This project was supported by Carnegie Mellon University's Corporate Startup Lab — an interdisciplinary group focused on researching and promoting the mission of transformative innovation within corporations. Access to the extensive network of CMU's Corporate Startup Lab, our team had the opportunity to conduct interviews and usability testing with corporate leaders from companies including: Bosch, Michelin, and Microsoft.
PROBLEM
"Since 2000, 52 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or ceased to exist as a result of digital disruption."
SOLUTION
Facilitating the transition of projects out of R&D and into a commercialization pipeline requires a framework that can standardize the outputs coming from varying R&D initiatives at the process level, to be used as inputs for assessment by upper management.
The introduction of a due-diligence worksheet for R&D project managers to fill out helps to ensure planning, bring awareness to common pitfalls, and enforce consideration of customer needs and goals. The bank of questions in the worksheet also helps project managers become aware of potential pitfalls so that they can be avoided ahead of time.
Worksheet Components
Qualitative Benchmarking
The worksheet is comprised of a collection of questions, organized into categories, that serves as a way for project managers to qualitatively assess the progress and risk of an R&D project. Additionally, the worksheet facilitates cross-functional collaboration between internal teams.
Quantitative Benchmarking
The quantitative aspects of the worksheet utilizes NPV, IRR, CAC, and CLV metrics to standardize benchmarking used to evaluate R&D project success (can be adjusted/interchanged accordingly).
For the executives, directors, or program managers, a desktop dashboard will help to manage a collection of R&D projects. The dashboard allows users to quickly parse out important information from the worksheet, and assess the project in the context of the larger portfolio by comparing metrics with other projects.
DASHBOARD Components
Portfolio Organization
Introducing a new information architecture for directors and executives to be able to organize programs and projects within a portfolio at the highest level.
Project Risk Evaluation
Using the worksheet as input for the dashboard, the data is presented in the context of the overall portfolio to enable corporate executives and directors to become aware of, and manage potential risks.
BACKGROUND RESEARCH
Understanding corporate startups through literature reviews
With very little knowledge of corporate inner-workings and processes, a literature review was beneficial to quickly gauge challenges encountered by corporate startups. The challenge that our team decided to focus primarily on, is the difficulty in moving a project out of a corporate startup and into commercialization. The uncertain process in this transitional phase contributes to the disillusionment of user expectations and 'chasm' of early adopters.
Interviewing corporate entrepreneurs to discover process painpoints
"It can be hard because [r&d teams] are engineers and scientists, not economists or entrepreneurs. It's not obvious to look at the business implications of the research."
"There needs to be a process put in place to be able to manage disruptive innovation. Executives dislike uncertainty...need a way to shield innovative projects so that they have a chance to be successful."
GENERATED INSIGHTS
After aggregating and synthesizing the interviews, we were able to arrive at a few insights that informed product design aspects.
INSIGHT 1
While R&D teams are urged to consider the business implications of transformative projects, they lack guidance on how to do so.
INSIGHT 2
Upper management needs to be able to evaluate risk, fit, and progress of transformative projects.
INSIGHT 3
Overstep of guidance can lead to micromanagement, stifling innovation.
INSIGHT 4
Qualitative metrics are variable depending on the project industry or domain.
Going into the project, our team initially imagined the tool to be some sort of worksheet similar to the other existing corporate startup lab tools. However, we also realized that in order to facilitate the transition of a project through to commercialization, a worksheet alone would not ensure necessary oversight by upper management.
Identifying needs and goals through user personas
Defining goals for the worksheet and dashboard product solution
From creating these user personas, we decided that project managers would benefit from a worksheet to help them with the following:
GOAL 1
Become aware of common pitfalls across various domains (ie. product development, finance, sales & marketing, etc.)
GOAL 2
Engage in cross-functional team collaboration and communication to overcome pitfalls.
For upper management, the worksheet helps to standardize project processes, but is unable to address the differing needs of executives and program managers/directors. Due to this, we decided to create a dashboard that allows users to:
GOAL 1
Monitor the progression of and gain visibility into risks for numerous projects
GOAL 2
Assess project fit within the overarching program or portfolio.
