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< Back Exclusive Interview with Swapnil Deshpande, Chief Digital Officer, Thoughtworks Here is an exclusive interview with Swapnil Deshpande, Chief Digital Officer, Thoughtworks India, who enlightens the readers about how the company is determined to provide a business transformation with its own digital platform and transformation strategies. Digital transformation is becoming popular among companies and industries to modify traditional processes into smart and digital business processes and customer experience. It is the integration of digital technologies such as AI, ML, data analytics, IoT, cloud computing, and many more in different areas of a business. It is thriving in the tech-driven market, especially after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. 1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers. ThoughtWorks, founded in 1993, provides premium, end-to-end digital strategy, design, and engineering services to enable companies across the globe to successfully and rapidly navigate their digital transformation journeys. It connects strategy to execution, using cross-functional teams of strategists, designers, software engineers, data scientists, and other specialists to deliver value to clients at scale. Four global service lines provide specialized capabilities and thought leadership to drive digital transformation: Enterprise modernization, platforms, and cloud : The company modernizes complex operations, platforms, development, and delivery practices to rapidly unleash business value Customer experience, product, and design : The team accelerates value creation through extraordinary digital products and customer experiences powered by integrated technology and design. Data and AI : The company enables data-driven intelligent products and business insights with pragmatic data strategies, governance, engineering, predictive AI, automation, and ML capabilities. Digital transformation and operations : The team augments other services by providing organizations with executable digital strategies, frictionless operating models, and transformation services that increase clients’ agility, resilience, and ability to compete for business and retain talent. Since its inception, ThoughtWorks has been pioneers in trends, such as agile software development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, microservices, evolutionary architecture, and data mesh that now underpin many modern digital businesses. 2. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company’s technology innovations? Consumer expectations and next-generation technologies are constantly evolving, requiring companies to re-evaluate their business models and undergo end-to-end digital transformations. This trend has only accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This is why digital transformation services spending is expected to more than double to US$1 trillion by 2025, according to MarketsandMarkets. The post-pandemic world has seen a huge acceleration in the transformation work that companies are doing to go digital in their services and offerings to their customers. With companies facing ongoing digital disruption, many lack the capabilities and talent necessary to keep pace with the accelerating rate of technological change. ThoughtWorks has been a thought leader at the forefront of technology innovation for the past 28 years. It leverages the vast experience to improve clients’ ability to respond to change, utilize data assets to unlock new sources of value, and create resilient technology platforms that move with business strategies and rapidly design, deliver and evolve exceptional digital products, and experiences at scale. With the globally diversified business and clients across all major verticals and geographies, its global distributed agile delivery model operates where clients are and helps them solve their biggest problems. The talent pool of over 9,000 employees working across 17 countries on five continents helps the company achieve the scale to help customers. Further, the unique, diverse, and cultivating culture, with a reputation for technical excellence and thought leadership, enables the team to attract and retain what they believe is the best talent in the industry. 3. How does your company’s strategy facilitate the transformation of an enterprise? Organizations are getting challenged to transform to adapt and grow in the face of continuous disruption. Innovation, including business model innovation, is almost inevitable for most businesses. Businesses that are digitally capable (modern digital businesses) have an advantage over traditional businesses as they can adapt, evolve, and continuously innovate to compete in the market. At ThoughtWorks, it connects deep strategic understanding with unrivaled software and platform expertise to enable fast, effective organizational transformation. It makes customers’ businesses ready for an unpredictable world. The company helps customers create a holistic vision for transformation and help them navigate their own digital path by building on the experience of working across multiple business and technology domains as well as across different geographies and work cultures worldwide. Using the Digital Fluency Model , the team understands customer aspirations, readiness, and capabilities and works with them to create a pragmatic roadmap that enables them to deliver value faster. Some of the services that the company offers to customers to help them with their transformations are delivery and organization transformation; digital platforms and cloud modernization; technology strategy and executive advisory services; data mesh, data platform, and advanced analytics; idea to market, product management transformation; customer experience strategy, product design, and delivery, as well as value-driven portfolio management 4. What are some of the challenges faced by the developer community today? In the post-pandemic world, the digital transformation pace has changed and there are ever-increasing demands on the IT community, particularly on developers to deliver the value/transformation faster. With the ever-increasing movement of applications to the cloud and the use of various SaaS products throughout the lifecycle of the development, the developers face major challenges to streamline their development process. Throughout the lifecycle of software development, there are multiple tasks that the developers need to do, which are far beyond the actual development work. For example, requesting code repositories, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines are some of the things that the development teams must do even before they start writing the first line of the code. Unless the process is very clear and automated, these things do take time and introduce delays. As the development progresses, the people in the team may change. The onboarding of the new people and offboarding of the people from the team can also lead to friction. Every new person in the team must be given a certain level of access to multiple systems involved in the development process, and every outgoing person’s access must be taken away to ensure the appropriate access control. Unless the process is simplified (or automated), there are chances that the wrong onboarding or offboarding may lead to security non-compliance. Developing new applications often involves integrating with other existing applications. The integration is done via API route or via event streaming. One of the biggest frictions the development teams face in the journey of integration is the discoverability and getting secure access to the available core assets (APIs, events) for integration. It could take many days to find out what is available, how to get access to the right APIs or events unless a well-established API marketplace to discover and gain access to core digital assets is present. In large enterprises, often there is a ‘ticketing system that is used for communicating between different teams. The organizational processes require each development team to create a ‘ticket’ for anything and everything that is required of the other team. Sometimes, there is a lot of back and forth on the tickets between the teams until they get to the required answer. This introduces a lot of friction and communication delays in the process. In addition to some of the above frictions, it’s also important for the development teams to focus on the delivery metrics to understand their development workflow and how their team is working to deliver intended outcomes. Four key metrics (4KM) is one such industry-recognized metric that helps the development team understand how efficiently they are building and deploying the software. However, many teams find it difficult to automate and build the metrics like 4KM that talk about their delivery efficiency, and many of the process gaps, issues go unnoticed. So, to summarize, the challenges that the development teams and developers face during their development cycle are that of two types: 1. Development process friction: Some of which include onboarding, offboarding of the team members, discoverability of core assets, and tracking delivery metrics. 2. Operational process friction: Some of which include the setting up of the infrastructure (or iteration 0), working with multiple teams to collaborate, managing and responding to tickets, and getting access to core assets. These challenges introduce delays and slow down the development process, introduce frictions, and could potentially leave the development teams unhappy and frustrated, even while doing small and simple things. 