Why do long term projects so often extend beyond their deadlines? There's nothing more frustrating in innovation management, or any project management for that matter, than schedule creep. Is it possible that we always work with the time we're given and then overestimate what is possible?
There's a great quote out there that says something like "we tend to overestimate what is possible in 3-5 years and underestimate what is possible in 7-10 years." That might be true of scope but it's even worse when it comes to schedule. We see that most 3 year projects take 5 years, most 5 year projects take 7-10 years and the 10 year project simply never arrives.
This is why we build projects and horizons around readiness instead of time. Time is a resource and can be purchased, compromised and augmented. Readiness is about choices and there's only one rule.
"You are only as ready as your lowest level of readiness."
So what defines readiness? You might have heard of the 'technology readiness level' scale, or TRL for short. This was a gift to all of us from NASA to help teams navigate the massively complex task of vehicles departing our atmosphere. We see technical readiness as one of three levels, and too often we see it treated as the 'only' consideration by too many teams.
Our three readiness levels are:
Skill Ready (aka technical readiness and the need for feasibility markers to be met)
Will Ready (aka market readiness and the need for desirability criteria to be met)
System Ready (aka operational readiness and the need for viability tests to be complete)
In our own painful experience we learnt the hard way: we had great solutions and quality consumer 'data' that confirmed a need, only to see total and expensive failure shortly after launch. Sound familiar? System readiness for ambitious plans is the hardest thing to get right. On several occasions we confused what we had permission to do with what we were qualified to do. There's a difference, and if you've read about our approach to defining your UAM (unique addressable market) this is heavily related when it comes to defining your portfolio.
If you take your entire project portfolio and assets and score them under these terms from 0 to 9, then you can instantly generate a 3 horizon view of your investments. Where all readiness levels score 7 and above, these projects are horizon 1. If one or two scores are below 7, these are your horizon 2 projects. And any project with all scores lower than 7 resides in horizon 3.
In case it's not clear from this, just because a project is technically ready does not mean that the project is ready. Far too many projects waste time and resources on this without understanding the importance of switching attention to more immature readiness levels. We implore you to only invest in your lowest readiness level.
We are always astounded by how consistently strong internal alignment is woefully imbalanced with external validation. This is often the cheapest and fastest step to take. Build a world that can be minimally experienced (we're sure you've already heard of MVP) and then get it into the hearts, minds and hands of someone who might attempt to act or transact in a way that validates all your hard work (pretty sure you've also heard of product-market fit).
We're not trying to reinvent the wheel with these methods, but we have discovered that the framework can be powerful in the rationalisation of projects. It also avoids the trap of creating future concepts that remain just that, a concept that never evolves beyond the status of taking shareholders on an intellectual vacation.
We have successfully taken portfolios down from as many as 700 individual projects, either sitting precariously too close to business-as-usual or agonisingly too far from commercial reality, to 100 or less (for a large corporate) with a clear red thread and appropriate proportional representation connecting each project across horizons. The first horizon has many steps towards the last, and constant viability testing is usually the new muscle to build.
If you look at your list of projects and they are taking too long, ROI is not clear and the consumer is primed but not activated, then we would be delighted to help.