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How to Prevent Scope Creep in Your Innovation Strategy
Discover 5 key strategies to effectively manage scope creep while driving your innovation strategy
Discover 5 key strategies to effectively manage scope creep while driving your innovation strategy
This is #4 in the series below
This series explores how you can create personally sustainable ventures, by optimizing processes for operational excellence #1 - Social Impact Leaders: Time-Saving Hacks for 20 Extra Hours a Week #2 - Google Sheets Task Management Template for Social Impact Leaders #3 - Secret to Innovation Strategy: How to Build Accountability in a Team #4 - Social Innovation without Scope Creep
Avoiding Scope Creep: Top Innovation Strategies
As a creative innovator with numerous ideas, the temptation to add new features and angles to your solution is incredibly tempting.
And doing so has a major downside: scope creep. With scope creep, comes delays, wasted resources, and potential financial failure.
Successful innovation demands discipline and a strategic approach to maintain focus and efficiency.
This article explores five powerful strategies designed to help you innovate effectively while avoiding scope creep pitfalls. By implementing these techniques, you can create faster learning loops, minimize delays, and maximize the impact of your innovation efforts.
Radically Descope through Auditing
When developing solutions, it's easy to overcomplicate things by focusing on edge cases or benefits that are actually not that important.
Radical descoping involves critically examining each component of your solution to ensure it's absolutely necessary. This process is fundamentally similar to writing concisely, where every word or sentence is analyzed with eagle eyes for its necessity and value.
This involves three steps:
- List each major action, requirement, or dependency in your workflow. Make sure you can articulate the “why” behind every item.
- Score from 1-5 (high), each item’s importance, level of effort/risk, quality of evidence for its importance. Push every item below a minimum threshold (e.g., 4.5 / 5) out of scope into a backlog or future phase, using the metaphor of “crawl, walk, run.”
- Even if an item is a 4.5 or a 5 of importance, keep brainstorming alternatives, such as using manual workflows temporarily for complex automated processes.
Unleash Creativity Through Constraints
Counterintuitively, imposing constraints can actually boost creativity. By setting hypothetical limitations, you force your team to think outside the box and develop innovative solutions within specific parameters.
In contrast to the prior technique which goes into the details, the prompts below are meant to encourage thinking about broader solutions to the problem, unanchored by those details.
How to apply this technique:
- Understand the why behind the request and brainstorm alternative big picture solutions to meet shared needs
- Challenge your team to achieve the intended impact on a specific metric in half the time or half the steps in a workflow
- Brainstorm solutions that double the impact on a specific metric with the same resources
Reframe the Problem for Novel Solutions
Reframing involves investigating alternative factors affecting a challenge, often leading to unexpected and cost-effective solutions. By looking at problems from different angles, you can spark innovative ideas that may have been overlooked.
Example
Take The Hotel Elevator Dilemma. When hotel guests complained about slow elevators, management initially considered costly mechanical upgrades. However, by reframing the problem, they discovered a simple yet effective solution: installing mirrors in elevator lobbies. This psychological approach kept guests occupied while waiting, reducing perceived wait times and eliminating complaints without actually making the elevators faster.
Create “Cheap Tests” with Beneficiaries Early
Before investing significant resources into an expensive solution, conduct "cheap tests" to identify risky assumptions early in the process. This approach allows you to gather valuable insights and refine your ideas with minimal risk.
Strategies for effective testing:
- Pre-sell your concept using sales copy to gauge customer interest
- Create simple modifications to existing analogous products instead of building from scratch
- Develop a minimum viable product (MVP) to test core functionalities, which may often involve using some manual or outsourced workflows
To test value propositions and new solutions quickly, check out Validating your innovation in 48 hours
Deepen Bright Spots
Focusing on bright spots prevents scope creep by concentrating resources on proven successful strategies, rather than spreading efforts across multiple unproven initiatives.
Once you identify these "bright spots," focus on optimizing, expanding, or applying these strategies before diversifying into new areas.
These bright spots can manifest in a variety of different ways, such as:
- unequal advantages, strengths, or assets
- smaller niches or segments where you’re experiencing momentum
- solutions across the company experiencing momentum
- best practices in your or analogous industries, services, products
- relevant mega-trends or opportunities on the horizon
Example
If you're exploring new marketing channels and find that email marketing is yielding exceptional results, concentrate on perfecting this approach before branching out. Aim to hit your goals (e.g., conversion rate, profitability) in email marketing before spreading resources across multiple new acquisition channels.
By applying these innovative problem-solving techniques – reframing, constraining, testing, and deepening – you can approach innovation challenges with fresh perspectives and develop creative solutions that drive growth and success.
Remember, the key to effective problem-solving lies in remaining open to new ideas and continuously refining your approach based on real-world feedback and results.
For other items in this series, see below
This series explores how you can create personally sustainable ventures, by optimizing processes for operational excellence #1 - Social Impact Leaders: Time-Saving Hacks for 20 Extra Hours a Week #2 - Google Sheets Task Management Template for Social Impact Leaders #3 - Secret to Innovation Strategy: How to Build Accountability in a Team #4 - Social Innovation without Scope Creep
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