Innovation & Technology

A company is experiencing problem with their latest product, it breaks too easy. The company decides that they need to improve their simulation activities to be able to better predict the the strength and fatigue life of their products. The R&D manager appoints an engineer in the organisation to lead a project to find and buy in a software tool that can solve the problem. During the project a specification is written and used to evaluate different software options. After careful consideration one software is chosen and acquired. The project  is finalised with a training for those who will be using the program.
One year later the next generation of the product is released on the market. Soon afterwards reports are starting to flow in with customers having similar problems as with the previous version.

So what went wrong?

• Is the new software not competent enough?
• Are the engineers not able to use it correctly? … But they are skilled and dedicated so perhaps the software is too cumbersome to use efficiently?
• The product is too complicated to be simulated?

It is usually along these lines people will explain why they are failing with software implementation.

But I will actually claim that the project was successful (a software was bought and installed). What failed was setting an appropriate goal for the project!

A R&D organization cannot be satisfied when they have installed the software and trained a few people, then they have gained nothing for their company. That would be like a Mount Everest expedition only planning and preparing for the first half of the mountain and expecting the climb from Camp II to the top on 8848 meters to happen on its own. R&D organizations cannot rest until they have changed their development process, all people involved have accepted and are working according to the changed process. The goal for the project should be something like to only have 0.1% products with quality issues or increase customer satisfaction with 30%. That type of goal brings value to the company.