Managing Product Development in the Cloud
The purpose of this article is to clarify the scope of “Innovation Management” from the perspective of the Product Value Chain Cloud (PVC) solution set. There are four feature sets in the PVC family, including:
- Innovation Management – to align Innovation
- Product Development – to accelerate development
- Product Hub – to synchronize Commercialization
- Embedded Analytics – to gain transformative insight
If you’re not familiar with the Oracle Fusion / Cloud strategy, my colleague at Inspirage, Jay Ramaswamy, has written an excellent piece, What is Oracle Fusion Cloud and Why Does It Matter that I encourage you to review. While many Oracle Fusion Cloud products are the next generation of existing on-premises Oracle Solutions, the Innovation Management application is a brand new solution providing a completely new set of required capabilities.
“The objective of Oracle Fusion IM is to ensure that the right strategy and roadmap be developed, defined and communicated clearly to execution teams to achieve the PLM goals”
Ideation to Portfolio Decisions
Traditionally, “innovation management” is defined as management of the process of introducing something new or better and bringing ideas to reality. The primary focus of Oracle Fusion Innovation Management (IM) starts at the very beginning stages of this process, from collating and collaborating on ideas through defining the offerings and making portfolio decisions.
Again, the sweet spot for IM seems to be during this period of innovation management. Typical phases during this period include Ideation, Concept, Feasibility, Definition, etc.
- What ideas and inventions should we invest in? What’s the ROI?
- How should we incorporate these ideas and inventions into our product and/or service offerings?
- What happens if we remove feature A, add feature B or tweak feature C? If we swap product Z with Y in the portfolio? What’s the impact on resources, financials and strategy? What can we afford?
- How do we foster innovation, and how can we get closer to hearing the voice of our customers?
These are questions that companies must be able to answer, effectively and efficiently, in order to be competitive. Examples of innovation management process deliverables include Market Requirements Document, Product Requirements Specification, Portfolio Decisions (e.g. roadmap, metrics, etc.).
By managing the core entities, incl. ideas, concepts, requirements and portfolios, in a single solution set, Oracle Fusion IM streamlines this upfront planning and decisions management process. Having said that, you won’t transform your process overnight by simply having an integrated solution. But this is a tangible and achievable goal, if you have a clear vision and are willing to take the journey one step at a time.
Project Planning and Execution
Fusion IM is not intended to manage this part of the innovation management process. However, it does play critical role in ensuring that the definitions and decisions be aligned with the execution processes, providing end-to-end traceability. Oracle Fusion IM has to be an integral part of driving the following enterprise dimensions:
- Product
- Program, Project Grouping or WBS Element
- Requirement
It goes without saying that consistent data model between Fusion IM and surrounding systems is a key success factor.
Inspirage defines Product Lifecycle Management, PLM, as a set of business capabilities that maximizes the economic value of a company’s products. In this context, the objective of Oracle Fusion IM is to ensure that the right strategy and roadmap be developed, defined and communicated clearly to execution teams to achieve the PLM goals.
