Posted on May 7, 2018 on Create Hub, here. Innovation, design thinking and agile approaches to working at scale
Samuel Fry describes how companies need to approach digital transformation using innovation, design thinking and agile principles. All companies, whether small or large, are attempting t0 adapt to our increasingly digital world. This means that they are creating digital products, changing their internal processes and continually looking to keep up with their customer’s shifting needs. What’s more, companies can’t afford to stay still. They must respond quickly to customers needs, new offerings that their competitors provide and changes made in the wider industry. Let’s face it though, this is hard. People are finding that they have to learn new skills, work longer hours and battle to keep up with the vision of the company itself. So, how do they approach this? Understanding customer needs through Design ThinkingIt is important to understand how to design experiences that provide customers with what they need. Ideally, you want to go beyond that and delight them. A popular approach for exploring these concepts is through Design Thinking, a framework used by designers to understand customer pain points, explore possibilities and to create outcomes that benefit them. Practically speaking Design Thinking is simply a toolkit of exercises that, when done properly, can help those completing them understand customer experiences better and align on the opportunities to improve them. When creating new digital processes, you can also use Design Thinking to better understand how scenarios impact the experiences of different users by looking at that experience from their perspective. As a result, you can decide how to communicate your design choices to users with different needs. Ensuring that innovation takes place in all areasCompanies are investing huge amounts of time and money to ensure that they innovate. Yet, often these plans are reactive to industry changes, rather than the result of a pro-active strategy. This leads to innovation feeling like a frustrating process that is done in relatively short periods of time and which looks for instant fixes. Instead, what would help is to create an innovation strategy to ensure that changes are made over the long term. An innovation strategy is a commitment to achieving a competitive goal, usually heavily linked to the overall business strategy. What is key is that each company should look to innovate their core business while also innovating in adjacent and transformational areas.
Collaborating towards a shared visionAn innovation strategy and the Design Thinking framework might help you understand how to explore ideas; yet, how do you make sure that you can execute on them? In my mind, it’s all about finding ways to help people collaborate towards a shared vision and being able to respond to feedback you receive along the way. Companies everywhere are aligning themselves to this mindset, whether by referring to the Agile principles, the lean principles, the concepts behind Systems Thinking or combinations of these like the Lean-Agile Mindset. Whatever definition you give this, it’s important that teams understand the vision that they are working towards and that they are self-empowered to progress towards that vision. As part of this, it’s important to prototype ideas early so that you can test them to see whether there is any value behind them. If you find that there is value, it’s also important to align as teams on what the Minimal Viable Product that you could release is – so that you get something in the hands of customers as soon as possible. It is also important to fully adopt these principles, not simply to say that your teams are ‘agile’. Sometimes I have seen teams say that they embrace ‘agile’ or ‘lean’ principles but in reality they have a very clear pre-defined idea of what they want to build, they don’t respond to customer’s feedback and the team is told exactly what to by their managers, without the ability to react to change. Similarly, there are teams that say they are ‘user-focused’; yet, they have no mechanism for testing ideas with users regularly. All of which can be more harmful than good as the outcomes they deliver are not those that are really needed. Approaching agile at scaleSo, delivering innovative products might be fairly clear when working on one idea with a small, self-empowered team. Yet, how do you approach delivering multiple projects with large distributed teams? How do you use data and other insights to make decisions? How do you deliver these experiences at scale without a ‘command and control’ approach? Well, really you just need to focus on the same things. If you concentrate on finding methods to align people towards a vision, collaborate with each other, share insights with one another, regularly work with your customers and stay reactive to their feedback then you will be fine. Of course, none of this is easy – but it’s certainly better than the alternative of having a fixed plan which may not deliver useful outcomes and that takes a long time to implement. To help address the challenge of delivering collaboratively at scale, a number of methods have been created which enable teams to work in a structure that does not lose sight of these principles. Structures like the Scaled Agile Framework and Large-Scale Scrum help organisations get started with delivering complex projects at scale; however, naturally each company and challenge that they work on is different – so these may be adapted over time. In fact, the methods themselves are changing based on the feedback that different companies give them when they put the methods into practice. So, none of this is easy; however, the ideas and principles should be. So, as long as you keep the basic principles of innovating, Design Thinking and delivering collaboratively with each other then you are progressing in the right way.
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