Search.

In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that .. < Back Building innovation engine In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Don’t wait for tomorrow In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that rests on its laurels can expect to become obsolete. In an ultra-competitive market, you have only a small window to spot opportunities and exploit them before your competitors. That’s because no matter how fast your market is evolving, technology is evolving faster. Tech-led, innovative disruptors are everywhere. Just look at long-established markets like global commodity trading. Within three months of launching, VAKT ($), the blockchain-based energy trading platform had signed up more than two-thirds of companies responsible for all deals in North Sea crude oil trading. This pace of change is unprecedented. And the consequences are clear: Unless your organization is geared up to innovate, you’ll always be playing catch-up. Many established organizations are comfortable not being at the bleeding edge. And that’s understandable: in febrile times, taking time to come up with a measured response can seem the pragmatic thing to do. In fact, pragmatism shouldn’t be conflated with inaction. If you really want to understand the best course for your business, you need to understand it from a cost perspective. How much will exploring disruption and investing in innovation cost? What value can you derive from exploiting opportunities? What is the cost of missed opportunity? What will you have to spend to get back in the game? And in many cases, that means you need to take action now. As Forrester Research principal analyst James Staten notes : “Driving change is far better and less fearful than waiting for others to disrupt you and having to painfully respond and adapt.” Introducing the ‘innovate to impact’ framework Concepts such as innovation can become overused, with everyone adopting slightly different ideas about what they mean. In this context, I’d define innovation as: Creating something new, that generates a tangible value to the intended audience. The most salient points here are “new” and “tangible value”. If it’s not new, and if it’s not bringing tangible value, it’s not innovation. It’s worth noting at this point that one-off innovation isn’t really much use. Take pic sharing trailblazer Snap. Its clever use of AR tech briefly made SnapChat the must-have app for any social media-loving teen, paving the way for an IPO that valued the company at over $30 billion. But its innovations were easy for competitors, such as Facebook-owned Instagram to copy — over the months following the IPO, Snap’s market cap dropped by more than $20 billion. Snap has only subsequently been able to recover lost ground through embracing the ideas of continuous innovation. To those that see innovation through the lens of eureka moments — where advances are only made after flashes of inspiration and brilliance — continuous innovation can appear anachronistic. It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. This isn’t a view I subscribe to, but it’s one I’ve often encountered; therefore, before we start thinking about a roadmap for innovation, it’s worth considering some of the major obstacles you’ll need to overcome before any innovation program can get off the ground. Barriers to innovation Ask any business leader you encounter and they’ll say being more innovative is highly desirable. But for innovation to be something more than a pipe dream, you need to be realistic about the challenges you’re likely to face. While there could be many reasons why innovation programs fail to take off within the organization, the most common barriers I have encountered are: Fear of failure In a world of performance reviews and targets, nobody wants to be associated with failure. When people are in fear for their livelihood they can become risk averse. What’s more, innovation means change — and change can be scary. Being ready to innovate often demands a huge cultural shift, where experimentation is embraced. And if things don’t work, what’s important is what you’ve learnt from the experience; not who’s to blame. Too busy on BAU You’re probably used to hearing from your teams how busy they are. But when all your efforts are expended on keeping the lights on, your ability to innovate suffers. And since people are busy, they often feel that they’re adding value — perhaps without questioning whether they could add more. The importance any organization attaches to innovation has profound cultural implications. It’s all very well making grand gestures, such as setting aside regular time for blue sky thinking; but if those sessions are the first thing to be cut when cost savings need to be made, don’t be surprised if your staff question your commitment to innovation. Lack of diversity As author Simone Bhan Ahuja notes, lack of diversity within innovation teams can hamstring your efforts from the outset : “You’ll know you have the wrong team when everything is running along smoothly but the team’s output doesn’t look much different from business as usual.” If you’re looking for new approaches and ideas, you’re going to need diversity of thought — people with different skill sets, people that come at problems from different angles. Key skills for the group may include: product strategy; product development; entrepreneurship; domain expertise; experience design; research and analysis; and ideation and creation. Typical approaches to innovation? Given the importance attached to innovation, it’s little wonder that so many people in the organization want to lead it. And while it doesn’t pay to be too prescriptive — each organization is unique and needs to find an approach that fits — here are some common approaches, along with their pros and cons. As we’ve seen earlier, this collaborative approach will need team members with a diverse set of skills. And it also has the greatest opportunity to succeed when it involves the tech function. That’s because today’s greatest innovations are dependent on tech; the complexities and processes needed to deliver innovation reliably depend on tech expertise. But collaboration also needs checks and balances: who is the one deciding on whether to focus on building something or enabling innovation? When should you focus on products and when is it more important to energize the team through events such as hackathons? Ultimately, you’ll also want to consider how you plan to support sustained innovation over the long term. This isn’t something you can achieve overnight. Planning for continuous innovation is a journey — and one, if done right, that will become a strategic differentiator against the competition for years to come. We call this journey the Impact to Innovation framework. This Innovate to Impact framework gives you a roadmap to create internal incubator teams, that become the engine of your innovation. The framework also sets out how to grow the impact inside and outside of your organization through scaling different stages of maturity. As the model suggests, for innovation to become a strategic differentiator, you cannot just stay at the experimentation level: you need to show the impact of innovation and have a plan to grow that. It can be useful to think about this journey at the outset: Stage four becomes your blue ocean ; you have to think about how innovation can become a strategic differentiator for your business and work backwards from there to identify what steps to take now. In subsequent articles ( Part Two, Part Three and Part Four), we’ll explore this maturity model in more detail, enabling you to understand where you are today and how to reach your desired end-state. Previous Next

