P1: H., researcher
Instead of plans and hours, give me the concrete stepping stones. If you want to inform or show something, then show: which concrete stepping stones have you realized in your innovation? The risk of focusing on hours is: ‘we spent 1,000 hours’—okay, but what did you get out of it? People don’t ask that. I don’t think ‘information’ is the right word in the innovation world. I’d put communication at the center rather than information. In innovation, you’re communicating and aligning with each other on how you will implement change. Reports aren’t the best way to do that. Innovation managers don’t get information, they have to go and collect it, that is something you don’t get from reports
P2: L., more F not really PM
How we make decisions has evolved over the years. In the beginning we just hired people who knew the sector and leaned on their judgment — someone came with a good story and we tried to shoot holes in it. If we couldn’t, we moved forward. Gradually that stopped working, so now we try to be more analytical: how many companies are in this field, where are the problems, how much funding have they raised. But data only tells you so much, so we still substantiate it with interviews and conversations. Ultimately it’s still quite exploratory — we test whether companies actually need what we’re thinking of and whether they’d want to participate, and from that we gauge whether we have enough confidence to move forward.
P3: L., not really PM
Impact monitoring is mainly informal. After each hackathon we get together with the working group to evaluate. We also send out evaluation forms to pupils and teachers. But there is no tight structure for that yet. Grant objectives do force you to measure certain things — with Tech Kwadraat, for example, we want to bring 75% of pupils into contact with technology — but you can never really establish cause and effect from a single lesson kit. So the targets are always somewhat arbitrary. What we do track carefully are our own KPIs: how many pupils and classes are we receiving? Right now the priority is simply getting schools to find us in this new building. But it is a balancing act between quality and quantity — I would rather have two groups leave here bouncing off the walls than have twenty classes come through and not really get anything out of it.
P4: L., more F
We do track our network carefully — in Excel — including all the scale-ups of our innovations across the Netherlands. We report on those annually to the steering group. Right now we have more than 160 locations across the country where an innovation that started here is in use. We find that important to document.
P5: S., PM RWS
The information I most want to discuss in our monthly meetings comes down to two things: the business case — what is it going to cost and what will it ultimately deliver, especially when resources are limited — and the impact analysis: what does implementing this innovation actually mean for our organisation? Which processes need to be reorganised, what are the legal implications, who needs to be involved? Those are the things that tend to come up around the larger trajectories. We have various inputs for the challengeportfolio — the public helpline where people call with complaints or questions, and our daily internal news digest that tracks how Rijkswaterstaat appeared in the news and how the public reacted. A recent concrete example: a lot of bridges have been struck by ships lately, causing disruptions for both road traffic and shipping. There was a lot of public reaction — can’t something structural be done about this? Internally I found that the same view was shared, and someone at WVL was already thinking about it. We also have a unit that works with students — DOK RWS — so we brought the problem to them to think about creatively from multiple perspectives. That’s how abstract challenges become concrete.
P6: M., PM Novum
The PM maintains an information overview through a combination of his project management system (Jira), automatic notifications for deviations, monthly status updates from team members, fixed meeting moments, and informal channels. Within that overview, he wants to be able to see at a glance for each project: the current phase, the issue, the assignment brief, the client, the team members, start and end dates, and the most recent status update. His ambition is to develop this further into a system that proactively presents the right information to the right decision-makers at the right moment — not only for himself, but also for management above him. An explicit starting point is that the system must also be pleasant and easy for team members to work in: only if they actually use it will the information remain reliable. The biggest gap remains a searchable knowledge database of previous projects and lessons learned; currently that knowledge is scattered across reports, working documents, and people’s heads, which becomes vulnerable the moment someone leaves.