PARALLEL PROTOTYPING
Concept mockups
HOME
ALTERNATE HOME
PROJECT OVERVIEW
RISK ASSESSMENT
Concept mockup
VERSION 1
Evaluation of worksheet and click-through prototype
After rounds of iterations for both the worksheet and dashboard through internal critiques, our team followed up with the earlier interviewees through Zoom to receive external feedback. We presented the worksheet first, followed by the click-through prototype.
WORKSHEET FEEDBACK GOAL
We sought to elicit feedback on the qualitative metric questions, and the ability to assess risk.
DASHBOARD FEEDBACK GOAL
We sought to elicit feedback on the incorporation and visualization of worksheet data.
Medium-fidelity Prototype
First iteration
VERSION 2
Iterations made based on follow-up interviews
We ran the critiquing session by first sharing with the interviewees the goals for both the worksheet and dashboard, and encouraged them to note down any thoughts or questions in the chat as they arose. Based on the feedback from three of the interviewees, we iterated upon both deliverables.
1. Personalizing the product by reorganizing information hierarchy
VERSION 1
VERSION 2
Many project/portfolio management software organize information based on pre-defined categories such as: projects, finance, planning, human resources, and others.
However, given the target user is someone who would be in charge of a specific program or collection of projects, it would be more useful to have the program or projects accessible at the highest level of information hierarchy, then be able to assess the finances, human resources, tasks and more within a program.
2. Assessing project risk based on time
VERSION 1
Visualization of risk and progress without time
VERSION 2
Depicting risk and time for all qualitative categories
VERSION 3
Segmenting qualitative categories into tabs
VERSION 4
Adding context of questions to score indicators
Second iteration
VERSION 3
CONCEPT DEMO
Elevator Pitch
Dashboard Prototype
My contribution to this project centered primarily on the executive dashboard used to assess risk of transformative projects, and evaluate fit within the larger program/portfolio.
VALUE PROPOSITION
- Customizable for portfolio organization and management
- Visibility into project workflow, potential pitfalls, and risk-level
- Specifically evaluates transformative or innovative projects and investments
CORE FEATURES
- Portfolio organization panel
- Program maturity visualization
- Worksheet input risk assessment
- Project manager task assignment
Core Feature Breakdown
PORTFOLIO ORGANIZATION PANEL
The portfolio organization panel inherently structures and organizes projects and programs within a portfolio.
When adding a project, having a user fill out the project description and goals can help to align teams.
PROGRAM MATURITY VISUALIZATION
The visualization allows users to quickly determine the maturity of a program.
Knowing the maturity of a program or portfolio can inform whether or not more or less transformative projects should be taken on.
WORKSHEET INPUT RISK ASSESSMENT
Should a user want more information about the risk score of a specific project, they can access the data from the worksheet through the risk assessment widget.
In doing so, they can assess what aspects of a project present the most risk.
PM TASK ASSIGNMENT
The ability to assign PMs tasks to answer specific worksheet questions can help to mitigate category risks.
The feature allows program executives or directors to oversee project progress while minimizing the chances of micromanagement.
REFLECTION
I have learned more from this project than any other project I have done thus far. Before and after each interview, I often had to do additional research in order to navigate jargon and breakdown unfamiliar corporate infrastructure and interactions.
Next Steps
For immediate next steps, I would like to continue from where I left off in the current demo by fleshing out the task creation flow. Task creation could be more robust by incorporating assignment to a specific project manager, recommendations for cross-collaboration opportunities, and inclusion of additional notes for project managers to reference.
Looking further down the pipeline, I would also like to consider what the dashboard would look given the user is a project manager. The information (in regards to the corporate portfolio) accessible to project managers would be limited, and therefore dashboard features that support roadmap planning, project and worksheet updating, and notification receiving would be prioritized.
If given more time...
I would have liked to conduct more follow-up usability testing with interviewees and other target users, specifically project managers. Given that the follow-up interviews were conducted over video conferencing calls, interviewees did not get the chance to interact with the prototype itself, though they still provided valuable feedback.
For the worksheet, a lot of effort was invested into coming up with useful questions for qualitative benchmarking. However, other than grouping them in categories, the questions are not organized in any particular way, though some questions may be more important to answer than others.
