Project Planning

Good planning is the basis of any successful endeavor. Planning helps you to make good, well-considered, robust plans, that, when successfully executed gives great products. A good plan will:
* State the current situation.
* Have a clear aim.
* Use the resources available.
* Detail the tasks to be carried out, whose responsibility they are, and their priorities and deadlines.
* Detail control mechanisms that will alert you to difficulties in achieving the plan.
* Identify risks, and plan for contingencies. This allows rapid and effective response to crises.
* Consider transitional arrangements – how to keep things going while implementing the plan.
A product planning cycle looks something like this:

1. Analysis of opportunities gives reality to the plan. It is important to explore and exploit all available opportunities to determine what is to be done. Creativity tools, SWOT Analysis and Risk Analysis can help to identify opportunities for development or improvement.
2. Definition of the aim gives your plan a goal to focus and concentrate its energy on. A well defined plan will prevent wastage of resources on irrelevant issues.
3. Explore options helps to generate as many different ways for achieving the aim as possible. By spending time looking for these you may find a better solution than the obvious one, or may be able to improve the obvious solution with parts of other ones.
4. Selection of the best approach is sometimes a tough call. This can be made easier by considering the resources and time available or with the use of Decision making tools like Grid Analysis or Decision Trees.
5. Detailed planing shows how to implement selected option. It helps to work out the most efficient and effective way of achieving the aim defined. It is the process of determining who will do what, when, where, how and why, and at what cost. Gantt Charts and Critical Path Analysis can be immensely helpful in working out priorities, deadlines and the allocation of resources.
6. Evaluation of this plan makes sure that the plan will be worth implementing. If it is not, return to an earlier stage and either improve the plan or make a different one. If no plan looks to be producing enough benefit to justify the cost, it is best not to make any changes at all.
7. Plan implementation is the next step once a course of action is selected, and has been proven to be viable.
8. Plan closure involves examining results and drawing conclusions. It is important to identify any mistakes, both to rectify them and to learn from them. The feedback is also noted for future planning.

Creating Ideas

Creating new ideas is the basis of any successful company. Innovation and creativity are the main requirements to compete and keep the business running. Creating ideas require understanding of the problem at hand. This usually arises based on user needs. Once specific a user problem or an unmet market need is identified, creating ideas is the next step. This might involve one or all of the following idea creation tools.

Brainstorming:
This technique is used to generate creative/original ideas over a broad range of options and within a short period of time. The problem being discussed is reviewed at the beginning of the session until it is understood by the entire discussion group. After about 2 minutes of silence, the members are invited to read out their ideas one at a time. All ideas are recorded and kept visible. Members can modify or build on other members' ideas. There is no criticism of evaluation of ideas, so as to keep the thoughts flowing. Once all ideas are recorded and several minutes of silence ensues, the session is declared closed. There are several modified versions of this basic brainstorming technique -
* Round-robin brainstorming - Allows all team members to participate and generate ideas without being influenced/overshadowed by a dominant member.
* Wildest-idea brainstorming -
* Reversal - Instead of asking, "How do I solve or prevent this problem?" ask, "How could I possibly cause the problem?" Instead of asking "How do I achieve these results?" ask, "How could I possibly achieve the opposite effect?" Once the ideas are collected, they are reversed to engineer original solutions.
* Starbursting - Focuses on evaluating ideas by asking questions rather than providing answers. Helps to understand all aspects of the new idea/product.
* Charette - Used to brainstorm multiple issues with multiple stakeholders. Involves organizing people into several small groups, each of which brainstorms ideas one-after-the-other until everyone involved has had a chance to contribute fully.
Brainstorming focuses on quantity - it aims at collecting many unusual ideas which may be combined or modified to yield productive ideas.
* Nominal Group Technique - It is a more structured brainstorming approach where once the subject is discussed, the group is allowed 5-10 mins to write down any ideas in silence. Each member then states his/her ideas one at a time and the ideas are noted and then discussed in detail. Based on a voting system, priority numbers are assigned to the ideas.

Affinity Diagram:
This is used in the case of large, complex issues with multiple factors. Ideas are put down on sticky notes and spread across a large surface. When related ideas evolve, they are put together in pools. Ideas can be grouped and regrouped such that patterns emerge and each group is given a title like, specifications, safety, quality, finance, etc. This will also help in assigning further tasks.

There are several other creativity tools that can aid in developing ideas for new products. More information about these tools are available at http://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_CT.htm#other