Stage Gate Design to Deliver Outcomes

Establishing effective governance and decision-making processes for innovation initiatives is key to delivering successful outcomes. But how, exactly, do you go about establishing stage gates?

Three things are needed for each stage gate:

• Information on the idea or initiative and its level of maturity;
• criteria to determine if the organisation will continue to support the initiative;
• and who will make that decision.

While this seems fairly straightforward, developing effective stage gate systems can be quite difficult with challenges including:

• Too many or too few steps;
• bottlenecks because of decision timeframes or lack of information;
• and misalignment with organisational decision-making processes

Below is a ten-step checklist we have created to help you gather the information you need to establish or redesign effective stage gates that improve decision-making across your innovation portfolio and maintain relevance to your organisation’s strategy.

Ten step checklist to enhance stage gate design: 

1. What is the process to mobilise internal resources?
2. What are your internal financial delegations and who has those delegations?
3. What is the resources budget for validation projects?
4. What is the process before a new product, service or process is adopted as ‘business as usual’?
5. What are the minimum information requirements for project handover?
6. Is there value in getting multiple divisions involved in idea or project selection if they will be involved in implementation?
7. What is the minimum amount of information required before allowing entry to the pipeline?
8. At what stage should funded projects that are not delivering value be stopped?
9. What reporting is expected by the leadership team or board that could influence stage gate design?
10. Do the selected stages make sense when communicating progress to internal (and if relevant external) stakeholders?

Gathering this essential information will enable you to map out a logical and effective process to evaluate innovation projects at various stages of completion, ensuring your projects stay on track for success.

If you would like more support to set up systems and processes that facilitate effective innovation outcomes within your organisation, contact us today.