When it comes to innovation one of the most important cogs in the process is good project management. Project managers are routinely paid very well and for good reason – their job is difficult, stressful, and a lot hangs on their performance.

A big fallacy in innovation is thinking it’s just some kind of free for all where everyone just does what they want and as long as they ship something on some made up deadline everything is okay.

This couldn’t be more wrong. Innovation requires firm deadlines. We’ve briefly discussed this on the site but in this article we’re going to go full swing. Let’s get started.

The Structure

Projects and people can be structured in a variety of ways. Alan Webb lists many of them in Project Management for Successful Product Innovation. These structures range from matrix models through semi-autonomous to even collaborative. His book goes into vast amounts of detail and is worth the read.

We’re not going to cover the specifics of each model here – we simply don’t have room to even begin talking about any of these structures.

Planning

When it comes to project management few tools are better than the Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a visual representation of the project and the timeline it’s on.

Gantt charts show subsets and nested jobs as well as requirements which makes them a genuinely useful tool to have.

For more complex projects managers will want systems with more potential. These will include network based planning, network analysis, resource scheduling, project costing and monitoring, and the ability to generate reports on these things.

Planning is beyond important for ventures and innovations because it keeps everything adhering to a solid schedule. Without good planning nobody knows what to do and when to have it finished. Proper planning goes a long way in making this a smooth process.

Time and Money Considerations

Shenhar, Shenhar, and Dvir in Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach To Successful Growth tell the story of the Sydney Opera House. The original plan in the 1950s had a budget of $7 million Australian dollars and a schedule of five years. Though numerous setbacks and issues the opera house was completed 18 years later at a final price tag of more than $100 million Australian dollars.

One might look at this and say that it was a failure – and certainly on many levels it was. Both time and budget were blown many times out of proportion and yet in the end, it doesn’t matter. Millions of people visit the opera house each year and it generates millions of dollars for the Sydney economy.

Projects can be judged as a success even if they blow past time and money, the two most important factors of all. With that said, project managers should always strive to deliver projects on time and on budget. It’s one of the most important things possible.

It turns out that faulty project starts happens quite often. The Ford Taurus is one of the most successful cars Ford has ever built yet the project manager of the first generation Taurus was demoted because the project was finished three months later than scheduled.

Windows suffered delay after delay but obviously has gone on to become an enormously successful product. Before the Mac was Apple’s Lisa computer which was an abject failure. Apple later said that a large part of why the Mac succeeded was because of Lisa’s failure.

There is a difference between project management success and firm success. In terms of project management the order is:

1. Did it get finished?
2. Did it get finished on time and on budget?

If your company can answer yes to both of those questions then you’re doing fantastic. #2 can be violated and your company can still get a win and obviously if the project never completes then the whole thing was a dismal failure.

As a manager you should always strive to get your projects completed on schedule but in the event that your launch is late odds are it won’t be the end. As long as the project is completed there is normally little to worry about.

From here you can look into the two books listed in this article. They’re both fantastic on the subject and can help you learn a lot. When it comes to managing your innovations we do recommend hiring someone specifically for that role. As a manager you no doubt will be adept at managing but a skilled project manager can make your launch that much easier.