Convictions
The founders of IPMC and its team of consultants all share certain convictions that guide their hand in consulting, training and coaching.
These convictions spring from their professional experience both as practitioners in business and as consultants specialising in product development, innovation, engineering and project management.
- In a globalised world, the sustainability of companies hangs more on adding value through innovation than by going head to head on a costs basis with the emerging economies.
- Successful innovation is primarily about team performance. The global best outcome is rarely the sum of the local best outcomes.
Success is not just a matter of putting the best individual skills together. It also means having a project team that shares a common understanding of the needs of the client, that can work in sync with one another, and that knows just when to reuse parts of solutions that already exist by implementing shared processes, Lean etc.
- Sharing a comprehensive performance model is essential to building effectiveness as a team.
In complex environments exposed to hazards, the only way to stay the course and avoid dispersion is having the ability to look at the “big picture”. The challenge is to construct a view of the whole, identify the critical points and act coherently along the five backbone aspects: product architecture, development business processes, organisation of roles and project platforms, “technical” information system, and motivation.
- In the virtual era, the creation and daily implementation of actual physical workplaces, calling broadly upon visual management, is a key factor in team effectiveness.
The development of remote work tools and virtual platforms requires teams to sync at critical times. The best way to work together effectively, make the right decisions and complete their project successfully is to have a concrete vision of what they are producing together.
- Each company has its own unique history, culture and positioning in the market. Tools and methods have to be customised, adapted and optimised to the particularities of each company.
Many of the off-the-shelf tools and methodologies are no use when they are thrown in without taking consideration of the context and the effort required to take ownership. Better then to have a robust methodology and tools that everyone can use, “at the right time”, rather than sophisticated methods that presume to be exhaustive.
- “Don’t just train your team, give them a workout!” Team performance assumes proper training in teams that mix disciplines and cultures, into the practice of the development process, reviews, trade-offs and design-optimising tools etc. Simulation platforms are the answer to this need for intensive training.
