Accolade Components Overview

Accolade consists of multiple components to manage all aspects of the innovation and new product development lifecycle across all relevant functions in your organization.

Process and Project Management

Accolade automates your New Product Development (NPD) process by integrating software, specialized content, and expert services to help maximize the value of your product development portfolio. At its core, Accolade provides flexible, web-based software to streamline the new product development process implemented in your organization. It also integrates information to support and inform new product development decisions from concept to market launch.

Accolade also includes the following optional components and add-ins which allows your company to purchase just the features that are most helpful in performing your mission. Although this Help system refers to all of these features, you might not be able to perform the tasks described in a particular Help topic if your company did not purchase the corresponding component.

  • Idea Submission - Enables the capture, evaluation, and development of new product ideas.
  • Collaborative Workflow - Allows a group of users to combine in a pre-planned way to create and review a document for a project.
  • Accolade Office Extensions - Use this add-in to save deliverable or activity documents and related documents directly to Accolade from desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, eliminating the need to navigate back to Accolade to complete the upload process. Accolade Office Extensions also provides the ability to easily create reports in Excel that access the most recent and up-to-date Accolade data. For more information, see the online Help available in the desktop versions of the Office applications after the component is installed.
  • Accolade's integration with Microsoft Project - Included in the Accolade Office Extensions add-in, this provides direct integration with Microsoft Project that enables project team members to use the extensive project planning features to help manage the day-to-day activities in their projects. For more information, see the online Help available in Microsoft Project after the component is installed.

    • Note:  Use of the Microsoft Project functionality may require additional licensing.

  • Accolade SmartDocuments for Office - Use this add-in to upload templates from Accolade into web versions of Microsoft 365 applications, collaborate and update information, and upload completed documents, eliminating the need to navigate back to Accolade. For more information, see the online Help available in the web versions of the Office applications after the component is installed.
  • Accolade Connect for Microsoft 365 - Use this add-in to connect teams using Microsoft Teams functionality. You can initiate conversations, phone calls, and meeting invitations, as well as create and manage Accolade-related project, deliverable, or activity teams directly in Microsoft Teams, all from within an Accolade project page.

Resource Planning and Portfolio Management

Accolade provides real-time management for each of your company's product portfolios and resource allocation strategy.

  • Accolade enables users to create portfolios of projects. In projects that contain a portfolio, project managers can view the contributions that portfolio projects are making to their project's critical metrics. They can also re-rank the projects in their portfolio and edit the target values for those metrics.
  • Use Accolade Portfolio Optimizer to load project portfolios and compare and manage the projects, to optimize scenarios, to evaluate resource usage and find ways to improve efficiency, and to create charts that display project relationships.
  • Resource Planning is an optional component that enables your company to plan how best to allocate resources among multiple projects.

Accolade Innovation Planning

Innovation Planning within Accolade provides cross-functional planners the ability to create an overall corporate plan for innovation that includes all functional areas and integrates strategic corporate plans with the actual operational plans for projects. In addition, Accolade Roadmapping, which includes all the functionality from Innovation Planning, provides the means to develop dynamic, interlinked long-range roadmaps for the innovations within your company. Roadmapping provides a visualization of the projects and their dependencies that make up the roadmap. Roadmapping aids in aligning company strategies and investments to meet company objectives, and to coordinate efforts across teams for product launches at the correct time to market. Both Innovation Planning and Roadmapping are optional components designed to foster better, more informed decision making to support long-term company strategies.