How to bring agile innovation to the workplace

To stay ahead of the competition and becoming a world-class organization, companies know they need to bring agile innovation to the workplace, the question is HOW to start.

Español – Companies nowadays are no longer looking forward to just survive, they want to thrive, be the customer favorite option. Changes are so fast that process standardization is not enough, innovation is needed. And everybody knows that, even small businesses. Now not everybody knows how to innovate consistently.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, it is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats”. Charles Darwin

One way to innovate is to apply proven methods in some industries to other industries.

So Lean and six sigma process improvement approaches started in the auto industry and manufacturing and were successfully applied to other industries. The software industry realized they need to be agile to adapt to changes in the context, to adapt to the new technologies and the new generations of millennials in the workplace. But still, they needed strong back-end processes and customer focus, so they created the Agile Thinking. They applied lean principles and tools to reduce waste and combined them with other idea generation tools to enable the company to bring innovation to the workplace more easily.

Agile companies

Agile innovation methods have now revolutionized IT. Over the past 20 years, they have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams.

Processes make you more efficient, but innovation comes from people, calling each other at 10.30 at night with new ideas-  Steve Jobs

Apple was one of the first companies to achieve innovation through iterative customer involvement. Working with manufacturers and being attuned to the customer. Apple integrated customer experience into product design and development.

Now the agile thinking is moving from the software industry back to the rest of the industries.

Some companies are born agile like Spotify and Zappo’s, with agile rules that enable them to bring innovation in any sector at any time. Companies like Airbnb, GE, Saab, P&G even banks like Barclays and Citibank are applying agile methods. Some more conservative in the oil industry like ExxonMobil are starting in IT sector already.

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Benefits

Agile methods offer a number of major benefits. It increases team productivity and employee satisfaction. It minimizes the waste inherent in redundant meetings, repetitive planning, excessive documentation, quality defects, and low-value product features. By improving visibility and continually adapting to customers’ needs, agile improves customer engagement and satisfaction, brings the most valuable products and features to market faster and more and reduces risk.

• 50% more of new-product introductions
• 40% more customer engagement
• 200% more employee satisfaction
• 40% less defects and waste

Bottom-up leadership

An agile enterprise embraces change. Agility has emerged as the successor to mass production. Companies should pass through lean first to become efficient and waste-free, and then work to become agile. The Bottom-up Method that we have developed for the leadership team to promote agility goes through three MMM stages:

1) Map your processes, responsibilities, costs and wastes

2) Manage change: train your leadership team and your staff to improve your processes and reduce waste through lean methodologies

3) Master innovation: Apply innovation tools like design thinking and Kanban to work smarter rather than harder.  Focus on generating more value to the customer from less work.

Agile culture Key factors

• Innovation happens from the bottom-up. “Top-down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart.” Every leaders’ job is basically not to manage, but coach and facilitate their team to unleash innovation, to train them to see different ways of approaching to the clients and getting things done.
• Work happens in small multidisciplinary teams, through projects with clear boundaries and objectives.
• Everybody is working to serve and listen to the customer. Leaders are no longer bosses, customers are. Tools like Design Thinking help to innovate by better understanding the customer needs and pushing them from the very first steps of the design.
• Leaders and executives help to remove obstacles. They have to allocate resources up front. The usual problem is not scarcity but slowness in the decision-making process and resource allocation, so agile leaders solve that improving interactions effectiveness.

RECOMMENDED COURSES: Agile innovation in the workplace

Small changes in all the employee’s and management habits are key. They will enable the cultural change and bring innovation into the whole organization as a normal part of the operations.

Contact us if you want to implement agile innovation.

Lu Paulise

luciana@biztorming.com

@lupaulise

Biztorming Training & Consulting