Produc t Camp Aus t in 11Ju ly 19 , 2013

Mat t Rober t smat t@mat t - rober t s . com

CONTINUOUS DEVELOPMENT TEAM

PRODUCT INNOVATION IN AN

AGILE/LEAN WORLD

@MulticastMattmatt@matt-roberts.comlinkedin.com/in/cpgmattr

WHAT DO THESE IMAGES HAVE TO DO WITH DEV-LED INNOVATION?

Congratulations--you're a Product Manager who is part of a team that fi nally achieved many of the benefi ts promised by agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban--you have a ranking of work items on which the team can focus, you're eliminating waste, and you're getting things done (just about) on time!

There may be an eff ort to put nearly everyone in your product development team (especially anyone in development) in the system and really crank up the velocity. However, you've noticed that the fl ow of new ideas coming out of development is not quite what it once was. You say to yourself, "at least it's better than before when they made ALL the decisions. But my competitors are catching up..."

Come to this session to learn about a bold potential solution that will allow for a balance of predictable performance and the generation of innovative ideas from your development team.

THE “THERE” THERE

For the purpose of this presentation Innovation is the creation of new value for a

particular group of stakeholders. It’s worth something (like money) that

stakeholders are willing to depart with to obtain. For a product development company, it’s a

source of growth (as opposed to maintenance/sustaining). Growth represents value in these organizations, especially startups or similar smaller groups.

It carries risk and is hard to “manage” It tends to be fun and creates engagement for

the people who create it.

WHY DO WE CARE ABOUT INNOVATION?

“Quite a few clients report that agile is anti-innovation. The developers have a vested interest in developing whatever they can produce within the allowable time. They are rewarded for maintaining the velocity of the project, not for their innovative solutions. Note that innovation, as we use the term here, means fresh thinking. We do not mean that innovation is the same as invention — it’s not. Innovation is thinking differently about the business problem with the intention of finding more beneficial things for the business to do.” “Keeping the Innovation in Agile” - Cutter Blog http

://blog.cutter.com/2012/04/10/putting-the-innovation-in-agile/

BUT WE’RE MAINTAINING VELOCITY!

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO AGILE…

Principles and Practices Delivery Innovation Risk

Organization Flattening Good ?

Focus on Quality Good No change

Focus on Modern Engineering Principals Good No change

Continuous Improvement / Kaizen Good Good

Focus on the Highest Ranked Priority by the Stakeholders

Good (Finally)

Eh….

Small, Collaborative Teams Good Well

Predictability Good Hmmm

Short Increments / Iterations/ Limited WIP Good Unsure

Reduction of Waste Good Define “Waste”

Focus on Velocity Good Yikes

“Interchangable” (T-shaped) Team Members

Good Really?

CAN DEVELOPERS GENERATE VALUABLE PRODUCT IDEAS?

Google’s 20% Time (or is it 120%? )Atlassian ShipIt DaysBazaarVoice Science FairCA Technologies Innovation Time Out / Hyperformix

Science Faire ..and so many more, based on the concept of SLACK

SOME INDUSTRY “SOLUTIONS” FOR DEV-LED INNOVATION

SlackTom DeMarco

CA TECHNOLOGIES INNOVATION TIME OUT

What is an Innovation Time Out and its goal? An Innovation Time Out, also known as an ITO, is a technique to foster the pursuit of new and innovative processes or products. To accomplish this goal, each team member has formal approval that permits them to spend up to 10% of their business time to work on their own, qualified, innovative ideas.

What qualifies as an ITO project? To qualify as an approved ITO project, the following parameters must be met:

One or more team members may work on any idea that supports any current product(s) or market(s) that CA Technologies is currently in or pursuing. The idea does not have to be limited to the product line that the team member currently works in. The ITO project must result in proof of concept (POC) demonstration in which working code is exhibited in an open forum hosted by an EMD senior manager.

Code: Is defined as any demonstrable function that creates a result based on a set of inputs.

Time frame for demonstrations – Quarterly (or so)

CHALLENGES WITH OFFICIAL ITO

Everyone loves the idea of the ITO, but its implementation has been a challenge.

Everyone is “too busy” and certain people don’t like the formality.

Idea—put the 10% time/innovation concept into our agile delivery system and see if all stakeholders find benefit it in.

This is the genesis of the Hyperformix Science FaireOur experience is that over 20% of the ideas

presented are placed into the backlog within the same release and prioritized to become fully productized features. This is huge.

HYPERFORMIX – CONTEXT

HYPERFORMIX SCIENCE FAIRE

Continuous – it’s now embedded in the product development process

Plugged into Innovation (Patent) Harvesting Team’s reaction to Matt’s insistence on coding examples

Fix a defect Implement small feature New tool Show prototype How to apply to new domain New technology New algorithm New/improved UI New/improved utility

Developers and Product Managers LOVED it. Non-developers, not so much—stil l a bit concerned. Everyone voted to do it again.

Ideas went right into the backlog and were invested in and shipped within weeks!

Challenges—are we just doing prototypes for Product Management? Is this an issue?

Time frame for demonstrations – Monthly (two days every other sprint)

HYPERFORMIX SCIENCE FAIRE - HOWTO

We sprint for two weeks. So, every two sprints, we spend two days on Science Faire. This is roughly 10% time.

There are no rules about who works on what or how people work. People are free to work together, on teams, or in a combination of modes (some do both).

Some entries are one-t ime only, some go on for months. The longest was over a year.

There are no winners or losers and there is no competit ive aspect to i t . The Faire is an opportunity to share working software/learning.

Everyone gets 10 – 15 minutes to present. The demonstrat ions are recorded so that they can be shared with others. This is very important in a large company l ike CA Technologies.

We l ike having others, not in development, part ic ipate—we’ve had Sales Enablement, Product Management, and Dev Management part ic ipate. However, each team decides how they work and what they work on.

This eff ort fi ts into our sustainable pace. We bel ieve that we can have these events just l ike any other work day and not require a tradit ional hackathon environment.

All entr ies (where i t make sense) are placed into the product backlog for consideration to ful ly productize.

We l ike to create a celebratory environment—adult beverages and chi ld-l ike treats are often served.

PURE CLOUD CAPACITY PLANNING AS A SERVICE

April 16, 2013

Engineer 1, Engineer 2, Matt Roberts, Engineer 3

HOWDY!

CA Capacity Management (Hyperformix) Dev Team

ACTUAL SCIENCE FAIRE SAMPLE

PCCPAAS - INTRODUCTION

Objective of Innovation: Get SaaSy by providing a service that can provide Capacity Planning in the cloud, for the cloud.

Details Problem definition: [REDACTED ] Development Area: Cloud, Software as a Service, Automation Relevance to business: [REDACTED ] Solution definition: To be demonstrated

ACTUAL SCIENCE FAIRE SAMPLE

PCCPAAS – INTRODUCTION (CONT’D)

Tools [REDACTED ]

How this is going to kill our competition… [REDACTED ]

Demonstration [REDACTED ]

ACTUAL SCIENCE FAIRE SAMPLE

WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN?

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED?