Metrics Summit

ABSTRACT

The one-day seminar description below is the third day of GGI's three-day Metrics Summit.

R&D-Product Development Innovation Metrics Portfolios - Overview

Product development metrics now number in the hundreds and are constantly expanding to measure emerging areas.  Corporate-Level overall results are measured by R&D spending, revenue, profit, return on innovation, launch rate, productivity, and other aggregate measures.  Projects measure time-to-market [TTM], time-to-profit [TTP], break-even-time [BET], slip rate, target unit cost and price and profit accuracy, volume accuracy, and other business-oriented parameters.  The products that are the purpose of the projects get measured on requirements, specifications met and/or changed, first-pass success, number of builds, change orders, tests failed, and a host of more technically-oriented measures.  Functional areas and departments measure training levels, competency, output, budget compliance, and other metrics that are both business and technical in nature.  There are always "improvement projects" going on in organizations and these improvement efforts have their own measures.

If you are knee deep in metrics complexity and are searching for the right metrics dashboard for your organization, this "everything-on-the-table" seminar-workshop offers a logical repeatable method to sort through all the chaos and determines a "right set of metrics"  for R&D-Product Development.

R&D-Product Development Innovation Metrics Portfolios - Trends

Advanced Development and Intellectual Property measures are growing rapidly and infiltrating all areas of R&D-Product Development metrics dashboards in this era of innovation as a priority.  There is also rapid growth of metrics and measures to get at "pure innovation," the degree to which a product or an organization or a company is innovative and/or has the ability to systematically innovate.  Functional and technical competency measures are also becoming more important as the rate at which knowledge is growing on the planet doubles about every 1.2 years.  Knowledge Management is becoming an increasingly important subject.

R&D-Product Development Innovation Metrics Portfolios - Seminar Goal

The goal of this seminar-workshop on metrics for innovation environments and processes is to develop a set of metrics suitable for the measurement of R&D and/or Product Development as a whole.  The perspective taken is to create a dashboard for company CEOs, CTOs, and VPs of R&D or Product Development who have responsibility for the overall inputs and outputs from an R&D budget and R&D delivery organization.

R&D-Product Development Innovation Metrics Portfolios - Dashboard Framework

The Linked Metrics Portfolio® creates a scorecard or dashboard of metrics that provide for  the measurement of:  the overall inputs and output results from R&D-Product Development, the individual project, the products that result from the projects, the expertises that functions and departments must maintain and those they need for the future, and the improvement projects undertaken by the organization. 

R&D-Product Development Innovation Metrics Portfolios - Workshop

New material will be presented during this third seminar-workshop of the three-day Metrics Summit.  Advanced Development Intellectual Property, Competency Measurement, and Industry-Specific Measures (where appropriate) will get discussed.

If a partipating company brings three or more people to the Metrics Summit, they will have a dedicated table at the workshop where they will work on developing a portfolio of metrics exclusively for their company using the Linked Metrics Portfolio@.  If balanced scorecards or other metrics frameworks already exist within the company, GGI will show these company-teams how easy it is to integrate the R&D-Product Development dashboard with the overall corporate framework already in existence.

If one or two people come from a company, which is typically the majority of Summit participants, there will be group-wide discussion prior to beginning the workship.  Participants will be asked to choose the group in which they wish to participate. We typically form groups in one of two ways.  The first way is to group according the similarity of their company R&D strategies.  There are four basic categories of R&D strategy:  Innovators, Platform/Innovator-Extender, Balanced Portfolio, or Followers-Extenders-Reducers.  Grouping by strategy is often the best approach as the metrics that Innovators need are quite different than the metrics that a Balanced Portfolio company will need.  Previous participants have said that it is very useful to sit around the table with leaders from other companies and discuss the metrics that are most powerful to drive and track a certain strategy.  The second way is to group according to industry.  For instance, Pharmaceutical and Biotech and Life Sciences and Chemical companies would often rather group together even if they have much different strategies for R&D.  We also often see this with "Software-Only" companies, regardless of strategy they wish to sit with other Software-Only companies.  The take away from the two grouping approaches is that participants have a great deal of choice which other companies they wish to sit with during the workshop.

R&D-Product Development Innovation Metrics Portfolios - Results

Everyone will leave the workshop with a semi-finished portfolio of measures that they specifically chose as being applicable and appropriate for their company.  Typically, these portfolios range between 20-40 individual measures and 3-7 measures are chosen as being appropriate to report upward to the company CEO for the R&D-Product Development organization.  The portfolio covers the needs of projects, functions and departments, improvement efforts, and the overall inputs to and results from these innovation organizations.