Innovation to Products to Ventures

Project Management Survival now available in Latvian and Chinese

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:28:52 +0100

I am happy to say that Project Management Survival is now available in Chinese as well as Latvian. The Polish version seems stuck in the works somewhere. Good job I wasn’t managing it then

Project management book soon in Polish

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:49:32 +0000

Project Management Survival will soon be available in Polish. Have to say I'm delighted as I have spent a fair ...

Project Management Survival book published

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:49:03 +0100

As part of this I have written a book called Project Management Survival - published by Kogan Page. I am now writing a book on programme management of complex programmes in R&D and technology based organisations.

Unfair advantages - why technology startups need them

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 21:23:40 +0100

I love the phrase "unfair advantage." Peter Crouch is a striker at Liverpool who towers over defenders and so gets more than his fair share of headers. I always look for the same thing in startups (and I don't mean tall people). Read on for more about the different types of advantages and how you can develop some for your technology company.

Startups and the trials of being an entrepreneur

Richard A D Jones — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:26:48 +0100

I think this should be the motto for entrepreneurs and those involved in startups...

It is not the critic who counts,
nor the man who points out how the strong man stumbled,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
I think this should be the motto for entrepreneurs...
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly;
who errs and comes short again and again;
who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those timid souls
who know neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

How many prototypes did James Dyson make of his cyclonic vacuum cleaner before he succeeded? Scarily the answer is Five thousand!!

It's about where you are as well as what you are selling

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:18:18 +0100

I was in a strange conversation today. Someone was asking about UK broadband opportunities and I told them it's a blood bath. It really is horrific with free broadband offers appearing (if anything is ever truly free). So why are my business partners and I are so keen on broadband in Eastern Europe. Broadband is broadband right?

Well, the difference is the adoption curve. You probably know this already but there is a profile of sales over time that starts to build slowly, then accelerates before flattening out again. This s-curve is seen in many industries. Sometimes your product or service can re-juvenate itself by finding a new niche or set of users and a second s-curve builds on your original one. Tricky but good if you can do it.

In broadband, we can see in the UK that we have achieved near saturation and companies are being forced to givie it away 'free'. However, countries in Eastern Europe have very low penetration and so are only at the start of the s-curve explosion.

This doesn't make it easy but it does mean that you can learn from what has happened in other countries and use strategies that have worked.

Real innovation requires real customers

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 14:32:39 +0100

I get to work with a lot of new companies and corporate ventures and, you know what, they frequently have no clue about what a real customer wants. Cambridge (the UK one) is a great place for technology innovation but even the smartest people don't always understand about having a real market. They have the “Field of Dreams” view about customers - 'if I build it, they will come." However, this mistake isn't limited to startups - I worked with a European electronics multinational and I couldn’t believe their approach to innovation.

The division I worked with produced equipment for automating factories - essentially like computers with input and output connections to make machines work. Here were two classic conversations with them.

"Good news Richard - we have done a deal with M****** (identity masked to protect the innocent) and will be distributing their single board computer series. Our arrangement means we will have the same market price as them."

"Okay. What do you mean by market price?"

"Our list price is identical to their’s."

"Hang on," say I, "our normal customer gets a discount of 10% whereas M****** give a discount of 30% as standard. Our real market price to users or distributors is going to be significantly higher than their’s. In what way do you think that is market pricing?"

....silence....

Real innovation is more than brainstorming

Richard A D Jones — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 11:05:55 +0100

The most tired management story on the planet is how 3M came to make the Post-It pad. Remember - man uses not very sticky glue to put bits of paper in his hymm book and eventually has to ..... oh I can't even bear to repeat it.

For every great idea that someone 'games' through the barbed wire and trenches of internal barriers, there are thousands that die a slow death in cupboards and desks.

240mph or 250 mph car - what's the difference?

Richard A D Jones — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:37:51 +0100

I was reading about the McLaren F1 (developed by Gordon Murray). This car can reach nearly 240 mph (with some minor modifications) and cost around £8.5 million to get the first car out of the door - including building the factory it was made in.

In comparison, the Bugatti Veyron can travel 10 mph faster. The other difference is that the Veyron cost around £250 million to develop - which is expensive if you only sell 300 cars. The problem with the Veyron is that the boss Ferdinand Piech set up a BFHG (big fat hairy goal) of 250 mph (okay it was 400 km/h) and 1000 brake horsepower. Unfortunately this goal came with a big fat hairy pricetag.

Never work with idiots and.....people you can't get on with.

Richard A D Jones — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 16:26:14 +0100

Ten years ago, I had a discussion with a friend who was a serious rower. He's not Sir Steve Redgrave but understands what it takes to win. His assertion was that teams don't have to like each other to perform. In fact they can downright hate each other and still do the job. It was alleged that Eric Cantona would never pass to striker Andy Cole at Manchester United for example.

At the time I wasn't convinced that the sporting metaphor could translate to business. I'm certain now - he was wrong.