5. What was the idea behind building NEO and making it available to ThoughtWorks developers? At ThoughtWorks, the developers are the biggest and the most important internal community. The company has been investing in building a world-class internal development platform for the last few years and considered the time to take the next step and reimagine the digital platform, this time, keeping the top internal stakeholders at the core of thinking— ThoughtWorks developers. Reimagining the internal developer platform, through the lens of the developer, pushed ThoughtWorks IT to rethink the approach and helped the team move from ‘what do developers need’ to ‘what do developers need and how can the company make it available to them in an easy and intuitive manner. The developers build apps or products all the time. Apart from building important solutions for customers, it also has a thriving internal application development community. People build software for learning new things and develop new capabilities in this company. For example, in addressing a business need, ThoughtWorks developers may build an application supporting a sales team to expand into a new area, geography efforts. After doing research and talking to many developers, the team realized that the process to kickstart a new idea or project often was not easy for people to follow. It was often an inconsistent and fragmented experience. They had to fill up multiple forms, talk to many teams separately and the overall experience left developers frustrated. It used to take almost ten days for people to get hold of the basic infrastructure to start coding, seven days to get access to relevant APIs, and security approvals to name just a few. The time for building even a simple application and taking it to production was between two to five months. The team had to do something to address this. So, after observing, speaking with, and interacting with 200+ ThoughtWorkers across 30+ offices in more than 15 countries who develop applications, the team started reimagining the whole internal developer platform experience. This time the team kept the developer and their experience of building products at the center of the thinking. The idea behind NEO was to make it easy for the internal development teams to build better products, faster while saving time, costs and improving the overall security of the applications being developed. NEO enables developers to build ideas that matter, liberates the data and core assets that are held within global IT systems, and accelerates innovation within ThoughtWorks. It speeds up the entire delivery and development cycle. 6. Is this platform only available to Thoughtworks developers or is it also available to other developers also? At this time, NEO is only available to ThoughtWorks employees and the contractors who support the building of the internal applications. NEO is used to build experimental applications, innovations, and business-centric applications. NEO is the internal manifestation of ThoughtWorks Digital Platform Strategy and it helps in developing better products and faster. As part of “ThoughtWorks on ThoughtWorks”, the team is sharing the insights and lessons learned with the experience of developing NEO to build a great experience for developers. The aim of the company is that customers can envisage leveraging this idea for their own digital platforms to create the same for their developers. Recently, Thoughtworks also announced partnering with Spotify to deliver better developer effectiveness with Backstage and helped TELUS, one of the customers, deliver the Backstage developer portal for improving the developer experience for their 8,000 engineers. This shows how the industry is now recognizing the ‘developer experience’ as one of the important aspects of the digital platform strategy. 7. How does ThoughtWorks aim to leverage this concept of developer experience for the developer community? NEO already has significantly changed the way developers build products within ThoughtWorks. It has unified and streamlined the developer experience around the internal developer platform. It has reduced the time to provision infrastructure by over 90%, introduced easy discoverability of the core assets, significantly reduced the friction in managing teams and infrastructure for the team, and introduced a new default start place for developers to go to for all their needs. With some of the best developer talent in the world working with the company, the team can continue to rely on the developer community to provide honest and relevant feedback on improving the developer experience with NEO. The major benefits ThoughtWorks has achieved from NEO are: Bringing all developer resources and apps together from multiple different teams (20+ teams) of the organization into a single place for streamlined management By automating processes and integrating cloud operations with NEO, ThoughtWorkshas significantly reduced time to infra provisioning by 90%. Reducing from as many as 7+ days to less than one day. ThoughtWorks is building new internal products and services faster, reducing the time from more than five months for a new application to less than a few weeks, savingThoughtWorks both time and money Integration with Google cloud platform, Github, CircleCI, Okta, and among others has become a lot simpler and more secure due to NEO automated provisioning Self-serve capability to create and manage the teams (across multiple infrastructure providers) helps with secure and seamless access to resources Easy discoverability of API or events with NEO helps developers discover, access, and use the core assets for delivering better and interconnected products and services Centralized metadata management capability helped to manage common organizational content (such as locations). This has reduced the time to change our systems for common content from multiple weeks to less than a day. 4KM reports built on NEO helps teams understand the delivery performance, potential issues and take necessary actions to speed up the delivery cycles Centralized application catalog helps the developers discover interesting applications and contribute to them Easy discoverability of data assets has helped operational leaders to understand what operational & data insights are available on the data platform and how to get access to them Now, here is how the company plans to leverage the concept of developer experience for the developer community: Use it for better, faster internal product development: By introducing the concept of the developer experience product like NEO, the team continues to push the boundaries of how it builds the internal product. Faster and better development means it will be able to respond to new business requirements faster than ever. With customers: In my opinion, NEO is an example of the ‘digital platform done well’. It reduces the friction from the delivery process, makes the core assets and other platform services discoverable and easily accessible, and accelerates innovation and experimentation within the organization. Sharing internal learnings with customers helps to save our customers from going through the problems that this company has gone through as an organization. With the industry: Creating an extraordinary impact on the technology industry through culture and technology excellence is the core part of the purpose of ThoughtWorks (WHY as the team calls it). It’s all about working with each other to push the industry forward and help companies and communities do the right things. The team believes that the learning and the way that has been approaching the internal developer platform concept through the lens of developer experience helps to put a new and unique point of view that could benefit a larger community. After all, happier developers result in better products, better work environments, and generally stay good for the companies and communities. 8. Would you also like to give some more details about how NEO is being used at ThoughtWorks? How has it been progressing? The thinking around NEO started back in Q2-CY2020 and its journey has progressed through multiple iterations to where it is today. The Alpha version of NEO went live for a very limited set of users (up to 40 invited folks) around November 2020. The Alpha plus version went live in January 2021 and has expanded to more early adopters to get more feedback. The beta launch happened earlier this year in July 2021 and the full product launch started August 2021 onwards across different countries. Since its Alpha launch, the developers globally have been actively and progressively been using NEO for their application development needs. Here are some of the statistics: 2000+ ThoughtWorkers (developers) across various countries have visited and interacted with NEO 450+ active developers in 300+ teams have used NEO for their application development needs 285+ applications available and discoverable in the NEO application catalog 60+ APIs and 200+ events available and discoverable through NEO 12+ active products using 4KM for delivery performance With more and more features being added, it is believed that NEO will continue to play an influencing role within ThoughtWorks for the internal product development process. 9. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead? A few key industry trends are driving spending for digital transformation: Expansion of computing boundaries: Rapid development of platforms, cloud, and internet of things are pushing the technology industry to new heights. This is made possible by the expanding boundaries of computing pushing the edges of what is possible for enterprises. The rapid advancement of AI- and ML-based tools: As artificial intelligence and machine learning gain more industry adoption, they enhance productivity and drive digital transformation by making predictions to assist humans in making decisions, and in some cases, by automating decision-making and tasks completely. The benefits of rapid advancement in AI- and ML-based tools can be applied across the entire value chain of business processes, from manufacturing and maintenance to marketing and customer service. Enhanced consumer experiences: The pervasiveness of technology has enhanced modern consumer experiences with the integration of digital and physical worlds, such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality. Consumers are not just demanding availability and accessibility— they expect experiences to be personalized and interactions to be seamless and rich. Enterprises are moving quickly to deliver an omnichannel experience across platforms with evolving interfaces that blend speech, touch, and visuals. Accelerating towards sustainability: Consumers increasingly factor sustainability into their decision-making when choosing a brand or supplier. This requires businesses to examine the environmental impact of their products and operations, including their carbon footprint, and to adopt more sustainable strategies and technologies, such as green cloud optimization. The growing impact of hostile tech and increased focus on information privacy: The increased complexity of technology presents a heightened risk of cyberattacks, computer malware, viruses, social engineering, employee misuse as well as data and security breaches. Privacy is also a key priority for consumers, with an increased focus on data sharing and growing awareness of the impact of AI and algorithmic bias. Previous Next

