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One network equipment manufacturer was so sure that its gating process was inhibiting innovation and at the root of its declining market share, that it decided to remove all of those nasty checks and balances – just let the design teams get on with it. “They’ll know a good idea when they see one.” This Company decided that this dramatic shift in policy needed to be introduced to employees in an equally dramatic fashion. They had each Gate name etched into a large pane of glass. Then they lined up all of the glass Gates, and in a special meeting with its employees (and with real time video conferencing for those in other cities) proceeded to smash each of the offending Gates into smithereens. The executives were delighted with themselves.
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Unfortunately, many managers do not know how to create or even read a business case. |
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arguments over features, budgets, and resource allocations. They hated having promising new products run into glitches because some group “came out of the woodwork” with some business critical show stopper. And most of all, they hated to see their bonuses impacted by the lack of innovative and successful products hitting the market. Yet, we suggest that it was not the Gates that they hated…and that improving company-wide collaboration may have solved their problem much more successfully than smashing panes of glass. |
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The employees were stunned. While few would disagree that the gating process should be made simpler, none agreed that the improvement was to have no process at all.
“Introducing a new product can complicate workflow, add billing processes, alter ordering procedures, change support requirements, impact network traffic, etc. Advance discussions can enable each group to determine the most efficient way to support the product, instead of expensive scrambling and work-around at the last minute. The failure to coordinate and plan with all affected departments almost guarantees that, at best, your launch will be severely compromised and, at worst, that it will be an utter failure.” – LTC International, Speed Kills
The fortunes of this company did not improve, so it is reasonable to conclude that the old and stogy gating process was not to blame. The notion that “gates” must mean tedious oversight, or must lead to Analysis Paralysis was, and is, simply wrong.
But we have some sympathy for the frustration that these executives were expressing. They hated those interminable interdepartmental product planning marathons. They hated having to arbitrate
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There are numerous ways to get this balancing act right, and all of them require collaboration between all of the groups required to design, build, launch and maintain the new products. Leave any group out of the collaboration loop and they cannot be expected to be ready, on time, to effectively support the new product. This all seems very straight forward, doesn’t it? There is no reason for a product to fail to launch effectively, or fail to generate the profit margins anticipated in its business case – is there?
There are some loud and strident complaints about the way companies introduce products.
“In the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) solution space for large enterprises, the fact is that solution providers use solution design techniques that haven’t evolved meaningfully over the last 30 years.” [David Page, Chief Technology Officer for Nexagent, Solving the ICT Solutions Bottleneck in Pipeline Publications, Volume 3, Issue 12]
After 30 years, it seems highly likely that some major changes should be required. Things can certainly be done better.
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