Finding Innovation in Unlikely Places
Innovation is such a lofty term. At its essence, it’s taking a new idea and turning it into a product, service or experience that improves our existing reality in some way. We focus so much on the grandeur of it that we sometimes fail to see that pockets of innovation can happen throughout the phases of our work and by many roles within those phases.
We may employ agile processes within some disciplines, but the crossover between one discipline to the next tends to follow a linear path with some overlap in between. Organizations typically view this natural overlap of disciplines as a point where production efficiencies can be optimized. Instead, they should be seen as opportunities to collaborate and innovate. There is the assumption that innovation will happen up front — in the discovery phase. But guess what? It can, and does, happen all along.
Whether you work for a large or small organization, you’re likely familiar with what I’m describing. Once the discovery stage is complete, the work begins with one discipline, then moves on to the next and so on and so forth. Decisions have already been made from one stage to another. These decisions are dictated to the next group, hopefully without any changes. But what if there are changes? This messes with the whole schedule and the project scope. In addition, the team member whose help you need, has moved on to another project and is no longer billable on your project. The project starts to suffer as you try to keep the integrity of the work intact. Nobody likes to be in this position.
Although process is paramount in keeping order and managing chaos it can sometimes become an impediment if we’re not willing to bend and modify things ever so slightly. This process has to be agile from both a project and business perspective. Changing the way we work, means changing the way we do business.
What does that mean? Instead of looking at the work each discipline does as finite stages and milestones we must overcome, let’s look at the work more holistically. While it’s important to still allocate time for each discipline, let’s not be so rigid about the finality of one stage and the beginning of another. In the end we need to bring multiple pieces together to create a complete whole. And in order to that, we have to be collaborating along the way.
This requires more conversations among team members. Aside from planned meetings, it means encouraging collaboration and impromptu brainstorming sessions. The process can still move in a linear fashion but there would be more loops back to ask questions, confirm, collaborate and move forward again.
One of the challenges I’ve often seen is that we encounter challenges to the previous work as we move from one discipline to the next. This is because we’re all human. We can’t think of everything, all the time. If we allow more cross-collaboration between checkpoints, we attempt to avoid this. Working this way would require team members to be available to help on projects past their discipline’s stage.
Having fuzzier lines between disciplines and resource allocations can feel unnerving. If you’ve ever managed a team, you know you have to be accountable for your team’s time and efficiency. Making it hard to track resource allocation because we want to account for innovation can make project planning difficult. But flexibility is a mindset and it’s all about reframing and considering it part of the process.
In that spirit, we have to take a holistic approach, maintain fluidity and an open line of communication in order to be innovating throughout the longevity of a given engagement.
