What is Results Engine?
You have Innovation Central and have run several successful events which generated hundreds of ideas. The reviewers have done their jobs and you now have a subset of well regarded ideas which address a variety of business needs. For some companies this is sufficient: they have well-established processes for the incorporation of new ideas into their flow of products and services, for their sponsorship, progression, and tracking. But others may lack this structure or experience, which is why we created Results Engine.
Use Results Engine to...
- Take the best ideas from your Innovation Central events and use them as the basis for new projects.
- Design processes that suit your business and workflow.
- Assign sponsors and work with them to assign project teams.
- As needed, add custom forms that meet your requirements and attach them to the stages that a project must pass through on its way to become a useful product, service, or innovative way of doing things.
- Define workflows and set up notifications, to keep projects moving and people informed of progress.
...and do it all transparently, in one place, where everyone, the project teams, and the sponsors (at your choice) can see what's going on and how things are progressing.
Who is it for?
Portfolio management generally involves the tracking of multiple projects through one or more business processes. This usually means defining the process as a series of stages, each with criteria that a project must meet before it moves to another stage. Tasks for the person with the role of Portfolio Manager may include initiating projects (based on others' requests or a preceding process, such as the top ideas from an Innovation Central event designed to generate new project concepts). The portfolio manager will probably keep track of agreed-upon deadlines, will remind others of their tasks, and will report to sponsoring management on the status of and any issues with the portfolio.
Okay great, tell me how it works.
Like Russian dolls, there's a hierarchy of things-inside-things in Results Engine. This is a brief dictionary of terms and definitions.
- Your portfolio is the top-level collection of business processes and projects. At this level there are just a few common properties of things that you will want for summary reports: are things completed? On time? Relevant to a particular company-wide initiative?
- A portfolio can have one or more processes. A process is a structured way of doing work, and can be as simple as two or three steps, or a complex mapping on to different skills and work groups inside or outside of your company.
- Processes consist of stages, which are typically units of work that are done all the time for nearly every project (like market analysis or shipping) or map to particular experts (like legal review or safety assessment).
- Projects are the basic currency of everything. Each project moves through one of your processes. A project might represent a future product or service, or its goal might be a new money-saving practice. A project almost always has an owner - one person responsible for it - and often an assigned team of people to work on it.
- While Results Engine is quite general, in most cases it will be used in conjunction with ideas generated, developed, and evaluated in Innovation Central. By attaching these ideas to projects in Results Engine, the original idea authors can follow the progress as their ideas are built upon, modified, and proceed toward implementation - because without implementation, great ideas have no value.
