• Launch lag delays ROI. Every extra week a project stays in development is another week’s worth of revenue it’s not earning in the market. To make matters worse, extra development time also means the project is using unplanned resources, which means it needs to perform even better in order for the returns to justify the investment.

• Launch lag disrupts your portfolio strategy. Your organization plans new products in context of both the market as a whole and specific competitors. Launch delays interfere with that strategy, and when delays become normal, the entire new product portfolio strategy becomes less dependable.

• Launch lag upends capacity planning. Business leaders (should) allocate resources across the portfolio in a way that allows each project to get what it needs when it needs it. But when projects stay in production longer than expected, they consume or dilute resources that were planned for other projects. This causes those projects to take longer too, and the vicious cycle repeats.

• Launch lag normalizes bad estimates. Beyond the problems listed above, once a culture accepts that delayed timelines are “just how it is,” deadlines lose their power of urgency. The more late projects an innovation group develops, the more desensitized to delay the group becomes.

Fortunately, enterprises have used growth innovation methodology to turn this around.

How Growth Innovation Cures Launch Lag

Growth innovation is the innovation management philosophy that sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome and manages every step of the innovation process accordingly. Implementing growth innovation (and reaping its true benefits) requires the enterprise to radically embrace three key principles, which we call the Growth Innovation Trifecta:

• Growth: Articulate measurable growth targets in the innovation strategy, and explicitly connect every innovation activity to at least one of those targets.

• Visibility: Centralize all innovation management data in one place and give every stakeholder access to the information they need. 
  Orchestration: Make every decision in the context of a portfolio-level growth strategy.

• Growth innovation enterprises apply these principles to every innovation management discipline in the organization: strategy, portfolio management, front-end innovation, and the development pipeline. Implementing these principles gives you and your organization the means to set realistic schedules for the innovation pipeline and keep them.
  

1. Planning Launch Schedules Based on Historical Data

One of the key reasons organizations miss launch dates is that the schedule wasn’t reasonable to begin with. This is understandable; it’s difficult to know how long it takes to do something if you’ve never done it before. But growth innovation gives the enterprise a way to mitigate this problem: it allows you to use your historical project data to project how long it actually takes to complete projects.

The second principle of growth innovation calls for organizations to make all of its own innovation data visible to the people who need it. This includes historical data (both expected and actuals) on how long projects have taken, how much they cost, and how they performed in the market.

Using this data, business leaders can model schedules based on how similar undertakings have progressed. They can set launch date expectations that track with real-life performance, and if they want projects to proceed more rapidly, they can adjust resource allocation to expedite them.

2. Setting Priorities Based on Growth Potential

Lack of prioritization is a common problem in enterprise innovation. Innovation projects aren’t usually ranked against each other in terms of priority, and most stakeholders can’t explicitly tie a given task directly to the business’s overall growth objectives, much less agree on which projects should receive preference when time and resources are slim. This makes the innovation pipeline particularly vulnerable to the tyranny of urgency. And when everything is treated like a high priority, nothing really is.

Growth innovation methodology changes this. Enterprises that take this approach connect every innovation initiative directly to at least one of the company’s growth objectives. Projects are then assigned priority based on which objectives they support and how much perceived growth will result if they’re completed. Each project is assigned measurable targets (including milestones and launch dates) that connect to overall objectives, and resources are allocated to projects according to priority.

3. Consistently Calibrating the Launch Pipeline

There are always a host of moving pieces when it comes to enterprise innovation. Unless you’ve aggregated your innovation data in one management system (such as Accolade), it’s impossible to keep them moving forward in perfect harmony, let alone monitor their statuses in real time.

But once you’ve established a system that makes all your innovation data visible to the stakeholders who need it and you’ve tied every innovation initiative to at least one company growth objective, the whole pipeline becomes more manageable. You can see which projects are on track, which ones are falling behind, and where the pipeline is getting clogged. Furthermore, you can measure both pipeline progress and new product performance against strategic growth targets to see how reality lines up with your expectations.

Growth innovation companies do this regularly. They’ll hold recurring, cross-departmental review meetings to gauge innovation progress, spot potential snags and delays, and make adjustments accordingly, with the entire portfolio in mind. This means no projects get overlooked or hung out to dry, and high-priority initiatives get every opportunity to launch on time.

Stop the Launch Lag With Accolade

Data visibility is key to reducing launch lag and completing projects on time. If the right stakeholders have access to all your current and historical innovation data, then your innovation initiatives can be set up for success throughout the innovation lifecycle: from strategy to development to launch.

Getting all that data in one place (and making it easy for people to find the specific data they need) requires a purpose-built system, which is why growth innovation enterprises choose Accolade as their innovation management software. Combined with growth innovation principles, Accolade’s data visualization, analytics, and collaboration tools have enabled enterprises to reduce time to market and increase innovation pipeline throughput, and we’d like to help you do so too.

If you’d like to see how Accolade can help your organization implement growth innovation methodology and get rid of launch lag, we’re happy to give you a tour. Book a demo with us today.