Insights gleaned from the 2019 Red Queen Innovators Offsite - Hosted by BMNT's CEO Pete Newell & Steve Blank this is a two-day gathering of innovators, entrepreneurs, investors and academics involved in defense innovation and scaling dual-use technology companies
Workshop delivered by Craig Smith and Julian Smith at Agility Today 2021 on 27 February 2021.
Today 'agile' is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.
This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at helping public sector organisations build capability to support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.
Mike Burrows: Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – business a...Lviv Startup Club
Mike Burrows: Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – business agility at every scale
Global Online PMDay
Website - https://opmday.org
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/startuplviv
FB - https://www.facebook.com/edunomicaone
From Technical Debt to Technical HealthDeclan Whelan
Everyone agrees that technical debt is a burden on software innovation that we would rather avoid, and certainly clean up whenever possible. However, in most organizations, people don't prevent technical debt nearly as much as they should, and they don't ever get the time to clean it up. Why, then, if there are clear incentives to deal with technical debt, is it a rampant problem?
In this session, we will focus on how to deal with technical debt on several levels, including the individual developer, the team, the software value stream, and the larger organization. While technical debt may manifest itself in a developer's IDE, the problem starts long before the developer decides to copy and paste some code, or creates an overly-complex and under-documented class. The pressures on teams and individuals to take on more debt than they should come from many sources. Therefore, the solutions to the technical debt problem must extend beyond the team.
Workshop delivered by Craig Smith and Julian Smith at Agility Today 2021 on 27 February 2021.
Today 'agile' is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.
This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at helping public sector organisations build capability to support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.
Mike Burrows: Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – business a...Lviv Startup Club
Mike Burrows: Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – business agility at every scale
Global Online PMDay
Website - https://opmday.org
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/startuplviv
FB - https://www.facebook.com/edunomicaone
From Technical Debt to Technical HealthDeclan Whelan
Everyone agrees that technical debt is a burden on software innovation that we would rather avoid, and certainly clean up whenever possible. However, in most organizations, people don't prevent technical debt nearly as much as they should, and they don't ever get the time to clean it up. Why, then, if there are clear incentives to deal with technical debt, is it a rampant problem?
In this session, we will focus on how to deal with technical debt on several levels, including the individual developer, the team, the software value stream, and the larger organization. While technical debt may manifest itself in a developer's IDE, the problem starts long before the developer decides to copy and paste some code, or creates an overly-complex and under-documented class. The pressures on teams and individuals to take on more debt than they should come from many sources. Therefore, the solutions to the technical debt problem must extend beyond the team.
Benjamin C. Anyacho: Help! Managing Projects and Stakeholders from HellLviv Startup Club
Benjamin C. Anyacho: Help! Managing Projects and Stakeholders from Hell
Global Online PMDay
Website - https://opmday.org
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/startuplviv
FB - https://www.facebook.com/edunomicaone
Presented at CodeMash 2015. By Paul Holway.
Regardless of how you feel about felines, dead cats stink. What also stinks is what is happening to agile development practices. What started as a movement to increase quality and usefulness of code written, has been professionalized into certificates and ceremonies that are only marginally helping the process. Instead of blaming political and organizational forces, this humorous and irreverent talk focuses on what team members can do to overcome these corporate obstacles and to get to the spirit of agile through a focus on architectural innovation and personal improvement. Attendees should expect to laugh, to learn from the experience of implementing dozens of real world enterprise agile teams, and to come out with proven new techniques to try to bring more satisfaction to how they do their work and to bring the focus of agile back to software development.
Talk delivered by Craig Smith and Julian Smith at ICAgile Experts Meetup Group on 22 September 2021.
Today 'agile' is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.
This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at helping public sector organisations build capability to support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.
Evidence-based Entrepreneurship by Steve Blank
Steve Blank @sgblank Stanford / Berkeley / Columbia
The Lean Startup Conference 2013
http://leanstartup.co/
The "digital enterprise" may seem like a fuzzy marketing concept, but the impact to most IT organizations is clear: apply software innovation to drive deeper engagement with customers and front-line employees.
