One-size-fits-all is great in concept. Do you like that shirt/jacket/hat? You’re in luck, we always have your size. The underlying problem is it will probably fit like king-size sheets on a twin mattress. Similarly, when enterprises endeavor to innovate, balancing resources across cascading departments and dependencies requires oversight that feels more tailored than one-size-fits-all.
The world of enterprise innovation is intricate. Resource management poses a considerable challenge. Your projects are highly matrixed, spanning multiple departments and relying on people who report elsewhere. This structure exists within a web of interdependencies in which each project is essentially a client, serviced by internal contractors with competing P&L demands. All of this is compounded by the fact that so much about innovation is unpredictable, making it difficult to anticipate the time you need from specialized talent and teams.
These challenges are compounded by the traditional tools, which treat the enterprise as a series of silos. Your innovation PMO may manage your pipeline in one system, while the critical engineers and experts you rely on are isolated within their own departmental solutions, working on their own cadences. This decentralization means that you’re constantly flying blind, unable to see the backlogs and conflicting priorities outside of your field of view. This creates a massive competition for shared resources and makes it increasingly difficult to track and negotiate resource trade-offs.
How Traditional Resource Management Tools Lead to Breakdowns
Traditional resource management tools are built to simplify and standardize the processes of managing people, equipment, and facilities. But innovation demands complexity and customization. Rigid, one-size-fits-all tools cannot accommodate the unique ways innovation enterprises manage resources. Even “flexible” enterprise-grade resource management tools tend to cause innovation managers headaches in a few specific ways:
- They’re unable to map resource roles to your enterprise
Innovation organizations need to track nuanced, enterprise-specific roles. This includes identifying resources based on factors like internal department, status, and lab access. When tools make this kind of complexity difficult, it becomes impossible to manage talent effectively. - They fail to capture resource attributes
In addition to defining roles, these tools can’t always capture the custom attributes and metadata needed to determine capability. You may need to know not only an engineer’s experience, but also their certifications and potentially conflicting operational duties. Understanding someone’s specialized skills, clearances, tenure, and availability is vital to making smart allocation decisions. When you cannot tag resources with this kind of data, you’re going to struggle to forecast capacity. That means you’re risking underutilization, burnout, or maybe even both. - They lack flexibility in defining capacity and dependencies
Generic tools are task-based and require defined hours. But how do you measure the capacity of a senior chemist whose task is largely open-ended research? How do you measure their workload in a research project when they’re focused on solving a specific problem, and not logging predictable hours? On top of that, these tools struggle to track the ripple effects when a chemist is delayed on a project, which can impact the entire portfolio’s timeline.
The Consequence: Blind Allocation and Pipeline Bottlenecks
The inflexibility of generic tools creates critical operational problems across the entire portfolio, not just the innovation portfolio. The first issue is a complete lack of visibility into availability. PMOs don’t have much insight into the types of resources available. This blindness means that resource allocation is a guessing game, leaving innovation projects to compete with each other.
Lack of availability visibility leads to lack of utilization visibility, making it nearly impossible to track specialized talent across projects and business units accurately. Without this data, you can’t tell if critical talent is being optimized or if they’re being overused and burned out.
The second major breakdown is a crippling lack of dependency management. Traditional resource management tools are oblivious to the complexity of the innovation portfolio. Delaying a testing facility for Project A by one week can create a ripple effect that delays the launch of Project B by a month or more. Because generic tools can’t account for these complex resources and project relationships, you can’t accurately assess the consequences of an allocation decision until the project is completely stalled out.
Moving Beyond Resource Management to Resource Planning
You don’t simply want to manage what you have; you want to plan for the resources you will need, when you need them. Relying on a generic resource planning tool to manage a complex innovation portfolio is like trying to diagnose a multi-organ illness from a patient’s X-ray. The problems you need to solve are systemic and interconnected, but you’re using a tool designed to examine a single isolated piece. You need a platform that is configurable to your specific resource demands and organizational DNA.
Resource Management Built for Your Enterprise DNA
Innovation is inherently resource-intensive, demanding specialized talent and budget across the organization. Traditional resource management tools struggle to account for all the intricacies. Accolade is an end-to-end innovation management tool that provides structure for managing innovation from concept to launch.
Where generic resource management tools choke on complexity, the Accolade advantage is that you can structure resources the way your enterprise actually operates. You don’t have to adapt your process to the tool; the tool adapts to your complex internal DNA, solving the resource management issues.
1. Eliminating Matrixing Problems
The system allows you to map resource entities, roles, and teams to match your organizational structure. You get to define what a “resource” is within the context of your organization, whether it is a specialist engineer, dedicated time in a shared lab facility, or reserved time on a manufacturing line. This capability allows you to track talent and capacity across the entire matrix by capability and role, and you’re not limited to the hierarchies and budget codes of the org chart.
2. Solving the Visibility Issue
Accolade solves the visibility issue by allowing you to define resource attributes, so you can tag specialists with the information that is most strategically and practically relevant. This includes critical skills, certifications, and availability constraints, turning your talent pool into a centralized inventory. This means you can stop the guesswork and start planning your capacity predictably, while monitoring resource use across the enterprise to keep talent productive and engaged rather than burned out and frustrated.
3. Improving Interdependency Management
Accolade is designed to handle interdependency management by allowing you to define the relationships between projects and resources. You can create custom entities, labels, and conditions so that your resource management system reflects how your innovation organization actually works, even for the most complex interdependencies. Accolade visualizes and manages resource allocation based on these relationships, ensuring that conflicts are flagged and the right people are tagged when a change will impact their area of responsibility.
Innovation Needs More Than Generic Resource Management Tools
The simple truth is that traditional tools are just not built for the world of enterprise innovation. They require simplifying the elements that make each enterprise unique, which inevitably leads to resource conflicts, bottlenecks, and stalled growth. To turn your innovation pipeline into a predictable, streamlined growth engine, you need a solution that can be custom-built for your complexities. Accolade provides the hyperconfigurability to map your organization’s distinctive resources, orchestrate interdependencies, and master resource planning.
Want to see how this could work for your enterprise?
Book a demo of Accolade and see how Accolade can help you manage your innovation resources.