Managing the Fuzzy Front End of Projects: Structuring Innovation For Business Success

This workshop can be customized to meet your needs, and is delivered at most locations internationally.

Contact us for more information.

Who Should Attend

Anyone involved in "the fuzzy front end" of projects including Project Managers; Program Managers; Marketing people involved in product definition (such as Product Managers); Engineering Staff and Leadership; Product Designers; User Interface and User Interaction Designers; Systems Analysts; Business Process Analysts; VP's and Directors of Engineering and Development; Managers of Project and Program Managers; Entrepreneurs of new business ventures; Directors of non-profit organizations embarking on new programs; Team Leaders and Members who find the initial definitional stages of projects to be slow and frustrating; and IT Managers defining new infrastructure projects and programs.

The Front End is the highest leverage part of a project!  There is tremendous opportunity to set yourself up for great success, innovation, operational effectiveness and customer delight and loyalty by properly leading and managing the Fuzzy Front End. And it is no longer mysterious. This workshop will help your team organize this phase, effectively lead and manage it, and to indentify the right people to involve.
 

The vast majority of projects waste valuable time and opportunity thrashing about in this critical phase and neglect to utilize its tremendous power. Teams bumble through not doing what they should be doing and spend a lot of wasted time in meetings arguing about features and other conjectures.

Classical project management methods such as PMBOK and others don't address this stage. Just try looking up "Fuzzy Front End", "Business Value" or "Innovation" in the index of the PMBOK guide - you won't find them.

Knowing this, senior consultant Jon Marshall has developed a framework, set of methods and tools to organize effort at the front end while at the same time enhancing, not diminishing innovation and creativity. In addition, using these methods can significantly increase the Total Achieved Value of the project while reducing risk factors and team frustration, increasing quality of decisions made, and maintaining flexibility through the whole project.

This workshop will increase your probability of successful and innovative outcomes.

This workshop provides a framework in which requirements, problem and opportunity definition, team composition, project strategy, innovation and creative inspiration and development are all organized together to achieve a great project outcome.

We have made the workshop even stronger with the addition of many new practices from the Toyota Lean Product Development System. There is an excellent synergy between our Front End Framework and the Toyota principles and practices, which you will learn.

Instructor: Jon Marshall

• A complete framework for the Fuzzy Front End of a Project

• Project initiation templates and checklists

• Strategies for maintaining management support through this phase

• How to develop Problem Frameworks as a basis for laying out your project plan

• Project Visioning and Situation Analysis

• Critical Success Factor development

• The Tao of the Problem-Solution Framework and the DC Cycle

• The dual nature of the development of concepts, interpretations, plans and results

  • Opportunity and Ideas

  • Customer and Technology

  • Divergence and Convergence

• The concept of Induction and how it relates to anticipating and creating plans

• Unique leadership and team development issues at the front end

• Developing the product or service concept

• Building a "Pull System" in the front end to align divergent activities: lessons learned from Toyota

• Planning and preparations for creativity, invention and out of the box solutions

• Organizing creative outcomes and converging them into plans

• Set-based design with synergy

• Converging the Problem Framework into a Solution Framework

• Cultivating the implementation process and team

• Creating metrics systems that work successfully even in the Concept Stage

• Wrapping it all together into a workable process

Our Guarantee

If for any reason you are not satisfied, write to us within 30 days after attending the workshop and return the course materials and we'll arrange for you to receive a full refund - hassle-free!

Contact us for more information.