ISO 56007 in Le Temps

“Projects”: a fashionable word, including in Switzerland. But far too many projects are launched in companies and few are completed, and all this within the planned time and budget. This can generate many unnecessary costs, loss of time and frustrations.

That is why the idea emerged of better calibrating projects, giving rise to the ISO 56007 standard adopted by 42 countries, including Switzerland, and published last August. Its full title is: “Innovation management — Tools and methods for opportunity and idea management — Guidance”. To discuss it, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, brought together experts from all over the world to define the best practices to follow, from manufacturing through services to management processes.

This standard, which is neither mandatory nor certifying, serves as a guide to helping people with project ideas in various fields in organisations wishing to be more systematic in their management of ideas, or SMEs seeking to structure their innovation activities better.

Swiss entrepreneur and trainer Raphael H Cohen is the representative of the Swiss Association for Standardization and a delegated expert to ISO to represent Switzerland in drawing up this standard. He looks back at how it can help companies.

We are seeing an inflation of projects, including in Switzerland. How do you explain this?

Companies generally always want, better, to offer new products and new services. But we are also seeing an acceleration in the changes companies face, with new laws and new realities, and consequently a need to adapt. Projects, training for example, are also flourishing with the arrival of artificial intelligence.

Why was this ISO 501 standard necessary, in your view?

Existing project management methods do not focus on the pre-selection phase, but they help to develop those that are relevant, above all to stop those that should not be pursued. Yet today it is the absence of brakes that means a great deal of energy and resources, especially financial ones, are wasted.

This standard actually deals with pre-project management for innovation, for which experts from all over the world came together to define best practices. I represented Switzerland and was particularly active in drafting this standard.

What concrete tools does it provide?

It is inspired in particular by work I carried out at the University of Geneva which highlighted the central role of unknowns in the pre-project phase. Unknowns correspond to missing information that represent blind spots. ISO 56007 recommends taking stock of these unknowns during the pre-project phase and preparing a robust plan to assess the effort and resources needed to resolve them.

Like many people have abandoned, a fault line can be identified before deciding to rush headlong down a path without knowing what lies ahead. We have developed in Switzerland tools that enable the greatest possible number of these unknowns to be identified upstream.

Many organisations fundamentally continue with risks, whereas when those are not managed they can increase these unknowns.

The standard recommends, for helping them, drawing up a list of selection criteria for projects and presents a model also developed in Switzerland. By analogy with recruiters, who use a checklist of questions to put to a candidate, decision-makers should also have a checklist of points to verify before launching a project.

Since there are very few organisations with a complete list of criteria, many projects are launched with blind spots that make them derail. The text also offers an alternative more convivial than drafting a business plan to present a project to decision-makers.

This standard is not binding and without certification. Can it really carry enough weight?

Existing ISO standards have an objective legitimacy. In the case of medicines, for example, a company that does not comply with a standard compromises the safety of users of the product. The same is true for environmental impact or for the quality of education.

In innovation, the issue is less to “be in order” than to make life easier for those applying it, without having to prove compliance.