In innovation, most attention is the work within the project. Before your next project begins, consider what questions your team should answer. This documentation provides transparency, alignment, and sets you up for success.

Manage your team like a factory because you want discipline, predictability, rhythm. Manage like a factory because you care about speed, quality, and waste.

Surely some activities in your organization are important to measure. A scorecard captures the “Metrics That Matter” - Leading and Lagging. Historical, Current, and Target values.

“K” - Knowledge - is the heart of ADKAR. Before you dig into detail of actual training material, put to paper all the expectations surrounding your training activities. Often, a Training Approach can apply across projects.

Before you leap into testing a new process or technology, formalize the general expectations about test planning and execution. For example, the number of test phases, test environments, and the documentation expectations for the test plan.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your speed? Consider trust, ambiguity, interruptions, fatigue, burnout, bottlenecks, egos, hero mentality, simplicity, complexity, silos, bureaucracy, meeting gridlock, and email overload. Fix your culture. Fix your Speed.

Your organization might be caught in meeting gridlock and email overload. You cannot just talk and email your way to success. You must document things outside email. It’s dry, sterile, unforgiving, and ruthless. But documentation keeps its value. A ruthless factory results in a valuable Asset Portfolio.

Your organization might not literally be a factory, but you should manage it like one. You care about all the same things: speed, quality, waste, and more! Avoid abandonment and chaos. Pursue movement and rhythm in your methodology and culture.

Use Five Verbs to pace, synchronize, and assign building your project’s Asset Portfolio.

Every innovation professional should have a grasp of the share of their time they spend on innovation, versus operations, versus chaos. Managers should be approximately on the same page with their employee’s view of their pie chart.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your variability? Consider how your innovation team writes. Apply your exotic word choice in marketing and poetry, not with your core innovation team. Controlled variability through these five writing strategies makes your team focused and fast.

Which of your culture traits can you trace to impacting your automation? Consider whether technology and data is your master or your servant. Consider whether Technology runs your business or if Business Runs Your Business.