Identify and analyze innovative improvements that could increase the organization’s quality and process performance.

The specific practice, Collect and Analyze Improvement Proposals, analyzes proposals that are passively collected. The purpose of this specific practice is to actively search for, locate, and analyze innovative improvements. This search primarily involves looking outside the organization.

An acquirer’s customers and suppliers are vital sources of innovative ideas. Inter-organizational and organizational learning are therefore critical to actively identifying and analyzing innovations.

Typical Work Products

1.    Candidate innovative improvements

2.    Analysis of proposed innovative improvements

Typical Supplier Deliverables

1.    Candidate innovative improvements

Subpractices

1.    Analyze the organization’s set of standard processes to determine areas in which innovative improvements would be most helpful.

These analyses are performed to determine which subprocesses are critical to achieving the organization’s quality and process-performance objectives and which ones are good candidates to be improved.

2.    Investigate innovative improvements that may improve the organization’s set of standard processes.

Investigating innovative improvements involves the following activities:

·       Systematically maintaining awareness of leading relevant technical work and technology trends

·       Periodically searching for commercially available innovative improvements

·       Collecting proposals for innovative improvements from projects and the organization

·       Systematically reviewing processes and technologies used externally and comparing them to those used in the organization

·       Identifying areas in which innovative improvements have been used successfully, and reviewing data and documentation of experience using these improvements

·       Identifying improvements that integrate new technology into products and project work environments

·       Determining where supplier products stand in relation to technology cycles and product lifecycles

·       Monitoring economies all over the world to spot new supply bases and markets

3.    Analyze potential innovative improvements to understand their effects on process elements and predict their influence on the process.

The acquirer and its suppliers may establish an innovation review program. This program may create time-boxed innovation solicitation, which is a well-communicated formal process for analysis and guaranteed response to innovative ideas proposed by customers, employees, and suppliers.

Process-performance models can provide a basis for analyzing possible effects of changes to process elements.

Refer to the Organizational Process Performance process area for more information about process-performance models.

4.    Analyze the costs and benefits of potential innovative improvements.

5.    Create process- and technology-improvement proposals for those innovative improvements that would result in improving the organization’s processes or technologies.

6.    Select innovative improvements to be piloted before broadscale deployment.

Since innovations, by definition, usually represent a major change, most innovative improvements will be piloted.

7.    Document results of evaluations of innovative improvements.