A Road to Innovation through Project Management

Fagun is a senior program manager in Delhi, India.

  Innovation  

Project management is a very powerful tool that can be integrated with other tools to get results. In this article, I will integrate project management with Six Sigma and show how it can result in innovation.

Many people think that project management and Six Sigma are different and would wonder how we can combine them to get innovation. Innovation is defined as a way to see things differently, to improve or create new solutions for existing problems in an effort to add value. The result can be incremental innovation (improvement in the existing product or process, or adding value in an existing one by modifying it) or breakthrough innovation (creating a completely new product or process).

Six Sigma is a tool that can be used to understand the root cause of a problem and then help find a solution for it in a planned and organized manner; it can be used to increase the quality of a product. Project management is a tool by which a project or problem is managed in an organized and sequential manner, so that (hopefully) nothing is missed in between and all stakeholders agree on all the aspects and methods (and accept the final product).

How are these related? We just have to change our way of thinking and modify our style of doing things. As mentioned in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), the project lifecycle is used. Its five phases …

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