This transformation requires connecting innovation teams with core IT through lean startup disciplines, visionary leadership, lean analysis, agile architecture, agile development, lean data management and DevOps.
Quick overview of using Lean & Agile Project Management techniques for successfully planning, managing, and delivering high-technology products and services. Begins with the impetus for using lean and agile project management vs. traditional project management, an overview of why traditional projects fail, a definition of lean and agile project management, and a quick overview of its value system, principles, and organizational context. Then, provides a quick survey of major competing lean and agile project management paradigms, their evolution, and history. Provides a deep-dive of the prevailing lean and agile project management techniques. Wraps up by identifying major lean and agile project management metrics, the business case, quick case studies, and a summary of lean and agile project management principles.
Agile practices have proven to help software teams develop better software products while shortening delivery cycles to weeks and even days. To respond to the new challenges of cloud computing, mobility, big data, social media, and more, organizations need to extend these agile practices and principles beyond software engineering departments and into the broader organization. Adaptive leadership principles offer managers and development professionals the tools they need to accelerate the move toward agility throughout IT and the enterprise. Jim Highsmith presents the three dimensions of adaptive leadership and offers an integrated approach for helping you spread agile practices across your wider organization. Jim introduces the “riding paradox” and explores the elements of an exploring, engaging, and adaptive leadership style. Learn about the good things that can happen when you coherently articulate why agility is so critical today and then follow up with a plan of action. Find out how to build a continuous delivery capability within your company-at the team, department, and organization levels.
It camp 2014 battle for success - peter leeson - finalPeter Leeson
The Battle for Success - Presentation at IT Camp 2014 (Cluj, Romania). I am not sure how much of this can be understood without the corresponding explanations, but for those who were at the conference and asked for a copy, I am happy to share.
Unstructured innovation in well-structured organisationsShourya Sarcar
Some experiences and thoughts on driving informal innovative practices like unconferences, codejams in big, organised and classically innovative companies.
This key note speech at a recent Rutgers conference on innovation was focused on opening the aperture of the participants thinking. Its title, "???", provoked interest even before the talk was delivered.
Keynote: Know the Way, Show the Way, Go the Way: Scaling Agile DevelopmentTechWell
Tired of the claims that Scrum, XP, and kanban don’t scale beyond a few teams? Overwhelmed by management’s resistance to the organizational changes needed to really follow agile principles? Concerned with the lack of proven practices required to scale agile methods to the next level? Exploring the Scaled Agile Framework™, Dean Leffingwell dispels these claims and answers these questions—and more. A publicly available set of practices for agile teams, projects, architectures, programs, and portfolios, this framework helps organizations scale lean and agile development from several small teams to hundreds—and even thousands—of practitioners. Working at companies including BMC Corporation and John Deere, Dean has discovered what works and what doesn’t work. He focuses on the critical role software development managers, leaders, and executives play in implementing and supporting the framework to achieve the full business benefits of enterprise agility.
Technical debt is a systemic problem - not a personal failingDeclan Whelan
This is a presentation Chris Chapman I delivered at the Toronto Agile Conference 2017. We take a 'systems thinking' view of technical debt.
The premise is that mounting technical debt is a not a problem ... it's a system problem. We depict system problems using causal loop diagrams and propose steps, via balancing loops, to shift the system to a healthier state.
We use the term 'technical health' to describe this systems view of technical debt.
Your Challenge
Companies are approving more projects than they can deliver. Most organizations say they have too many projects on the go and an unmanageable and ever-growing backlog of things to get to.
While organizations want to achieve a high throughput of approved projects, many are unable or unwilling to allocate an appropriate level of IT resourcing to adequately match the number of approved initiatives.
Portfolio management practices must find a way to accommodate stakeholder needs without sacrificing the portfolio to low-value initiatives that do not align with business goals.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Failure to align projects with strategic goals and resource capacity are the most common causes of portfolio waste across organizations. Intake, approval, and prioritization represent the best opportunities to ensure this alignment.