Let's talk First Name Last Name Email Subject Message SEND Thanks for submitting!

The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used .. < Back Learning innovation ! – Part II– Incremental & Radical Innovations The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used .. Last time I wrote about one of the techniques of learning Innovation called Innovation by Subtraction. This time, I would be trying to explain one more type of Innovation viz., Incremental & Radical Innovations. The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used across the world for innovation. They are also called Sustaining & Disruptive Innovation techniques. Incremental innovation generally relates to enhancements or small improvements in the existing products or services, whereas the Radical innovation brings a significant improvement in the product or the service. One of the most common examples of the Incremental innovations are the early Pentium chips developed by Intel. From Pentium I to IV, they were generally based on the similar pattern however as the new version came out they brought out newer technologies & innovations in their chipset, which could be attributed to the Incremental innovation. Moving from a single core to dual or quad cores in their latest processers could be termed as a Radical innovation though. Another example of Incremental innovation being Microsoft’s Windows 98 operating system, which was an enhancement over the Windows 95 operating system. The Windows 95, however was a Radical innovation over the previous Windows 3.1 operating system interface. Now you may ask me how to differentiate between the Incremental innovation from a Radical innovation or you may even ask, what should be the degree of deviation between an innovation to be considered as Incremental vs Radical? The answer to this question was defined by a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute . They recommend to consider an Incremental innovation as a Radical if it meets one or more of following characteristics, The innovation provides entirely new set of usage features and experience In terms of statistics, it provides about five times or better performance Or it provides more than 30% reduction in the costs of the product / service Normally the Incremental & Radical innovations go hand in hand. If you see my previous examples you would see that the Radical innovation has followed after one or more Incremental innovations. So you would relate to the fact that the Radical innovation is characterized by a long period of Incremental innovations before and after it. The important benefit of the Radical change is the fact that it can potentially and significantly change the basis of competition in the favour of the innovator. Incremental innovation is relatively easy to obtain than Radical one and I am sure by now you would have understood pretty much of it. There are significant examples of where the Radical innovations have given great advantages to the innovators. Some of them are as follows, IBM Introduction of electronic typewriter, nearly wiped off the manual type writers form the market and gave IBM a significant business advantage. Wal-Mart Innovated a radical process change in the way the supply chain was managed throughout its stores in the US that gave a significant advantage in terms of time & cost and helped it cement its position as No. 1 in the retail market. Incremental Vs Radical – Which one to choose? Radical Innovations are significantly risky, take more time to develop and are more expensive to obtain in nature, whereas, the Incremental are significantly less risky, relatively cheaper & based on a proven product or a process and are more likely to produce results in a shorter time frame. The Incremental innovations provide the businesses with a steady stream of enhanced and improved products / processes or services, but due to relatively simpler nature of these innovations it is required to keep in mind the following, Ensure that the innovations are focussed around the market demands. Since the nature of innovation is such that you would eventually keep on developing new enhancements, small features, there is a danger that you might do something which the customers would not want and may not need in their product. If you continue to churn out the improvements or new features that the customer does not want, the customer eventually might look for alternative products. Don’t forget Radical innovation! Incremental innovations do not necessarily envisage the future technology and attempt to provide a bridge between current and future technologies. Imagine what would have happened to iPhone if Apple would have used the traditional keyboard design of the phone !! Also, remember that its on Radical innovation that changes the business game in your favour !So when you look around next and do a brain storming about innovation, you might want to start with an Incremental innovation and who knows you might bring out a Radical innovation in your product / process or your service! Good Luck! #Softwareengineering #Innovation #productivity #learning #techniques Previous Next