< Back Innovate to impact framework Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. And often, the reason for failure is that organizations are trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Good luck with that. Instead, we prefer to plan for success. In this article, we’re going to dive into the practical details of our fluency model — the Innovate to Impact framework — looking at each stage of the journey and outlining the steps you need to take to proceed to the next level. The framework relies on a collaborative approach to innovation — avoiding the pitfalls of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches that so often end in frustration (see article one for a fuller description of the collaborative approach). But success demands more than just setting up a team and hoping for the best. Let’s look a little closer at how your journey towards sustainable innovation can map out. It starts with a vision: how you see ways to differentiate yourself from the competition. Stage 1: Experimenter (Build the capability & innovation engine) The first stage of your journey is all about building capability and the innovation engine that will help you with experimentation. Your innovation team needs to understand all key stakeholders; the roles team members will play; how to source ideas from people across the enterprise; and how to establish communication channels and build a process that will allow efficient execution of the experiments that you’re going to conduct. Experimentation, however, needs to be aligned to a purpose: that of getting you closer to your vision for strategic customer differentiation objective. Successful experimentation will help you scale through the steps of this framework, and smooth the path towards sustainable innovation. As part of the innovation engine, your team needs to get accustomed to the discipline of sourcing ideas; validating them; ensure the focus is aligned to business priorities; and evaluate experiments’ success in ways that are tangible to the business. This helps the team to be lean in their approach of building an innovation engine for experimentation. As part of this stage, the following are the aspects you need to consider: Purpose To build the capability and set foundations to carry out experiments in the most efficient manner. What you need to do? At this stage, you will need to: Identify the purpose of your innovation programme and set a long term charter for the programme Identify the key stakeholders and team members Build relations and alignment with leadership and understand strategic objectives of the organization Generate, validate and select a set of ideas and experiments in collaboration with people across organization Prioritize a set of ideas and run experiments using the rapid innovation framework Review your process to identify the most efficient and impactful way to build experiments Repeat the process for different types of experiments to fine-tune your innovation engine Expected outcome This phase is all about building an innovation capability that turn your ideas into products, prototypes or some tangible results (success or failure) in the most efficient manner. Once you’ve taken the above steps, its expected that you would have: Built the team that’s capable of running experiments in the most efficient manner Understood the communication pathways and decision points within your organization Proven your capability that you can turn ideas into products, prototypes or some tangible results (success or failures) within a definite period of time This should invite more attention for you innovation programme and possibly enable you to secure additional funding. Possible risks One of the biggest challenges for this early-stage Experimenter team is that the projects may fail, or at least not produce the anticipated results. Maybe more experiments fail than succeed. This can undoubtedly impact morale. So you should raise this possibility with the team at the outset. Because at this formative stage, successful projects aren’t the only goal: it’s essential that your team learns to adapt and quickly identify when projects aren’t delivering. They’ll learn far more from projects that go awry than those that are plain sailing. Innovation in practice Google X is a great example of how experimentation-oriented innovation labs can be set up. X is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. Its goal? 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement. It approaches projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research, and tries to tackle them with the speed and ambition of a startup. Some of its best known ideas include Project Loon (balloons to deliver internet in rural areas) and Project Wing (Drones for good deliveries). Stage 2: Value creator (Build enhanced credibility and strengthen leadership support by targeting internal value creation) Once you have a solid engine that enables you to turn your ideas into tangible results and has proven its worth through a series of experimentation, you should then turn your focus onto building impact within the organization. This can be done through targeted value generation using your engine. As a part of value creator, your focus should now be to partner with important business functions within the organization, identifying opportunities where impact of innovation can be highest and partner with the users or functions to deliver those innovations to them. The important difference between the experimenter phase and value creator phase is that in the latter, you identify specific areas (such as recruitment, staffing or operations) and work with the end users to establish a hypothesis of value and agree on it before starting to work on solving the problem and delivering an innovation. In this phase, your working team becomes bigger as you welcome the potential users and functional people into your team and focus on co-creation to deliver impactful innovation through your engine. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to strengthen the partnership with the organizational leadership by providing direct and tangible benefits to the important business functions through your innovation engine. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Identify and partner with an internal business function, which is strategically important for the organization (say staffing, recruiting, sales) Talk to the users and understand their problems, as well as opportunities in the area Ideate within the context to understand the possibilities for innovation Map idea to potential value /outcome and target specific idea for experimentation Create a working group with users and functional people that would work with your team to co-create the solution Use your experimentation engine to build the solution/product/prototype and targetedly deliver the value Measure the value delivered Expected outcome Because your innovation team is now working with a target group within the enterprise, you can expect the team to hone their ability to generate ideas that solve specific problems for that team. This can help build the culture of purpose-led innovation. Innovation is driven by customer value and market differentiation. It's sustained with strategic alignment and people participation. The innovation efforts through this phase should directly help your organization achieve part of its strategic goals or push your functions closer to achieving their strategic goals. In a nutshell, deliver impact for an important business function within your organization. Possible risks The choice of targeted teams within your organization will determine your success. That’s because this needs to be a close working relationship. If your stakeholders can’t make time for, you can’t deliver. This can be a challenge. As we saw in the first article, when business-as-usual is the priority, innovation suffers. You can’t afford to be seen as a distraction, rather than a strategic enabler. Innovation in practice In a commercial aircraft’s galley, space is at a premium. And with hundreds of passengers to please, every square centimeter is precious. So when looking at how to maximize use of this space, Delta Airlines’ innovation team, The Hanger, came up with an neat idea to reclaim nearly two carts’ worth of space: turning the coffee mug handles to face each other . Sometimes, valuable ideas don’t need to cost the earth. Stage 3: Business enabler (Build customer-focused innovation engine to support sales and new client solutions) Once you’ve proven yourself to be a value creator for the business, it’s time to take the next step and start thinking of directly contributing to the business growth. As you start thinking of growing the impact of your innovation program, it’s important that you start thinking of impacting the sales and demand efforts of your organization and to an extent, your organization’s clients. This phase, the Business enabler, specifically targets value creation for the revenue-earning departments or in some cases, directly for the clients. Using the work done for building the delivery engine and value creation for internal functions, you’d have built a repository of innovations that could possibly be ready to be showcased to your clients as a part of your proposal, or a sales pitch. In some cases, there may be a need to do a targeted prototyping or concept designing for clients based on certain pre-sales activities. Your innovation team can partner with the client account teams or sales and demand teams to proactively identify opportunities to showcase your innovations to clients or create new innovations that will assist sales efforts with existing and new clients. This is where the focus of the innovation shifts from delivering targeted value to an internal function to target supporting business development efforts of the organization through innovation. