Monitoring implementation

Once you’ve developed the new product, process, technology or practice, you need to implement it.

The Implementation Plan helps you to monitor the process by defining the steps, tasks, responsibilities, and time required. It answers what, who, how, and when. It should be specific to your needs and the project specifications.

Ensure that the owner of each task is equipped to carry out the actions assigned to them. Check in to see if there are problems or delays. If one task is dependent on the next, you will have to ensure that everyone (upstream and downstream) is in the loop. It will require organisation and administration.

Monitoring requires you to focus on:

• Your implementation plan
• Owners
• Finances and resources
• Co-ordination between actions
• Data
• User feedback
• Iterations

Most innovation implementations do not go strictly to plan. They will be new and different and as you progress you will discover problems to be solved and refinements that are needed. Feedback from users may reveal, for example, that:

• Your assumptions may not have been right, and change is needed.
• You can revise your system to be more efficient and/or effective.
• Parts of the innovation – the technology and so on – don’t work as designed and need modification.
• Different skills are needed.

Your implementation plan should be sufficiently flexible to allow for changes and delays so you can solve problems that arise.

Steps in problem solving are:

1. Pinpoint the problem.
2. Discover the underlying cause of the problem.
3. Generate solutions that will solve the problem.
4. Try out solutions to select the best.
5. Implement the solution.
6. Test and verify.