Tip #4: Use real-time input to monitor

your progress.

A dashboard of indicators will help you make better decisions as you go.

In addition to making projections and assessing accomplishments, metrics should serve as an active tool for making real-time decisions. By establishing in-process indicators for your project, you can monitor your progress and course-correct as needed. With a firm understanding of business goals and success metrics, innovation teams already have a good start in planning for the appropriate development process activities. Using and regularly reporting a series of flexible in-process indicators that result from these activities will help the team stay on-track and communicate their work. The metrics and indicators a team collects along the way, become useful data points that help the team decide what to work on next.

Some of the richest data that comes from the design process often shows up in the anecdotes that emerge from user research, brainstorming, prototyping and testing. Digging deeply into these stories, and communicating them in process, is often an effective way to reassure stakeholders of progress. For example, positive user feedback from an early usability test can indicate that the team is on-track to developing a product that will reduce support call volume down the road.

To make in-process indicators more useful:

Stay on track by reporting all findings in relation to the business goals.

Design exploration is constantly uncovering new potential directions and opportunities. While it may be tempting to explore these new avenues for growth, sometimes too much divergence can cause a team to lose focus and distract from their core goals. Thus, measuring the innovation process requires “keeping your eyes on the prize.” Every report-out to stakeholders should be seen as a chance to communicate: How does this new knowledge improve our likelihood of giving the customer what they need in a way that fits with our specific business goals? And, how does it help us be smart about what we do between now and the end of the project? Remember, when situations change, shared metrics and goals can help ground these conversations.

Keep track of failure, and learn from it.

Along the way, some of the team’s assumptions and ideas will be proven right. Others will be proven wrong. Keep in mind that the very act of projecting helps you learn, because it can surface incorrect assumptions and help to set the course of the rest of the project. The mark of a healthy innovation process is frequent failure, insights that get contradicted, and prototypes that don’t resonate with users. The key is to structure the process so that these failures get noticed early, the losses are small, and the team learns how to improve. When tracking project progress, be sure to see these moments for their contribution to the emerging base of knowledge, not as setbacks.

Related posts:

1. Five Key Strategies for Making Metrics
2. Design Council’s Lessons from America
3. Five Key Strategies for Managing Change
4. Design Strategies for Technology Adoption
5. Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovations