Innovative climate! Creativity methods! Excellent people! Agile! Leadership! Crowd innovation! Strategy! These is just some of the good advice found on the Internet on how to make a company more innovative. But there can be a bit more structure to such advice: four skills.
Agile IS All About Process
I regularly hear the “Agile is good, process is bad” mantra from various Agile communities. In a recent meeting on development methods one contributor even declared “process doesn’t contribute to the product so we should not put any effort into processes”.
Continue readingKnow how to shape the future
In order to create great products, know how is needed. Interdisciplinary or cross-functional teams are the way to make people with different expertise create a common solution. Here’s a puzzle piece for cross-functional teams: 6 generic areas of expertise needed in a product development.
Mobile and Agile: Why can’t they get along?
This morning’s RE12 keynote was excellent. Steve Fickas described his use of a gaming engine and other resources to create a virtual environment for testing / requirement elicitation for mobile devices.
Fickas went on to describe how he interfaced mobile devices under development to the virtual environment and use this for testing in early stage development iterations (it is more controlled / manageable than the real world)
Agility and the Seagull Manager
Ken Blanchard coined the term The Seagull Manager in his 1985 book Leadership and the One Minute Manager. Blanchard described Seagull Managers who fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, then fly out. Do agile methods help or hinder this problem?
Maturity tools for product owners
Pin the maturity cards on the wall. Ask how well do we foresee the change we’re going to inflict with the planned features. “Customers will love it”, the engineer proclaims putting a few features on tree level. The sales rep sourly adds: “If they’ll ever grasp it”, moving them up into the clouds.
Increase productivity with a Speed Creation session
In large and distributed companies the knowledge is spread. Experts come from different locations and subsidiaries. These experts often work in several projects simultaneously. This leads to an efficiency loss and long product development cycles. What if there is a way to get rid of dozens bilateral and specialized division workshops and preparation meetings? The approach is called approach “Speed Creation”.
Continue readingAgile innovation from stars to road
Taking ideas from the stars as innovation onto the road can feel like being stomped by a herd of elephants. It’s people and trade-offs. Well, even while we’re quite a reasonable lot most of the day, we still do a few quite stupid things. Especially if interests, values, and opinions clash. Here’s an agile way to innovate.
Collaboration – Buy or Lease?
Installment sales are great. Instead of spending the whole amount of money up-front – and save for it – you simply pay your monthly deposit. Still, someone will have to pay the interest and cover the risk involved, i.e. you, the buyer. Thus you trade the profit of having something right now with the higher costs. Did you realize, that this is an analogy to how we collaborate?
Continue readingHow mature are your ideas?
Ask this question in a workshop to a round of engineers and product managers. After a few blank stares you will start hearing comments like “we’re ready to build it”, or “they’re pretty sound”, and “well, we actually have no idea what this is all about”. Quite often we hear completely different opinions about the same item. Try it yourself, it works. Stunning, isn’t it?
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