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to directly support the pre-sales, client account teams and business development efforts by targeting specific client or market opportunities to help win more business. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Partner with the market-facing or revenue-generating departments within your organization to understand the opportunities Understand about the existing clients and potential clients that your organization wants to target Collaborate with client account teams and sales teams to identify opportunities where innovation bring an impact on business development Identify opportunities to showcase your innovations to relevant clients (existing / potential) as a part of sales efforts Deliver new innovations that would be relevant / showcaseable to clients (existing / potential) that would open up new business opportunities Continue aligning with the business functions within the organization to deliver concepts / prototypes / innovations relevant to the market Expected outcome As part of this phase, your team is now working with the direct revenue-earning (or maybe winning) departments of the organization, you can expect the team to contribute to winning more business for the organization. This is especially true when it comes to existing revenue-generating streams. You can do this by supporting the sales efforts by delivering innovative example PoCs, concepts, prototypes aligned with the clients or market you are targeting. The innovations that you deliver should be targeted to help open up new conversations with existing clients for more work, innovative work and help convince new clients about your capability of delivering work. By running experiments that are targeted towards customers, clients and the business, you should get quicker way at market and opportunity assessment. It should become second nature for your teams to know about market conditions and identify where opportunities lie. Possible risks The stakes are rising. You may need larger investments for the experiments you’re running — and that’s often a business challenge. Especially because you are doing a pre-investment into delivering potential revenue earning innovations that may or may not necessarily guarantee new business. There’s a danger that customers may still be thinking about yesteryear’s ideas and may not be really prepared for your innovation to drive their growth. So in many cases there is a likelihood that you may present a shiny new innovation to them and they may think: “This looks great, but probably we need time to be ready for this kind of work.” Innovation in practice At US insurance group USSA, business enhancements are achieved by going to its customers directly. It runs new ideas past its customers via USAA Labs, where members are invited to evaluate and test new ideas and concepts. For instance, members might be asked to evaluate the firm’s process for handling natural disasters or maybe a guide for managing debt. Through its innovation process, it can run experiments that target specific value and get to production through a targeted innovation process, where it has proven customer needs. Stage 4: Strategic differentiator (Define your own blue ocean and find your sweet spot, led by innovation) Now that you have mastered building your innovation engine, understood how to create significant value for internal stakeholders and the organization, and also mastered the art of building innovations for clients and help strengthening existing revenue streams, it’s time to take a jump and take the next step. To grow significantly faster, you need to create your own blue oceans and deliver differentiated value to clients through your innovation engine. You need to create a value proposition such that it differentiates you positively against your competition and potentially, makes the competition irrelevant. This is the whole point of innovation and through this phase, you should aim to create a strategic differentiation for yourself against your competition. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to use innovation to build a strategic differentiator for yourself against your competition and position yourself positively in the market you operate. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Invest in R&D to understand and spot potential new market opportunities that would provide significant new value to your customers Use your market research skills to come up with new offerings, services or products for your existing customers, or to spot an entirely new customer segment Understand how this could differentiate yourself against your competition and provide you an advantage in the market Invest in building a strategic capability to support the delivery of the new offering, services or a product for your customer segment Successfully delivery value to customers and run a full cycle of acquisition, retention and growth with your customer (i.e., acquiring, retaining and growing the customer) Think about building a strategic partnership with your customers and help them to graduate through their own innovation journey You can think of being successful if you are able to help customers draw significant value in the markets they operate through your new innovative offering Expected outcome As a part of your strategic investment in innovation efforts, you need to create a new product, service offering or a value proposition for customers that’s innovative and positively differentiates you against your competition. This can be done by establishing a strategic innovation partnering with your customers and help them shape up their own innovation journey and help them deliver significant value to their customers. Possible risks The biggest risk in this is the lack of belief of leadership in investing into R&D to create true differentiation through innovation. It’s often seen that the leadership prefers to take low-risk approach to exploring new opportunities and it may mean that they’d miss out on creating a significant differentiator for organizations through this approach. This phase requires organizations to take a radical new approach and may impact culture, people and the way the business is done etc. and it needs strong and visionary leadership to take this step. Innovation in practice Airbnb is a great example of how innovation has enabled an entire new business to be set up; one that’s disrupted the hospitality industry globally. Its unique rental platform lets people list, find, and rent short-term lodging in 65,000 cities and more than 191 countries across the globe. Innovation has proven to be a big strategic differentiator for Airbnb and allows itself to create a blue ocean for itself against the competition within the hospitality industry. In n ext part of this series, we'll explore how this fluency model has been implemented in practice. Previous Next

< Back Building innovation engine In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Don’t wait for tomorrow In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that rests on its laurels can expect to become obsolete. In an ultra-competitive market, you have only a small window to spot opportunities and exploit them before your competitors. That’s because no matter how fast your market is evolving, technology is evolving faster. Tech-led, innovative disruptors are everywhere. Just look at long-established markets like global commodity trading. Within three months of launching, VAKT ($), the blockchain-based energy trading platform had signed up more than two-thirds of companies responsible for all deals in North Sea crude oil trading. This pace of change is unprecedented. And the consequences are clear: Unless your organization is geared up to innovate, you’ll always be playing catch-up. Many established organizations are comfortable not being at the bleeding edge. And that’s understandable: in febrile times, taking time to come up with a measured response can seem the pragmatic thing to do. In fact, pragmatism shouldn’t be conflated with inaction. If you really want to understand the best course for your business, you need to understand it from a cost perspective. How much will exploring disruption and investing in innovation cost? What value can you derive from exploiting opportunities? What is the cost of missed opportunity? What will you have to spend to get back in the game? And in many cases, that means you need to take action now. As Forrester Research principal analyst James Staten notes : “Driving change is far better and less fearful than waiting for others to disrupt you and having to painfully respond and adapt.” Introducing the ‘innovate to impact’ framework Concepts such as innovation can become overused, with everyone adopting slightly different ideas about what they mean. In this context, I’d define innovation as: Creating something new, that generates a tangible value to the intended audience. The most salient points here are “new” and “tangible value”. If it’s not new, and if it’s not bringing tangible value, it’s not innovation. It’s worth noting at this point that one-off innovation isn’t really much use. Take pic sharing trailblazer Snap. Its clever use of AR tech briefly made SnapChat the must-have app for any social media-loving teen, paving the way for an IPO that valued the company at over $30 billion. But its innovations were easy for competitors, such as Facebook-owned Instagram to copy — over the months following the IPO, Snap’s market cap dropped by more than $20 billion. Snap has only subsequently been able to recover lost ground through embracing the ideas of continuous innovation. To those that see innovation through the lens of eureka moments — where advances are only made after flashes of inspiration and brilliance — continuous innovation can appear anachronistic. It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. This isn’t a view I subscribe to, but it’s one I’ve often encountered; therefore, before we start thinking about a roadmap for innovation, it’s worth considering some of the major obstacles you’ll need to overcome before any innovation program can get off the ground. Barriers to innovation Ask any business leader you encounter and they’ll say being more innovative is highly desirable. But for innovation to be something more than a pipe dream, you need to be realistic about the challenges you’re likely to face. While there could be many reasons why innovation programs fail to take off within the organization, the most common barriers I have encountered are: Fear of failure In a world of performance reviews and targets, nobody wants to be associated with failure. When people are in fear for their livelihood they can become risk averse. What’s more, innovation means change — and change can be scary. Being ready to innovate often demands a huge cultural shift, where experimentation is embraced. And if things don’t work, what’s important is what you’ve learnt from the experience; not who’s to blame. Too busy on BAU You’re probably used to hearing from your teams how busy they are. But when all your efforts are expended on keeping the lights on, your ability to innovate suffers. And since people are busy, they often feel that they’re adding value — perhaps without questioning whether they could add more. The importance any organization attaches to innovation has profound cultural implications. It’s all very well making grand gestures, such as setting aside regular time for blue sky thinking; but if those sessions are the first thing to be cut when cost savings need to be made, don’t be surprised if your staff question your commitment to innovation. Lack of diversity As author Simone Bhan Ahuja notes, lack of diversity within innovation teams can hamstring your efforts from the outset : “You’ll know you have the wrong team when everything is running along smoothly but the team’s output doesn’t look much different from business as usual.” If you’re looking for new approaches and ideas, you’re going to need diversity of thought — people with different skill sets, people that come at problems from different angles. Key skills for the group may include: product strategy; product development; entrepreneurship; domain expertise; experience design; research and analysis; and ideation and creation. Typical approaches to innovation? Given the importance attached to innovation, it’s little wonder that so many people in the organization want to lead it. And while it doesn’t pay to be too prescriptive — each organization is unique and needs to find an approach that fits — here are some common approaches, along with their pros and cons. As we’ve seen earlier, this collaborative approach will need team members with a diverse set of skills. And it also has the greatest opportunity to succeed when it involves the tech function. That’s because today’s greatest innovations are dependent on tech; the complexities and processes needed to deliver innovation reliably depend on tech expertise. But collaboration also needs checks and balances: who is the one deciding on whether to focus on building something or enabling innovation? When should you focus on products and when is it more important to energize the team through events such as hackathons? Ultimately, you’ll also want to consider how you plan to support sustained innovation over the long term. This isn’t something you can achieve overnight. Planning for continuous innovation is a journey — and one, if done right, that will become a strategic differentiator against the competition for years to come. We call this journey the Impact to Innovation framework. This Innovate to Impact framework gives you a roadmap to create internal incubator teams, that become the engine of your innovation. The framework also sets out how to grow the impact inside and outside of your organization through scaling different stages of maturity. As the model suggests, for innovation to become a strategic differentiator, you cannot just stay at the experimentation level: you need to show the impact of innovation and have a plan to grow that. It can be useful to think about this journey at the outset: Stage four becomes your blue ocean ; you have to think about how innovation can become a strategic differentiator for your business and work backwards from there to identify what steps to take now. In subsequent articles ( Part Two, Part Three and Part Four), we’ll explore this maturity model in more detail, enabling you to understand where you are today and how to reach your desired end-state. Previous Next

< Back Innovation techniques – for the brilliant ideas in you Innovation is almost non-negotiable for every company today. Its important aspect that ... Innovation is almost non-negotiable for every company today. Its important aspect that every company should consider, if they want to sustain and thrive in this competitive market. And hinking of innovation, one of the most important aspect of innovation is the “Idea Generation”. Unless ideas are generated, innovation can not fly. There are quite a few idea generation techniques that would help generate large number of ideas to find new solutions and different ways of achieving the purpose. Here in this article, we are going to have a look at three common techniques of idea generation. Brainstorming / Brain writing For the brainstorming or brain writing session, we need to gather a group of participants who are familiar with the challenge statement. Create a challenge statement and the attribute list and make them visible to the team. For the purpose of brain storming, it is recommended that the group of participants is typically less than 7 people. If you have more than 7 people in the room, then you should go for Brain writing technique. Ideas should be put up spontaneously verbally during brainstorming session and written on a piece of paper during brain writing session. During the brain writing session, after each idea is written on a piece of paper, it is recommended to crumple the paper and throw in the middle and pick up someone else’s crumpled paper to write next idea. Ensure that some rules such as non-criticism of any idea, welcoming unusual ideas and encouraging other participants to build on other’s ideas should strictly adhered to. Encourage ‘quantity’ of ideas. For the purpose of idea generation, quality follows quantity. Overall ideas should be rated based on the benefits it can give and easiness of achieving them. All the ideas should be properly documented for future reference. Scamper SCAMPER is a checklist of lateral thought technique that can expand one’s creativity. SCAMPER is a acronym of the following words, Substitute – Try and see what can be substituted in the current situation in order to improve upon the scenario. Ask the questions on what can be substituted, how, when, why ? Combine – Try to enhance the synergy by combining, merging, attaching, adding and uniting separate attributes together for the issue. This might give a different solution altogether. Adapt – Try and make adjustments to certain aspects and attributes of a product or process Modify/Magnify/Minify – Try and change the size, quantity or quality of the attributes. Try to make things later or smaller, faster or slower and see what difference it can make to the situation. Put to other use – Try and change the place or purpose for which an object or a process is currently being used. Eliminate – Try and remove, omit or get rid of a quantity, part or whole object from the situation and see how it happens. Rearrange/Reduce/Reverse – Try and place attributes against each other, pit them opposite or contrary to, turn around; to change order or adjust, different plan, layout or scheme. Think like a child Whilst, I understand that changing the perspective from an adult to the child itself can be challenging but believe me it can be a fun. In order to try and generate ideas using this technique, make your mind set similar to that of a child by thinking of a children you know and you can anticipate the reaction of. Try and see the situation through their eyes and feel what they would like about the situation, what they would be proud of, what they would dislike, feel funny or useful about and note down the reactions. Consider the simple example of a muddy puddle. When we adults see it, we try and step over or step around it. We imagine muddy shoes, dirty clothes and filthy carpets at home if we step into the puddle. However, if you ask the same to kids, they would call it fun and imagine to build bridges and dams to cross it !! #generation #idea #mind #mindset #Innovation #techniques Previous Next

< Back Putting innovation theory into practice In the first three parts of this series, we’ve explored the ideas of .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Get started now In the first three parts of this series, we’ve explored the ideas of building an innovation engine within your enterprise, creating a system for sustainable innovation. Here, we’re going to look at the practicalities of making this real. To give you an idea of how this Innovation to Impact model can work, I’ll share with you the genesis of the concept, which emerged out of some work I was doing at Thoughtworks. A few years ago, I’d started my role heading up the internal IT (workspaces) at Thoughtworks internal technology program — TechOps, and spent some time travelling across our global offices to get a better picture of our capabilities. I’m sure this was an experience familiar to many: the chance to meet incredible colleagues with brilliant ideas. But it was also clear to me that we were often not making as much impact as we could because there wasn’t enough visibility into what people were doing. So for instance, our demand teams in the US would have had no idea about some of the incredible work on Internet of Things (IoT) projects that colleagues in Manchester, UK were doing. It’s a tale that I’m sure’s familiar to many people in enterprises today: the issue isn’t that we don’t have innovative teams, but channeling those ideas into business value is tough. How do you create an ecosystem for innovation? How can you make that ecosystem sustainable? As is often the case in a company such as ours, we started with ideas — a plan to run experiments. But to deliver something truly innovative — something that would add new value to the business — we would only pursue those that had a purpose. We started by setting up meetings across the nine global offices, both in-person events and online meet-ups. And we asked our staff for ideas that would help us tackle issues they saw in their day-to-day roles. Identifying the right projects From those meetings, we generated 185 nominations, which we narrowed down to 130 ideas when we’d removed duplicates. Out of those 130 ideas, we then had to streamline further, looking at which were commercially viable, and where we could start creating impact first. We eventually decided on a project for our recruitment teams — one looking at getting consistent feedback from candidates. We also carved out a small, but separate incubator team, from an existing large team to focus especially on delivering business value through innovation. The team had a people with product and domain, strategy, design and development skills, with a person often playing multiple roles. Their challenge was to find a consistent way of getting high quality feedback from candidates — and in a way that would enable us to improve our recruitment process, give better feedback to candidates and measure the effectiveness of our recruitment teams. The team had their first prototype done in eight weeks: a tablet-based system that candidates use immediately after their interview. That enabled us to get a trial out quickly, which we then monitored to ensure people were using it, to identify areas that could be improved and to ensure our recruitment teams were finding it useful. This solution quickly established the notion that our incubator team could not only innovate, but come up with ideas that impacted the business. And having established our credentials, we could then build on this by returning to our ideas board, re-evaluating our list of potential projects and finding new ways to help the business. This process for creating sustainable innovation can be seen as a four-stage process: Through this approach we’ve expanded our projects to include a global room booking system and multi-sensor environmental sensors. And we continue to grow and become an increasingly important engine of innovation. An eight-point plan for success To summarize, this series of articles has explored mechanisms to make innovation an integral part of business-as-usual — to make you less reliant on Eureka moments and to innovate systematically. I believe that by following the eight working principles outlined below, you’ll have an opportunity to create an innovation culture that enables your organization to outmatch its competitors in the long run. Co-creation and high-touch engagement. Building ‘with’ is better than building ‘for’ to build a sense of shared ownership High-velocity decisions. Speed is imperative for innovation, so avoid delays Think ‘openness’. Use open protocols, build your products / prototypes for interoperability by default Intrepreneurship attitude. Think from outcome perspective, having a high-level vision and navigating to achieve desired results First-principle approach. Go back to basics and challenge your fundamentals, revalidate all rooted assumptions Sense of urgency. Bringing a sense of urgency into entire process can eliminate blockages and clear the path Use +1 thinking. Going beyond your immediate problem or idea to find the next and solve for that Build for scale. You don’t want to spend extra time “later” to scale your innovations, do you! Previous Next

Innovation. Putting innovation theory into practice In the first three parts of this series, we’ve explored the ideas of .. Read more .. Innovation in practice One of the core principles of our Innovate to Impact framework ... Read more .. Innovate to impact framework Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. .. Read more .. Building innovation engine In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that .. Read more .. Learning innovation ! – Part II– Incremental & Radical Innovations The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used .. Read more .. Learning innovation ! – Part I – Innovation by Subtraction Many years ago I always used to think that innovation is ... Read more .. Innovation techniques – for the brilliant ideas in you Innovation is almost non-negotiable for every company today. Its important aspect that ... Read more ..

< Back Guide for career progression - 3Ps process Do you know the effective way of moving forward in your career? If no, read more .. While the trajectory of your career is influenced by both hard work and luck, it's equally shaped by your ability to recognize the right opportunities and make strategic moves at the right moments. As you ascend into more impactful roles, the competition intensifies, making advancement more challenging. Drawing from my own experience and observations, I've distilled the journey from one career level to the next into a three-step approach. Following these steps, in conjunction with seizing opportunities and timing your actions effectively, can greatly enhance your career progression. Before delving into the steps and unveiling the secret, it's important to note that this approach may not universally apply to all scenarios and job types. It's tailored to the context of the IT sector, where hierarchical structures prevail, and individuals are driven to climb the corporate ladder. Now, let's explore the three-step process I mentioned earlier. This process typically spans 2-3 years (given the current IT landscape), demanding patience, adaptability, a willingness to invest effort, a knack for acquiring new skills, and the occasional stroke of luck. The three stages of this process are Prepare , Practice , and Progress . Henceforth, I'll refer to it as the 3Ps approach. 1. Prepare yourself well In any job role, setting your own goals is crucial. Without a clear direction for your career and objectives, you could easily end up adrift, like a piece of wood in a river's current. So, establish your goals. Make sure they're realistic, achievable, and, importantly, measurable. Your goals should be tangible enough that you can showcase your accomplishments to your managers and colleagues. It's wise to set goals that can be realized in both the short term (3-6 months) and the long term (2+ years). When setting goals, remember they should meet two essential criteria: Benefit Your Project/Organization: Your goals should contribute positively to your project or organization's success. Add Value to Your Performance Report: Your goals should reflect achievements that hold weight and contribute to your performance assessment. Once your goals are defined, the initial and most crucial step is to hit the ground running by dedicating yourself to your project with diligence and intelligence. Key actions to consider: Rapidly grasp the project's intricacies. Demonstrate teamwork and active listening skills. Assist your teammates. Deliver strong results in your project, establishing your dependability. Showcase your capability to handle the project with confidence. Typically, within 6-8 months, you should be ready to transition into the next phase of your progression. Once you've fulfilled the aforementioned criteria, you're poised to step forward and embrace even more challenges. 