"If you were Google, how do you fix this problem?". This question is used as a trigger to generate new ideas without any constraint you have in your mind (money you have, how your company works nowadays and so on...) so you are able to think freely about solutions or ideas. Well, that's what happened to us and after realising we are definitely not Google, some of those ideas may not come to light anytime soon. Anyway, the exercise brought a lot of good results.
Next step, prioritization. First we tried a cost-impact matrix, (we love matrixes and quadrants, that's the true). Didn't quite work for us this time. Next attempt was to try to use different horizons for those ideas. If you are not familiar with the concept of "horizon" in terms of innovation and product development, we really recommend Lean Enterprise. It's a concept we use to introduce to our customers the complexity of trying to mix in the same backlog ideas from the "business as usual" together with radical innovation (don't really work, does it?).
Briefly, it's about laying out the ideas using 3 horizons as containers: first one, with the actions and tasks you already know and there is no uncertainty on how to build it, that's the day-to-day work in the company, that brings the bottom line. Second horizon, the ideas that could bring some revenue in a few months. Things you already tested a bit and they are promising. You don't know exactly how to build it but you have the main idea. The last horizon, things you want to try. Probably 50% of them are not coming to light but are worth test it (radical innovation). If everything goes well, ideas are going to move between horizons as soon as we learn more, hopefully coming to the first horizon and building an additional business line.
This exercise helped us to gain some perspective on how some of these actions we could execute on the short-term will help those on the long-term, creating synergy and alignment for future initiatives.
Do you want to know about the ideas that survived all the filters? Well, that's a topic for the next chapter, stay tuned!
On one hand, our already established video-interviews, with a new chapter (almost one year already!), featuring this time Mayte Fernández (RR.HH Ikea), Marco Massarotto (Agile Coach) and Albert Roig (VP Engineering in ABA English), with Manu López creating the environment. We discuss Conflict management, patterns and tricks our guests are using to help their teams.
More news this month: for all of you out there not using YouTube a lot but still willing to invest time learning from the experience of our guests, we've created a Podcast channel in Ivoox with all the chapters. How does it sound for you? You'll find it here: Podcast Agile Interviews. We hope that this channel will make it easy for you to create conversations around those topics. Also, for those of you using ITunes for that matter, we've got you covered: Agile Interviews in ITunes Podcasts.
What else? AOS 2018, of course. We've been sharing experiences in this very well organized event, enjoying conversations with a lot of experts in this agile world we live in, meeting old friends and making new ones. A really big pleasure being able to promote and collaborate to make events like this one to become a reality.
Is there any other topic that you would like to talk about? Let us know and we’ll look into it (no promises made). Also if you want us to do a video in English, tweet us using the hashtag #DTIspeakingles.
Our latest interviews, conference talks and some other experiments we are creating, like our newspaper-like mini-bot in Twitter, @elperiodico_dti, where you can get the latest news about agile in small bits.
Hope you enjoy it!
Don't forget that after this special edition, we'll be preparing the last Management 3.0 of the year in November.
Thank you so much for all the support and feedback you give us in every one of these events!