TIPS Survey Findings and Discussion

R&D Purchasers

Executive managers for three R&D purchasers responded. The manager from P1 dealt with "public good" strategy policy issues and considered TIPS unhelpful for selecting strategy but it "looked useful for implementing it." The manager of P3 (from an accounting background) had a "hands-off", "sunk-cost" approach. The manager considered that judicious selection of a project, the credentials of the researcher, and receiving a completion report provided as much control as could be hoped for. Therefore, she considered TIPS irrelevant.

The manager of P4 operated at the business unit level. He felt that TIPS would provide "a simpler platform." Computer spreadsheets are more commonly used across organizational functions and levels than project Gantt charts.

R&D Providers

Two project managers and one executive manager responded. The project manager from R1 advised, "NPV (given success) still needs to be supplied." However, "It looks as if [TIPS] will deal better with [project] unpredictability … which has been an issue for us." A "demonstration" of TIPS was desired.

Uncertainty and risk are quantified for each time-block, but the discounted cash flow and NPV calculation details were not included on the spreadsheet version of TIPS given to the interviewees, which created concern. Put another way, if R&D, engineering, and production are required to provide best estimates, so should marketing. Indeed, if TIPS is to be regarded as an organization-wide tool, calculating NPV should be done on the TIPS spreadsheet for each project.

The executive manager from R2 agreed that their organization needed a "structured approach like TIPS." Its staff was computer literate and would find TIPS "easy to pick up." He required that TIPS be made compatible for intranet use.

The project manager from R3, a very hierarchical organization, described the conceptual advantages of TIPS this way: "TIPS appears to allow [technological innovation] projects to ‘morph’ as they progress, in order to best achieve a successful outcome without being constrained to original ‘guesstimates’ as to cost, value, etc."

Electronics/Manufacturing Companies

Each of the respondents for the electronics companies originated from an engineering background, where detailed planning is common and manufacturing processes likely to be used are frequently well known. They generally had a strong desire for schedule prescription and compliance.

A program manager from E1 felt that TIPS has the advantage of summarizing a project for portfolio management and assigning priority in a scarce resource environment. However, he felt that TIPS provided nothing new or better for planning, tracking, or controlling projects. He contended that the main issues in project management were "keeping staff wound up and pointed in the right direction, accurately reporting progress, [and] correctly identifying and resolving big issues early to aid the prediction of the time/cost to completion." He consequently perceived time-blocks as an aid "for project reporting, rather than as a planning and control method."

A project manager in E1 envisaged TIPS as providing opportunity for project staff to develop leadership skills in the role of block manager and extend those skills by taking charge of blocks near the limits of their specialization and thus, providing the motivation and challenge desired by good staff. He also acknowledged that his company did not "really do a great deal" to account for risk and it had no formal method to "calculate or communicate the level of confidence in the project plan."

The project manager in E1 also considered the TIPS portfolio summary sheet with listed priority rankings to be useful. He commented that they try to avoid multitasking and said, "the best way to ensure project completion is to allow the design team to focus on one project and leave them to it." This suggests caution would be required when using TIPS. Project priorities should not be frequently or radically changed, nor should too many staff be expected to float across high priority projects.

The program and project managers of E2 sent in a combined survey response. They considered that TIPS would be a useful method for assessing and comparing "new technology/blue sky" projects, which in their company did not have a formal method for evaluation. E2 were also concerned about how to isolate critical tasks within time-blocks. Again, the desire to fully plan the schedule and tightly control resource allocation was evident, even though these features of existing systems were not used in any of the organizations.

Food Companies

The program manager of F1 felt that TIPS had the advantage of providing alignment with existing time-based requirements, and specifically cited "accounting and reporting processes." This program manager advised that multitasking on various projects was common and daily scheduling of personnel to specific projects was impractical, thereby validating the TIPS approach of delegating individuals to optimize the use of their own time.

A program manager from F2 concluded that TIPS combined several well-proven methodologies and should therefore be robust. He described it as "simple enough", which he regards as important because "many systems lose the plot as they become too complex (academic)." He suggested that meaningful feedback could only be achieved by trying the system and was looking for projects to do this. It should be noted that this manager was also the only interviewee originally satisfied with his current process!

A project manager for F2 felt that using TIPS had the advantage of formalizing the innovation process.

Forestry Companies

A project manager in T1 thought that intuitively "it looks like it frees up more time [to do] the project compared to managing the process." He reflected that "businesses are probably more interested in return on shareholder funds (ROI) these days than change in value (NPV)." This suggests that NPV measures, used for selecting and prioritizing projects, are less important to company executives when reporting to shareholders than the expenditure and income measures for the aggregate portfolio. Therefore, the TIPS approach, which does not track expenditure on individual projects, could be suitable.

A project manager at T2 felt that TIPS would best contribute to the innovation process by quantifying the probability of project completion alongside the remaining "net present cost" for completion. He considered that this feature alone would help provide a decision-base to abandon some projects "currently lingering." "At present, several specialist applications [software packages] are in use. Having TIPS in Excel makes it available for use to a far wider audience."

Survey Response Summary

The amount of information reported here comes from a very small sub-set of organizations and represents a "snapshot" of opinion only. Nevertheless, nearly all the survey respondents (fifteen out of sixteen) thought TIPS had several advantages over current systems. The remaining survey respondent did not feel qualified to comment since her organization had a "hands-off" approach to funding. The most frequently voiced advantages of TIPS can be distilled to "providing a simple, tangible, consistent, and transparent means to regularly compare innovation projects for inter-project ranking and compliance with organizational strategy." Transparency is aided because most managers use Excel spreadsheets, the proposed platform for TIPS. This platform interfaces well with the Internet (email and website access), which is useful for multiple-site projects.

Six of the sixteen respondents specifically requested demonstrations of TIPS on a "real" project before they would consider implementing TIPS in their organization.