2. Practice Diligently – Become a Vital Player The next phase revolves around immersing yourself in project work and evolving into a pivotal contributor. To comprehend the term 'key player' is fundamental to mastering this stage. When I refer to a key player, I mean someone who is: Self-sufficient in project-related tasks Exceptionally proficient and reliable in their role Capable of delivering solutions to challenges Possesses a deep understanding of the project and its environment Achieving self-reliance requires dedicated efforts to understand the project's nuances, internalize its objectives, and align your short-term goals accordingly. As the saying goes: Working hard is crucial, but working smart is even more so! Evolving into a key player not only elevates your significance within the project but also strengthens your trustworthiness, contributing to favorable impressions from your superiors. Rather than merely clocking in hours, it's pivotal to focus on demonstrating outcomes. Although sometimes long hours are needed, tangible accomplishments carry more weight. A span of approximately 6-8 months is a reasonable timeframe to attain key player status. Yet, let me emphasize that this isn't an easy feat. You must constantly exhibit a willingness to learn, adapt to changes, and exhibit your competencies on the journey. This becomes a critical aspect during this phase and serves as a significant exit criterion. Demonstrating your project's value is crucial for your management to acknowledge and appreciate your contributions. (Apologies for unveiling this crucial tip!) Key tips to bear in mind while striving for key player status include: Showcase your value by yielding results. Take the initiative to implement technical solutions for common challenges. Boost efficiency by automating routine tasks. Remember, outcomes matter more than the time spent. Attain process efficiency and highlight gains for both management and customers. Strive to be consistently visible. If you succeed in this pursuit and evolve into a key player within the team/organization, you're better positioned for the next phase in your career journey. However, keep in mind that this isn't a straightforward path and might necessitate regular discussions and aligning short-term goals with your manager. It's imperative to keep your manager informed about your progress, your immediate objectives, and how your contributions benefit the project! 3. Progress forward Assuming you've effectively become a key player within the team and have been performing at your peak for a substantial period, it's time to prepare for the next step by 'unlearning' some of your current project knowledge and cultivating successors. When I mention 'unlearn,' consider these key steps: Identify someone who can step into your role within the project. Personally train this individual on the project's intricacies. Ensure the knowledge you've amassed is transferred, understood, and practiced by your chosen successor. Remain accessible to your manager for tasks that need completion (since, ultimately, you're aspiring for their role, right?). Initiate the process of making your own role in the project redundant. You might wonder about the last point – after all, if the second phase urged you to be a key player, why suggest making yourself redundant now? It's a valid question and a tremendously crucial one. The answer is simple: unless you pave the way for your project to function independently of you, how can you ascend to the next level? The significance lies in building a proficient team and robust resources for the project's continuity. It demonstrates your legacy as a professional, manager, and effective leader. During this phase, connect more frequently with your manager than you did in the earlier stage. Seek to comprehend their responsibilities, methodologies, and performance expectations. Secret tip: Your manager is also striving for advancement. By aiding their progress, you pave the way for your own ascent. Grant them space to rise, and you'll find yourself rising too! If luck shines your way, you might observe favorable outcomes in your subsequent performance reviews. Then, you can loop back to applying the principles of phase 1 to your new role! As I mentioned in my initial post, this cycle generally spans about 2-3 years. Patience and a strong work ethic are vital attributes during this journey. ---- Photo in the image by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash Previous Next

< Back Three models of building successful teams If you think of some of the most successful football club teams in the world .. [ Originally published on LinkedIn here ] If you think of some of the most successful football club teams in the world in the past 50 years, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Barcelona would likely come on top of your list. Between them, they have won 80+ domestic and 21+ continental & world football honours and the list does not end there. While, they are known for success, glamour, and position they held in the world football for multiple years, they also represent three unique models for developing successful teams over multiple years and generations. Manchester United Success philosophy - Visionary leader, investing in young players with potential and hunger The most successful period of Manchester United’s history had been under two legendary managers, Sir Matt Busby, and Sir Alex Ferguson. They created multiple generations of successful teams from young, hungry talent. Think Busby Babes and the Class of 94 and more. Both managers spotted, recruited, invested in and cultivated in potential young talent that had a burning desire to succeed and dominate the world and created a culture of discipline and an environment where talent flourished. They both exactly knew how to balance team goals and individual aspirations. The moment the manager felt someone was being bigger than the club or team, the player was shown door out of the club. They had a long-term vision of the club success. The club, however, went downhill each time the legendary manager retired or left the club. Real Madrid FC Success philosophy - Buy the best talent, have a manager that can keep them together and see them create wonder Since I started following Football (maybe last 20 odd years ago), I have always known Real Madrid to invest in and buy the best of the talent available in the market and got them working together in the team. They created a super brand with the ‘Galácticos’ approach. Their president Florentino Pérez spent huge money on buying the best available players from other teams and countries and created a Real Madrid team that was the envy of the world. Every player, in every position, was a world-class and expensive purchase and probably one of the best, if not the best in the world at doing their job. They went on to win a lot of trophies, simply because they were almost always better than the opponent in quality at every playing department. The job of their manager was mostly spent in managing the big player egos and ensuring that these brilliant bunch of people were always able to play together. Barcelona FC Success philosophy - Create a perfect system and follow the system to perfection that leads to the success When you think of Barcelona, it is very likely that you would likely think of terms like beautiful football, Tiki-taka and passing opponents to death. Indeed, it’s a system that has worked wonders for Barcelona for multiple years. They have defined system and a predictable way of playing football and is based on intrinsic passing, keeping possession, outrunning opposition and allowing individuals to flourish. Everyone who joins the team must adapt to the system and learn to play a part. Over multiple years of use, the system has been perfected to help them achieve results, simply by outplaying and outrunning the oppositions. Often, the opposition is not able to keep up with Barcelona and end up losing. Summary If you are a football fan, I am sure you would connect with these three teams and their characteristics that I outline above. So, if you want to apply these models in your teams and within your organizations, here is what you should consider. To build a successful team based on the Manchester United model you should, Have a manager/leader with a vision, clarity, and passion to build teams Policy, process, and mechanism to recruit the best young talent with potential Creating an environment for them to succeed and achieve individual goals and glory Do not be afraid to take risks and stretch people to seek higher goals Base your system/processes based on talent at disposal to get the best out of what you have Leader’s vision matters the most and the leader has the last word To build a successful team based on Real Madrid model you should, Buy (hire) the best people, pay them the most, put them in a team, let them figure out how to win Strategize to be a company/division/unit/team or a brand that people aspire to associate with Leader’s job is to keep the team working and manage people System is based on the team at the disposal Vision is to the best brand and best paymasters where best people want to work To build a successful team based on the Barcelona model you should, Build a solid system around sound foundations, Leaders, and teams follow the system absolutely to the last word Take a perfectionist approach to implement the process & system Allow individual talent to flourish but only as a part of a perfected system, without breaking/challenging the system People who radically alter the system are not welcome Perfect system is most important, leaders and teams can keep altering Which model would you be using to build your successful team? 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Item List ART & SCIENCE OF CAREER & LEADERSHIP ​ Read More BUILDING FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Read More ENTERPRISE INNOVATION & COLLABORATION ​ Read More LEADING THROUGH DISRUPTION This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Read More SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION This is placeholder text. To change this content, double-click on the element and click Change Content. Read More WORKSHOP ON “UNBLOCKING INNOVATION” ​ Read More

< Back Innovation in practice One of the core principles of our Innovate to Impact framework ... [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Making good on ideas Four phases of innovation One of the core principles of our Innovate to Impact framework is the notion that we’re creating something that adds new value to the business. And as we’ve seen, that value might be realized in new revenue streams, new customer services or internal efficiencies. As you move through the four-stage maturity model, the goal is to build out more impactful innovations. But as discussed, there’s little point in expecting the business to appreciate and support your efforts unless you can articulate the value derived. Validation and measurement are key. So the four stages of innovation throughout the Innovate to Impact framework can be summarized as: Ideate. Generate a backlog of ideas through voice of customers, crowdsourcing, hackathons, workshops. Your initial focus should be on quantity. Validate. Test your initial set of ideas against a defined set of parameters to understand the likely impact. Prioritize those with the biggest potential returns. Incubate. Build rapid prototypes, regularly showcase your work, co-create the product with your stakeholders to target value delivery Measure. How have you performed against expected targets? Measuring your impact. Let’s take a look at these phases in detail. Ideate The purpose here is to generate ideas. Every idea is welcome as long as it’s in keeping with the theme of the task. Whether something strikes you as a flash of genius or total clanger: park your judgement for now. You want to encourage your innovation team to become an ideation powerhouse. So gather up every idea coming your way. Some form of ideation workshop can be a great way to kickstart the process. Of course, not every idea has to be new. Your stakeholders are likely to already have their own ideas in mind, so you’ll want to ensure you involve them in the ideation process too. IT might also be necessary to do some for of discovery to identify what ideas are already out there. Another mechanism for encouraging the flow of ideas is by using the lens of the customers’ voice. What are their pain points or their needs? What are they telling you about potential opportunities to improve your offerings? Validate Here, your focus is validating your pool of ideas against predefined criteria to score ideas’ potential value. This helps us prioritize and identify which ideas bring the biggest impact. The validation process forms part of what I’ve dubbed the ‘ideas funnel’. Taking a set of ideas and narrowing it down through understanding which ones will offer you the most bang for your buck. When scoring, you may want to consider some of the following criteria: Commercial viability . Is the idea commercially marketable? Can it be showcased to, or used by, potential clients? Would this influence our clients or staff? Usability (Proof of value) . Is the idea usable in the current condition and within the existing context of your organization? Is it simple and intuitive to use by people? Is it easier to deploy and maintain? User adaptation . How easy would it be to get first 100/1000 etc. users to adopt this? Would they find it easy to get on board? How likely are they going to be repeat users? Strategy alignment . Is it aligned with the organizational strategy, vision and objectives? Does it help your organization achieve its goals? Feasibility . How feasible the idea is to qualify as incubator idea? Is it likely to result in a large programme of work? Can it be implemented in a definite period of time? What are the considerations for costs, efforts, team etc. needed to build this? Incubate Once you have validated your ideas, you’ll need to move fast to deliver a product or prototype. The incubate phase is based on high-touch engagement, high-speed decisions, intrapreneurship thinking and bringing a sense of urgency into the process so that we can meet the desired outcome with speed. To succeed here, your working team needs to be rapidly established. It should comprise of decision makers and people with domain expertise, so that they can collaborate with your incubator team. Their first task is to dive deeper into the problem at hand while developing a shared context within the working team so that they all coalesce around desired outcomes and possible measures of success. We advocate daily showcases to ensure everyone is aware of what’s coming up, how the solution is shaping up and what the early indicators suggest about chances of success. Changes is an integral part of incubation — you shouldn’t expect that you have the perfect solution from the get-go; but this iterative process should help you stay on track to meet your goals. Measure In some ways, measurements should take place at every stage of this incubation process. It’s essential to ensure you’re on the right track. But if you’re looking to create sustainable innovation within your enterprise, measurement comes into its own once you’re first solution is finished and you’re building a pipeline of ideas. You might start by measuring what I’d describe as targeted innovation. Make qualitative assessments on your impact on the business — as well as their perception of the incubator team. This enables you to track your overall success as an innovation engine. But you’ll also want to keep tabs on things at the initiative level. Can you show that your initiatives have saved money, time or effort? Have new market opportunities opened up? Has your organizational decision making improved? Can you demonstrate a return on investment? Ultimately, your success as an innovation team will depend on the number of ideas that you’ve turned into long-term products. So you should plan to track this from the outset. Always learn, always The path towards sustainable innovation isn’t about producing the perfect solution. What matters is continuously measuring the impact of your actions and learning from that. As the diagram above shows, what this means in practice continually revisiting your backlog of ideas. Things that may once have seemed impractical might now look urgent. Likewise, if some ideas haven’t produced the anticipated results, can you identify why not and plot a course to success? By constantly challenging yourself and your incubator team you won’t just come up with one quick win, but a sustainable program of improvements over the long term. In Part Four of this series, we’ll take a look at how all these ideas have played out in practice. Previous Next

Leadership. Trust does wonders to people A little story of a conversation between me and one of my product managers .. Read more .. Three models of building successful teams If you think of some of the most successful football club teams in the world .. Read more .. Guide for career progression - 3Ps process Do you know the effective way of moving forward in your career? If no, read more .. Read more .. Seven tricks to feel motivated at workplace and in life Have you ever felt de-motivated, dejected, disappointed or down hearted ... Read more .. Learning Emotional Intelligence There are two kinds of emotions that one can experience. Simple enough to guess ... Read more .. What exactly is a "collaboration"? When we gathered to discuss about Collaboration, questions came about What exactly is Collaboration? How we can achieve it? .. Read more .. How would you define leadership? On the face value of the question, it looks very simple to everyone, however ... Read more ..

< Back How developers can become a lot more productive Swapnil Deshpande & Vivek Kant speak on developer effectiveness, with Times Jobs. The phenomenal pace of digitalisation, especially following the pandemic, has led to a surge in demand for developers. But hiring and reskilling developers is turning out to be an expensive and time-consuming affair. Another way to tackle the problem is to improve the productivity and effectiveness of your existing developers. That was the subject of our discussion in the Times Techies Webinar last week. “A typical programmer spends no more than 30-40% time in actual coding,” said Vivek Kant, CTO of Finserv MARKETS. The rest of the time, she is in meetings, asking and following up on approvals (like for use of IT infra), following up with another team which has built an API she needs to use, going back to business analysts or product owners for clarifications of requirements and design. “There’s also the discoverability issue in today’s microservices and API world, where all applications are dependent on each other. There are so many of these, I wouldn’t know what all exists, what each one’s capabilities are. The developer spends a lot of time trying to find these, raising tickets, waiting for responses,” Swapnil Deshpande, chief digital officer at Thoughtworks, said. Deshpande also found different Thoughtworks offices working on exactly the same problems, without realising it. So Deshpande’s team set about developing what they call an internal developer platform and a developer experience portal, and launched the beta version in July. Called Neo (network-enabled organisation), the platform connected all developers, became a repository for all knowledge in the organisation, enabled requests and approvals (it’s increasingly even automating provisioning once an approval is given). “Getting basic IT infrastructure now takes less than a day, compared to 7-10 days earlier; the average time between ideation and first line of code has gone down from a couple of weeks to a couple of days; building APIs is down to minutes, from days. Developers can discover all assets entirely by themselves by searching on the portal,” Deshpande said. Kant said developer effectiveness at Finserv MARKETS has increased 20-30% after his team improved tooling, automated processes, and built developer self-service capabilities. “I believe we can go another 2x, 3x on developer effectiveness,” he said. Previous Next