The ability to flesh out an idea and its potential efficient realisation is absolutely vital for a vibrant, growing and evolving business.

Ideas rarely spring up fully formed and many may never see the light of day.

The business should have an established and effective reusable process by which ideas can be realistically evaluated.

Conceive: Formulate an idea or plan in the mind.

Explore: Flesh out the idea by looking at its finer nuances and possibilities.

Articulate: Express the idea in a form that can be  unambiguously communicated and understood by others.

Align: Determine if the idea supports the mission, vision, goals and objectives of the business. Abandon the idea it if no alignment exists. capture the reasons why.

Define: Identify, define and describe the different possible options for bringing the idea to fruition.

Select: Determine which of the options is best suited to progress.

Assess: Establish an expected and measurable business business benefit of the final solution. This assessment along with the preferred option forms the basis of a business case.

Build: Turn the idea into reality.

Realise: Put the built solution into production.

Re-assess: Measure the delivered benefits and compare them to those expected.

Each step described above should have a defined process supporting it with indications of what inputs and outputs are expected.

After re-assessing ideas that have been realised it is essential that

• both correct actions and mis-steps,
• previously undocumented assumptions or issues,
• realised risks and their consequences and
• measured realised business benefit

are captured and acknowledged. The lessons learned allows for future ideas to be better defined and consequently enables the business to improve identification and mitigation of risks associated with future ideas or initiatives.

The lessons learned from any single idea should also feed into the overall process enabling the opportunity to improve and refine it for future use.

All ideas will have an inherent risk associated with them. To realise those ideas that truly have merit a strong and rigorous process needs to be in place. This ensures decisions to progress or abandon can be efficiently made.

Realising good ideas can equate to growth within a business.

The alternative is stagnation and or decline.