Accolade Innovation Planning and Roadmapping Overview
Accolade Innovation Planning 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. Individual plans are written using planning elements, which can be configured by color and style to allow planners to visually identify different types of plans and to easily assess the development of different aspects of an overall plan. Using metrics to track aspects of each plan enables you to report on the progress and success of each plan through integration with Accolade Portfolio Center.
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, to aid 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.
Innovation Planning is used throughout this Help system to refer to the components contained in both Innovation Planning and Roadmapping.
High-level functionality is available as follows:
| Accolade Innovation Planning | Accolade Roadmapping | |
|---|---|---|
|
Ability to create elements based on date ranges or a single point in time |
x | x |
|
Ability to build a hierarchy of parent/child relationships |
x | x |
|
Metric values |
x | x |
|
Dependencies, such as Start-to-Start |
x | |
|
Dependency conflict notifications |
x | |
|
Canvas view |
x | x |
|
Grid view |
x | x |
|
Gantt view, including hierarchical Gantts |
x |
Portfolios and Innovation Planning
Within Innovation Planning, Planners can arrange elements in a hierarchy of parent-child relationships. Using a hierarchy allows Planners to create plans by modeling elements that are components of, or in some sense subordinate to, other elements. If your company has purchased Accolade Portfolio Center, you can use Portfolio Optimizer to manage the highest level element in the hierarchy. The first-level children of a planning element become that element's portfolio, and you can use Portfolio Optimizer to evaluate the portfolio with a variety of metrics, re-rank the elements in the portfolio, and create charts that show the relationships between the elements.
To open Portfolio Optimizer from Innovation Planning, from the parent element of the portfolio, navigate to the Portfolio 
page and select Open Portfolio Optimizer. The portfolio is named the same as parent planning element. For more information about using Portfolio Optimizer, see the Portfolio Optimizer online Help available within that application.
See the following to get started: