Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Keeping Promises

NPI for Life: Collaborate for Better Products

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personal favorite, “but it’s strategic,” will all be excuses why the product must be rushed to market without adequate governance and preparation.

And there are other structural reasons why this last minute rush occurs. Key people are expected to be able to support several high priority projects at one time. Key people get pulled away to fight fires (and remember rewarding that type of behavior simply encourages arsonists…), and people with essential input may often watch and wait to ensure that a project looks like a winner before participating.

These are all signs and symptoms of a dysfunctional company.

These behaviors must be fixed first before any new NPI process can be expected to succeed. Sadly, we find anti-progress forces present in just about every company. Basically, no progress can occur until a company faces up to its issues and the executives commit to their solution. At the Spring 2007 TeleManagement World in Nice, Barbara Lancaster felt that executives from service providers and telecom vendors were committing to this change. What they must understand is that facing the problem is only the necessary first step. Cultures must also change. A success-oriented company will be capable of applying success-oriented disciplines – and smart enough to recognize them.

Subversion is deadly, but even more difficult to correct is today’s general organizational structure ,which, while not “bad” in itself, leads to non-productive results for the full company. Many authors, yours included, have written and spoken at length on this.

“The problem with service creation environments in the telecoms sector is… Business and IT are essentially at odds and working to their own agendas rather than those of the customer or the business as a whole. The net effect of this disconnect is that unique relationships between all of the departments involved must be forged every time a new service is created. This makes the creation of that service an unnecessarily long and complex process…. not only do the different departments not fully appreciate each other’s capabilities, they don’t use a common language to communicate and they also don’t have a standard set of components with which to work.” [Brian Naughton, VP Architecture and Strategy for Axiom Systems in Pipeline Publications, Volume 3, Issue 12]

A governance team must be perpetually vigilant.

This represents a significant advancement in the conceptualization of a service – that services can be composed and delivered in very short timeframes.

Properly support “Best Practices”

In an article, we can only touch upon a few of these business practices that can be applied by success-oriented companies:

Align activities tightly to the corporate strategy: Not magic; no Elves and the Shoemaker fairy tales here. As in LTC’s methodology and Kaplan and Norton’s Strategic-Focused NPI, turning strategy into action requires: Specifying the desired outcomes and the acceptable means of achieving them. Laying out the activities required to accomplish this goal. Measuring exactly only that which is carefully aligned with the goals and activities of the strategy. Putting in place conformance practices for regulation and oversight. Rating everyone who participates based on process success and outcome quality. Providing for a continuous cycle of learning and growth that identifies and leverages intangible assets such as knowledge sharing. Defining and planning for sustained change. Motivating success based on rewards for meeting desired outcomes. As with creating a business case, promises made should be promises kept. Management must keep a tally of what performance is expected and hold the post mortems after product release that measure accumulated success.
Creating a Real & Rigorous Business Case: Unfortunately, many managers do not know how to create or even read a business case. For them, a business case is simply a scenario of how the product will be used. Instead a formal business case is a description of how the new product will make a difference for the company. There are specific approaches and technologies that are used to provide as accurate a prediction of this difference as possible. For now, we stress that business cases must be based on honest numbers and not written to spin and justify a pre-determined decision. The business case is not just done before everything starts to get a budget allocated. While a business

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