More time spent with stakeholders during the ideation phase to help set realistic expectations for stakeholders and enhance visibility into IT’s capacity and processes is key to both project and organizational success.
Too much intake red tape will lead to an underground economy of projects that escape portfolio oversight, while too little intake formality will lead to a wild west of approvals that could overwhelm the PMO. Finding the right balance of intake formality for your organization is the key to establishing a PMO that has the ability to focus on the right things.
Impact and Result
Eliminate off-the-grid initiatives by establishing a centralized intake process that funnels requests into a single channel.
Improve the throughput of projects through the portfolio by incorporating the constraint of resource capacity to cap the amount of project approvals to that which is realistic.
Silence squeaky wheels and overbearing stakeholders by establishing a progressive approval and prioritization process that gives primacy to the highest value requests.
Benjamin C. Anyacho: Help! Managing Projects and Stakeholders from HellLviv Startup Club
Benjamin C. Anyacho: Help! Managing Projects and Stakeholders from Hell
Global Online PMDay
Website - https://opmday.org
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/startuplviv
FB - https://www.facebook.com/edunomicaone
Presented at CodeMash 2015. By Paul Holway.
Regardless of how you feel about felines, dead cats stink. What also stinks is what is happening to agile development practices. What started as a movement to increase quality and usefulness of code written, has been professionalized into certificates and ceremonies that are only marginally helping the process. Instead of blaming political and organizational forces, this humorous and irreverent talk focuses on what team members can do to overcome these corporate obstacles and to get to the spirit of agile through a focus on architectural innovation and personal improvement. Attendees should expect to laugh, to learn from the experience of implementing dozens of real world enterprise agile teams, and to come out with proven new techniques to try to bring more satisfaction to how they do their work and to bring the focus of agile back to software development.
Talk delivered by Craig Smith and Julian Smith at ICAgile Experts Meetup Group on 22 September 2021.
Today 'agile' is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.
This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at helping public sector organisations build capability to support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.
Evidence-based Entrepreneurship by Steve Blank
Steve Blank @sgblank Stanford / Berkeley / Columbia
The Lean Startup Conference 2013
http://leanstartup.co/
The "digital enterprise" may seem like a fuzzy marketing concept, but the impact to most IT organizations is clear: apply software innovation to drive deeper engagement with customers and front-line employees.
This transformation requires connecting innovation teams with core IT through lean startup disciplines, visionary leadership, lean analysis, agile architecture, agile development, lean data management and DevOps.
Quick overview of using Lean & Agile Project Management techniques for successfully planning, managing, and delivering high-technology products and services. Begins with the impetus for using lean and agile project management vs. traditional project management, an overview of why traditional projects fail, a definition of lean and agile project management, and a quick overview of its value system, principles, and organizational context. Then, provides a quick survey of major competing lean and agile project management paradigms, their evolution, and history. Provides a deep-dive of the prevailing lean and agile project management techniques. Wraps up by identifying major lean and agile project management metrics, the business case, quick case studies, and a summary of lean and agile project management principles.
Agile practices have proven to help software teams develop better software products while shortening delivery cycles to weeks and even days. To respond to the new challenges of cloud computing, mobility, big data, social media, and more, organizations need to extend these agile practices and principles beyond software engineering departments and into the broader organization. Adaptive leadership principles offer managers and development professionals the tools they need to accelerate the move toward agility throughout IT and the enterprise. Jim Highsmith presents the three dimensions of adaptive leadership and offers an integrated approach for helping you spread agile practices across your wider organization. Jim introduces the “riding paradox” and explores the elements of an exploring, engaging, and adaptive leadership style. Learn about the good things that can happen when you coherently articulate why agility is so critical today and then follow up with a plan of action. Find out how to build a continuous delivery capability within your company-at the team, department, and organization levels.
It camp 2014 battle for success - peter leeson - finalPeter Leeson
The Battle for Success - Presentation at IT Camp 2014 (Cluj, Romania). I am not sure how much of this can be understood without the corresponding explanations, but for those who were at the conference and asked for a copy, I am happy to share.
Unstructured innovation in well-structured organisationsShourya Sarcar
Some experiences and thoughts on driving informal innovative practices like unconferences, codejams in big, organised and classically innovative companies.
This key note speech at a recent Rutgers conference on innovation was focused on opening the aperture of the participants thinking. Its title, "???", provoked interest even before the talk was delivered.
Keynote: Know the Way, Show the Way, Go the Way: Scaling Agile DevelopmentTechWell
Tired of the claims that Scrum, XP, and kanban don’t scale beyond a few teams? Overwhelmed by management’s resistance to the organizational changes needed to really follow agile principles? Concerned with the lack of proven practices required to scale agile methods to the next level? Exploring the Scaled Agile Framework™, Dean Leffingwell dispels these claims and answers these questions—and more. A publicly available set of practices for agile teams, projects, architectures, programs, and portfolios, this framework helps organizations scale lean and agile development from several small teams to hundreds—and even thousands—of practitioners. Working at companies including BMC Corporation and John Deere, Dean has discovered what works and what doesn’t work. He focuses on the critical role software development managers, leaders, and executives play in implementing and supporting the framework to achieve the full business benefits of enterprise agility.
Technical debt is a systemic problem - not a personal failingDeclan Whelan
This is a presentation Chris Chapman I delivered at the Toronto Agile Conference 2017. We take a 'systems thinking' view of technical debt.
The premise is that mounting technical debt is a not a problem ... it's a system problem. We depict system problems using causal loop diagrams and propose steps, via balancing loops, to shift the system to a healthier state.
We use the term 'technical health' to describe this systems view of technical debt.
Your Challenge
Companies are approving more projects than they can deliver. Most organizations say they have too many projects on the go and an unmanageable and ever-growing backlog of things to get to.
While organizations want to achieve a high throughput of approved projects, many are unable or unwilling to allocate an appropriate level of IT resourcing to adequately match the number of approved initiatives.
Portfolio management practices must find a way to accommodate stakeholder needs without sacrificing the portfolio to low-value initiatives that do not align with business goals.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Failure to align projects with strategic goals and resource capacity are the most common causes of portfolio waste across organizations. Intake, approval, and prioritization represent the best opportunities to ensure this alignment.
More time spent with stakeholders during the ideation phase to help set realistic expectations for stakeholders and enhance visibility into IT’s capacity and processes is key to both project and organizational success.
Too much intake red tape will lead to an underground economy of projects that escape portfolio oversight, while too little intake formality will lead to a wild west of approvals that could overwhelm the PMO. Finding the right balance of intake formality for your organization is the key to establishing a PMO that has the ability to focus on the right things.
Impact and Result
Eliminate off-the-grid initiatives by establishing a centralized intake process that funnels requests into a single channel.
Improve the throughput of projects through the portfolio by incorporating the constraint of resource capacity to cap the amount of project approvals to that which is realistic.
Silence squeaky wheels and overbearing stakeholders by establishing a progressive approval and prioritization process that gives primacy to the highest value requests.
Mindavation - Requirements Enoughness - when is enough enough?Haydn Thomas
“Analysis paralysis” – the perceived need to continue to examine possibilities and options, to ensure your requirements package is accurate, and complete, tempts many a business analyst. It results in delays and frustration, as business improvements are not realized in appropriate timeframes.
The opposite of analysis paralysis is the “I’ve got it syndrome”, when you think you understand fully and spend too little time capturing, understanding, examining and verifying requirements, leaving your business area wanting, with unfulfilled needs, or worse yet, doing damage to the business from misunderstood requirements.
So how do you avoid these two dangerous endpoints and determine when you have collected enough requirements, and have the understanding you need to produce business improvement? Haydn Thomas from Mindavation, will share the secrets, techniques and science behind determining requirements enoughness in an interactive and entertaining presentation.
Key Learning Outcomes
Participants will explore the following takeaways:
• Ensure an understanding of the overall requirements process
• Discuss who owns and determines requirements enoughness
• Why Alignment is so important to project success
• Review various approaches to requirements refinement
Implementing an effective Project Intake Process is a key success factor for expanding the value of your Project Management Office. Your Intake Processes function as the Gate Keeper for your PMO and are the foundation for effectively managing your PMO Project Portfolio. Facilitating the process that allows your organization to define, approve, and implement within the limited resources available is a big step toward expanding the value of your PMO beyond just successful project delivery. This session will provide real life examples of a functioning Intake Process in today’s rapidly changing business environment, as well as provide high-level take-aways that you can use to improve your organizations Project Intake Process
Digitalization acceleration: Why it matters for institutional funding and gr...MzN International
- In short - what do we need to build stable income streams (in a
disrupted world)?
- Why digitalization?
- How do you digitalize funding?
- What does it mean to digitalize funding?
- 5 practical steps towards digitalized funding approaches
APM event hosted by the South Wales and West of England Branch on 29 March 2023.
Speakers: Alex Constantine and Lloyd Skinner
Artificial intelligence (AI) is starting to transform industries. It can detect cancer, draw paintings, write poems and sieve through masses of data in an instance. It is no surprise, that we wonder how AI may change the project profession.
In this talk, we took a tour of understanding what an AI is and how it works. From there, we looked at which skills we will need in a future with AI and how project teams may change in organisations where project professionals work side by side with an AI.
This event covered:
An introduction to AI
Opportunities for the profession
How AI will affect the competencies we need
How we will experience the change of AI coming in
A live AI case study of AI being deployed into a project environment today
Lastly, in this talk we introduced you to the greyfly.ai flagship tool, Intelligent Project Prediction, which uses AI to provide executive intelligence to increase project success and gave a practical example of AI being used in PPM today.
https://www.apm.org.uk/news/the-impact-of-ai-on-project-professionals-introducing-a-future-with-ai-at-your-side/
Making communications land - Pertinence and proximity webinar
Wednesday 6 September 2023
APM Enabling Change Specific Interest Group and Change Management Institute
Presented by:
Donna Unitt and Harriet Taylor
The link to the write up page and resources of this webinar:
https://www.apm.org.uk/news/making-communications-land-pertinence-and-proximity-webinar/
Content description:
One of the most fundamental components in change delivery is communication. Whether that's the communications between project teams, to project sponsors or the impacted users, how effective we are as practitioners can have lasting impacts.
In this webinar, we reviewed how communication is used to set and manage peoples expectations to minimise the chance of perceived failure. Looking at case studies provided by APM Enabling Change SIG and Change Management Institute practitioners, we explored the following considerations:
1. What capacity does the recipient have and how should that shape our comms approach - Pertinence
2. How crucial is there action at the time we send - Proximity
3. How can we ensure what we communicated was received and understood as intended and how do we course correct.
The Washington DC Scrum User Group (DCSUG) welcomed Adam Parker on June 19, 2017 to present on "Finding Lean in Agile: What They Can Learn From Each Other"
Abstract: Explore the connections between Lean and Agile. What is shared? What's similar? What can each learn from the other? Discuss why highly performing teams from both philosophies demonstrate similar traits; including:
• Delivering value to the customer
• Creating and maintaining a stable, people-first environment
• Visualizing the work (Kanban being one example)
• Improving continuously
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyVyk0npFM
Eliminate Bottlenecks in Software Development & DeliveryMicro Focus
Great approach demonstrated via slides from a recent @archie_borland @MarkKulak webinar for Borland Software.
Key take-aways:
- Agile is filled with benefits, but has some unintended consequences which “bottleneck” delivery
- The market trend has this getting worse – backed by analysts & customers
- Take practical steps now to overcome with a few key process improvements to eliminate
The frantic pace of change, driven by mobile, cloud and the rise of the consumer, is introducing new levels of complexity to the software industry and forces organizations into more fragmented ways of working. Today's development managers are subjected to constant change that they cannot control, yet must manage, and are responsible for delivering the applications their customers need at an unprecedented scale and pace. To stay relevant and meet customer demand in the face of constant change requires a truly optimized approach.
BASIS Quality Forum Presents
“Poor Business Analysis -The Culprit of IT project Failure”
The Problem Statement
Statistics on Project success rate
Finding the reason : the Culprit
The solutions
The stakeholders role
Ecosystem of a successful Project
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 3DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 3. In this session, we will cover desktop automation along with UI automation.
Topics covered:
UI automation Introduction,
UI automation Sample
Desktop automation flow
Pradeep Chinnala, Senior Consultant Automation Developer @WonderBotz and UiPath MVP
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Generating a custom Ruby SDK for your web service or Rails API using Smithyg2nightmarescribd
Have you ever wanted a Ruby client API to communicate with your web service? Smithy is a protocol-agnostic language for defining services and SDKs. Smithy Ruby is an implementation of Smithy that generates a Ruby SDK using a Smithy model. In this talk, we will explore Smithy and Smithy Ruby to learn how to generate custom feature-rich SDKs that can communicate with any web service, such as a Rails JSON API.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
3. Innovation needs to be a connected process - not
individual heroics or disconnected activities
• We need to continuously Source people, problems, and technologies
at scale to ensure an adequate output in Transition (anecdotal
evidence suggests a 250:1 ratio from one end of the pipeline to the
other)
• Discipline during Curation allows for better problems to enter
Discovery and move into solution building at Incubation
• We need to better align innovation activities to allow leaders to
efficiently apply resources to develop the most promising projects
and redirect resources away from others
“It takes years and years of doing great work to build a strong Innovation Pipeline”
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
4. In seeking support it's more important to focus on
mission outcomes, not the process of “doing”
innovation
• The objective of the innovation pipeline is to deliver mission impact -
continuously
• Good story-telling backed by data is key to gaining buy-in and support
from peers, partners and senior leader champions
• Examples of how successful impacts occurred by using the innovation
pipeline are more useful than discussions on innovation processes
“An example of successful innovation is way more useful than a process”
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
5. While innovation in government is no longer
“mission impossible,” it will always be hard
• Recognition in the 2018 National Defense Strategy that “Innovation
capacity is seen as a cornerstone of meeting future defense needs”
has helped
• Innovation initiatives have grown across each department of the DoD
+ IC, however, early adopters are still driving innovation activities in
cells - innovation pipelines have yet to scale throughout the
enterprise
• To make necessary changes to deal with the Red Queen problems,
innovation needs to port over to the enterprise
“Innovation is ***ing hard, it's a roller coaster ride that you never get off of”
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
6. Metrics drive success
• What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get done
• Have well-defined metrics will act as top cover when undertaking
rapid learning and setbacks
• Metrics backed by real data are key to building stories to gain peer
and senior leader support
• Saving time (human capital $) is an important metric to capture
“You have to collect data early in the pipeline to have empirical reasoning for making hard decisions”
"Tie your metrics to your vision - If your metrics don't help you make a decision, they're useless”
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
7. It’s important to identify offramp
opportunities at each phase of the pipeline
• Organizations might not do all phases of the Innovation Pipeline on their
own. If there is another entity handling a different phase, it’s critical to
establish alignment
• Discipline between the different phase gates of the pipeline creates higher
chance of offramping valuable outputs to other pipelines and for
transitioning solutions at the end of your pipeline
• After problem sourcing, the next steps for each problem, even if not part of
the Pipeline, should be considered a measurable output of the Innovation
Pipeline
• Offramp possibilities can be a requirement or modification to an existing
program. It could result in jumping to another pipeline, or being
determined that there is an existing capability that could solve this
problem
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
8. Insights by Phase of the
Innovation Pipeline
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
9. Source
• Establish achievable goals for the team and leadership - hold people
accountable to determined metrics
• Build multiple tools/resources to source people, problems, and
technology to ensure a better pipeline throughput
• Continuously source problems - sourcing is not a one time activity
• Train employees on the activities, methodologies, and tools to source
people, problems, and technology to ensure a health input to the
source stage
• Establish clear, measurable metrics and data to monitor sourcing
input to determine what passes through the next part of the pipeline
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
10. Curate
• Establish a repeatable, reliable prioritization methodology to triage
the most pressing problems
• Talk to those most affected by the problem to ensure you build the
correct solution
• Interview multiple experts in the problem area to understand the
scope of your solution
• Be willing to pivot from the original problem statement and change
your solution pathway iteratively based on the data collected
• A dedicated, passionate problem owner is the most important part of
moving a problem into Discovery
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
11. Discover
• The right team is critical in validating or invalidate your solution
assumptions
• Gather organizational support to get your validation teams resources such
as manpower, physical space, and funding
• MVP iterations and testing ensures you are pushing the correct solution
into incubation
• Not being ‘married’ to your initial solution is key to iterative building a
desired solution
• The problem owner is vital in this stage as they will be the one to push (or
drag) the proposed, validated solution to the incubation and transition
team
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
12. Incubate
• Determine metrics to insert your validated solution into an existing
program based on validated IRL, TRL, and ARL
• Connect with outside partners to improve and expedite incubation
process and create investible entities
• Solutions that have validated IRL, TRL, and ARL are the ones to move
to prototype development
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
13. Transition
• Leadership must support the off ramping from the innovation team to
the transition team to fit the solution into the white space between
programs
• Leadership should be able to provide written exceptions to reduce
barriers in deploying the solution into the field
• The time you spend in the transition stage is related to the level of
the problem (Horizon 1, 2, or 3 - H3 will be longer)
• High performance early in the pipeline equates to more solutions
transitioned
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
15. Innovation Pipeline Phase Insights
• Overall Pipeline score for the group was (2.5/5)
• Highest Pipeline sub-activity was “Activities executed to generate output” during
the Sourcing phase
• Lowest Pipeline sub-activity was “Establishing success metrics during the
Transition phase”
• Overall trends:
• The group scored highest in the Source and Discovery phases (2.8/5)
• The score during Curation was slightly lower (2.6)
• Incubation (2.4) was even lower, which suggests that a breakdown in Curation allows
uncrated problems to enter Discovery
• This can explain why Transition was the lowest score (1.9) - uncurated problems have a low
chance of transitioning to end users
Takeaway: Poor performance early in the pipeline limits Transition opportunities
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
16. Category Specific Insights (1)
• Commercial entities scored higher overall, making them valuable
partners in developing an innovation system (or doctrine?)
• Senior leaders rated higher than Managers and SMEs in the first three
steps of the pipeline (Source, Curate, Discover)
Takeaway: Sr. Leaders have more visibility into “Problem” specific
phases - Sourcing problems, making Prioritization decisions, deciding
what gets Discovered
• Recommendation: Communicate priorities and set metrics early in
the IP process
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
17. Category Specific Insights (2)
• SMEs rated higher than Senior leaders and Managers in the last two
steps (Validate, Transition)
Takeaway: SMEs are involved in the “Solution” specific phases - They
are narrowly focused on delivering a solution to Transition.
Breakdown between the two leads to “solutions” being developed for
unvetted problems, leading to low adoption.
• Recommendation: Involve SMEs earlier in the IP so they can inform Curation
and Discovery
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
18. Common themes in the free answer fields
• Defining of goals early is crucial to transitioning project
• Operational support is not a strong suit
• The later in the pipeline the more challenging it becomes as there
is less experience in moving projects along
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019
19. Metadata told us
• Where organizations already have a pipeline of activities, the key is
connecting these activities into an evidence based, data driven
system which ensures mission-centric output
• The Self-Assessment allowed participants to break down their
Innovation Pipeline phases into actionable steps
• The Self-Assessment gave an unbiased framework for viewing
Innovation Pipeline health
• Each Innovation Pipeline phase has multiple sub components which
determine the health of the overall phase- the innovation pipeline
provides rigor to innovation programs
Source: Red Queen II Innovators Offsite – March 2019