Accept Software Resource Library

A Cue from "Bucky" Fuller for Product Planning!

Richard Buckminster Fuller the famous inventor and systems theorist, whose life began in 1895 and spanned almost 100 years has a famous saying. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

He said this numerous times about things that had to be re-imagined to work in a new and better way. It’s true that he wasn’t responding to the crisis with product planning today but he could have been. We’re pretty sure that if he were alive today and we could ask him about how to deal with the product planning crisis he might employ his saying or at least expand on the sentiment of it.

We here at Accept Software have done and continue to do just that: “build a new model”. The part where we make the old model obsolete has yet to happen but we think, at least, that companies who are using the old model to plan their products should certainly consider what the new model might do.

Old Product Planning Model - using disconnected point tools to prioritize resulting in disconnected islands of information that must be regularly reconciled and synchronized, leading to a weak ability to prioritize.

New Product Planning Model - Centralizes prioritization by capturing, connecting and synchronizing all product planning information on a recurring basis, when needed.

Because after years of living and breathing this issue with our big and small clients, we know that a new model has been just the answer. We suspect that’s why when we ask our customers, they often report that we helped change their entire data management and planning process. By the way, the old model works perfectly well fine for many companies. But if they don’t, “Bucky”, as they called him, has a message for you.