Project management at the borders - why milestones count

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 19 May 2006 12:55:40 +0100

...it's at the interfaces that things most commonly go wrong. For example, the spacecraft that crashed into Mars because one group worked in yards and another in metres. Their invidual parts were fine but they didn't fit together. It's the railroad tracks meeting in the middle of the US and finding they use different gauges for the track (a great cartoon not a fact). How do you stop this happening in projects.

It's about customers (stupid!)

Richard A D Jones — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 09:18:46 +0100

When someone has to persuade you about why you need a service then you probably don't. Need is pain. When you have something that is really inconvenient in your life then you recognise a solution when someone shows it to you.

Sick of the shower burning your bum when someone flushes the toilet - you need the .......

Worried about losing your family photos from your laptop, then you need the ..........

If there is not a 'selfish benefit' to a company, one that you understand intrinsically, then you probably don't want to buy the product and I don't want to help it grow and succeed (because it won't).

Project management mistakes - ridiculous resourcing

Richard A D Jones — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 17:40:29 +0000

I went into a development programme once and looked at the project plan. It looked good. That’s the problem with Microsoft Project (and Powerpoint) - the biggest, steaming pile of junk can be made to look good. The problem that makes this worse is that most senior managers are incapable of spotting a dodgy project plan when they’re two inches away from it.

Tollgates and Milestones - What's the Difference?

Richard A D Jones — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 21:54:11 +0000

During the life of a project, the team will define milestones specific to the project and pass tollgates that are imposed to allow review of the project at important states in the project.

5 more things not to do when you start a business

Richard A D Jones — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 15:00:26 +0000

My friend Mike Trup’s posting on his experience about starting up his own software distribution business. He starts with a nice variation on the classic advice (Ansoff) not to go for a new product in a new market. Mike’s twist replaces the market with the channel. I’m going to be posting more about screwing with your channels soon.

1) Do not try and introduce a completely new product or service and a completely new way of buying it all in one go. I promise you, you will be up against enough of a problem trying to get people to understand and accept one of these concepts.

The rest is here

So you thought marketing is fun - lessons from software companies

Richard A D Jones — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:05:36 +0000

An important part of any product based startup is to consider the marketing channels by which the product will be delivered to market. It’s a simple point but capable of extreme pain for a startup that get’s it wrong and painful enough even if you get it right!

The following goes through the detail of some of the issues that will keep you up at night for a software business. Some of the points are equally valid across other types of product.

Dead project walking -why you have to kill projects to be successful

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 22:04:44 +0000

Companies can be outstanding at generating new ideas – I mean really world-class and yet they struggle. The simple reason is they don’t have the resources to exploit them. I’m not talking about the resources not existing in the company, I am talking about them just not being available. If the resources are being used for something useful then is that okay? Well only if it is more valuable to the business than the project it is delaying. If not, then your resource prioritisation across the portfolio of projects better be good. However, the more frustrating problem for companies relates to when their resources are ‘lost’ to the business either still working on bad projects or doing ‘after sales’ on previous projects.

Some rules of investing in technology companies

Richard A D Jones — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 21:57:04 +0000

I'll do a version of the classic rules of investment and startups some other time but here are a few you don't find in books.

If there's money on the table - take it!
- You’ll be wrong sometimes but hanging on for a better deal later on seems to go wrong way too often.
If it feels wrong - it is.

Technology startup funding tips - 'go faster' money

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 23:23:06 +0000

Money invested in a company is there to make something happen. I normally refer to it as ‘go faster’ money – as the most normal use is to fund the business accelerating towards it’s goals using the extra funding as fuel.

In comparison, the following are not seen as reasonable uses of their money by investors:

Giving yourself a great salary
Taking expensive office space
Feeling better because you’ve got some ‘breathing space’ money in the bank
Acquiring a nice company car

Portfolio management - slightly trickier now

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:46:10 +0000

In another post, I put up the graphic above as an approach to assessing different projects within a porfolio and understanding the overall ‘balance’. The projects here represent a company that is sticking pretty close to home in terms of what it does but is expending significant money in trying to develop technology led approaches to their market (the diameter of the circle represents the money committed to the project).

A simple guide to portfolio management (rocket science omitted)

Richard A D Jones — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:10:30 +0000

This is start of a ‘back of an envelope’ guide to portfolio management.

Portfolio management is the set of activities that seek to find and maintain the optimum current and future balance of R&D projects to support the busines strategy.*

I wrote this almost 10 years ago but exactly the same problems face companies today.

There are many approaches to selecting individual projects such as simple project attractiveness ratings, however selecting a set of projects (or portfolio) requires you to:

nntake account of overlaps and common resource requirements between projects
nfollow the direction provided by the overall strategy and the technology strategy
ndevelop an iterative process refining the portfolio to find the optimum balance between available projects and the strategic direction

Portfolio management - a few more models

Richard A D Jones — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 15:12:00 +0000

People often forget that the reason you try to understand what you are currently doing in R&D is so you can make better decisions in future. Representing projects graphically allows you to understand the portfolio at a higher level and is ideal for the senior management team when they are contemplating where they are compared to where they are trying to get to. There are a couple of other blogs about this but I was too tired to put in these final diagrams. Again, there’s no right or wrong – just different ways of viewing what you have. I think they’re pretty self-explanatory. I’d write more but there’s a guy playing his i-Pod so loud I could sing along and I’m just off to garrott him with his own headphone cable. If there are no more posts – please come visit me in prison.

10 rules for web startups

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:58:00 +0000

I’m going to start mixing up my content with the best of what I find out there (or what makes me titter like a little girl and wet myself).

Given I’ve been going through a list phase, here’s the founder of Blogger talking about web startups. A lot of the rules are very applicable elsewhere in my opinion.

http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

When product management goes bad - T-mobile come on down!

Richard A D Jones — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 09:13:35 +0000

Okay you're sat in Starbucks wanting to access the internet. You know they have a T-mobile wireless hotspot but what you don't know is that T-mobile have developed a cunning process to make it almost impossible to buy their product without upsetting customers. Read on for a rant with a few lessons hidden inside.

7 things investors do wrong...

Richard A D Jones — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 23:03:26 +0000

Having laid into people pitching their ideas to investors and resource managers, I was challenged to come back with a blog about daft things investors do to provide some balance. Well, balance in this case is going to come from a chip on both my shoulders so let’s move into the shadowy and sometimes arrogant world of investment. A few dont’s and dont’s with the odd bit of personal experience thrown in…

Startups - how to blow it with potential investors

Richard A D Jones — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:55:51 +0000

Oh dear. I’ve had a day when I’ve seen another very enthusiastic person with an early stage business and absolutely no clue how to get their idea across. Okay to be honest he wasn’t that enthusiastic………… and he smelled a bit strange……………and smoked the smallest ‘roll-ups’ I have ever seen but anyway – back to my point. How is it people blow investment opportunities so badly? It appears like a sub-conscious wish to fail it can be so bad. To save people who really want to screw up but don’t have the energy to figure out how to do it, I have compiled a list of real ‘show stoppers’ when you’re looking for investment or approval for a new corporate venture.

Free innovation - "What's in the cupboard?"

Richard A D Jones — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 11:38:26 +0000

I tend to ask this question in quite a lot of companies, although it is particularly important in the development of new products/features/ventures! When new initiatives are put in place, everyone seems to somehow forget the past. Ongoing projects are respected but innovation pipeline, idea banks etc. are ‘created’ and then people studiously start to fill them up with new stuff.

I was the same until someone opened a filing drawer in their desk once and I spotted a strange bit of plastic. After a bit of conversation it turned out this was actually an idea for a medical device that the person had thought of a few years previously. I’d like to say it was a stroke of genius but it wasn’t. Actually it was so bad it would probably only be good if you decided euthenasia was a growth area. However, the more people I talked to, the more I realised that there was interesting stuff that had been canned in the past for various reasons but which might hold value now.

It stands to reason if you think about it. A good innovation process will put some stuff on hold while you await specific conditions to be met. That might mean a component needs to hit a certain price point or someone has to invent something new. You’re just keeping it in a holding pattern waiting for the world to turn enough that it becomes worth something. Well, this was the same situation. A lot of good ideas in this company had been halted because there was not enough money, willpower, time, management attention and intelligence to carry on. Some of the ideas were just hobby projects that never saw the light of day because the person changed jobs, lost enthusiasm or a myriad other reasons.

Okay the cupboard is a metaphor………..or is it a simile……no, it’s a metaphor. There will be things in cupboards, drawers, hidden on computers and locked away in people’s heads. However, I’ve never seen this exercise fail to find interesting ideas whose time has come. You can ignore all this previous work and thinking but why make life hard for yourself.

Technology only rolls one way - downhill!

Richard A D Jones — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:39:02 +0000

Something is a specialist skill that only a few people can do and gradually it becomes more widely available, cheaper and easier to use (no punchcards in computers now - only blue screens of death and sanctimonious Mac users to deal with). This article talks about the inexorable march of technologies and produsts from high cost, scarcities to being cheap and on your desktop etc.

How to spot a crap technology startup - 1 "We don't have any competition"

Richard A D Jones — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 08:34:30 +0000

Here are the signs of how to spot if you are talking to a startup company that is doomed. Might be a bit harsh and an exageration but I bet I'm right almost all the time on this. Here is the first thing they say that should make you run out of the door screaming.

Pay or play - licensing mistakes and how they cost you big time

Richard A D Jones — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 23:37:10 +0000

Okay you've sold your idea to a big company for $1 a unit they fit it to..... and they make millions each year. Just before you start driving away in your Ferrari though, you realise they aren't building any units with your baby incorporated. What's worse, you can't get the idea back from them. You've been caught in the pay or play trap.