In the first three parts of this series, we’ve explored the ideas of .. < Back Putting innovation theory into practice In the first three parts of this series, we’ve explored the ideas of .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Get started now In the first three parts of this series, we’ve explored the ideas of building an innovation engine within your enterprise, creating a system for sustainable innovation. Here, we’re going to look at the practicalities of making this real. To give you an idea of how this Innovation to Impact model can work, I’ll share with you the genesis of the concept, which emerged out of some work I was doing at Thoughtworks. A few years ago, I’d started my role heading up the internal IT (workspaces) at Thoughtworks internal technology program — TechOps, and spent some time travelling across our global offices to get a better picture of our capabilities. I’m sure this was an experience familiar to many: the chance to meet incredible colleagues with brilliant ideas. But it was also clear to me that we were often not making as much impact as we could because there wasn’t enough visibility into what people were doing. So for instance, our demand teams in the US would have had no idea about some of the incredible work on Internet of Things (IoT) projects that colleagues in Manchester, UK were doing. It’s a tale that I’m sure’s familiar to many people in enterprises today: the issue isn’t that we don’t have innovative teams, but channeling those ideas into business value is tough. How do you create an ecosystem for innovation? How can you make that ecosystem sustainable? As is often the case in a company such as ours, we started with ideas — a plan to run experiments. But to deliver something truly innovative — something that would add new value to the business — we would only pursue those that had a purpose. We started by setting up meetings across the nine global offices, both in-person events and online meet-ups. And we asked our staff for ideas that would help us tackle issues they saw in their day-to-day roles. Identifying the right projects From those meetings, we generated 185 nominations, which we narrowed down to 130 ideas when we’d removed duplicates. Out of those 130 ideas, we then had to streamline further, looking at which were commercially viable, and where we could start creating impact first. We eventually decided on a project for our recruitment teams — one looking at getting consistent feedback from candidates. We also carved out a small, but separate incubator team, from an existing large team to focus especially on delivering business value through innovation. The team had a people with product and domain, strategy, design and development skills, with a person often playing multiple roles. Their challenge was to find a consistent way of getting high quality feedback from candidates — and in a way that would enable us to improve our recruitment process, give better feedback to candidates and measure the effectiveness of our recruitment teams. The team had their first prototype done in eight weeks: a tablet-based system that candidates use immediately after their interview. That enabled us to get a trial out quickly, which we then monitored to ensure people were using it, to identify areas that could be improved and to ensure our recruitment teams were finding it useful. This solution quickly established the notion that our incubator team could not only innovate, but come up with ideas that impacted the business. And having established our credentials, we could then build on this by returning to our ideas board, re-evaluating our list of potential projects and finding new ways to help the business. This process for creating sustainable innovation can be seen as a four-stage process: Through this approach we’ve expanded our projects to include a global room booking system and multi-sensor environmental sensors. And we continue to grow and become an increasingly important engine of innovation. An eight-point plan for success To summarize, this series of articles has explored mechanisms to make innovation an integral part of business-as-usual — to make you less reliant on Eureka moments and to innovate systematically. I believe that by following the eight working principles outlined below, you’ll have an opportunity to create an innovation culture that enables your organization to outmatch its competitors in the long run. Co-creation and high-touch engagement. Building ‘with’ is better than building ‘for’ to build a sense of shared ownership High-velocity decisions. Speed is imperative for innovation, so avoid delays Think ‘openness’. Use open protocols, build your products / prototypes for interoperability by default Intrepreneurship attitude. Think from outcome perspective, having a high-level vision and navigating to achieve desired results First-principle approach. Go back to basics and challenge your fundamentals, revalidate all rooted assumptions Sense of urgency. Bringing a sense of urgency into entire process can eliminate blockages and clear the path Use +1 thinking. Going beyond your immediate problem or idea to find the next and solve for that Build for scale. You don’t want to spend extra time “later” to scale your innovations, do you! Previous Next

Gayathri is the Global IT-Compliance Lead for /thoughtworks and an auditor with a strong focus on Information Technology audits. Professionally, she loves collaborating and accomplishing big things as a part of a team and her thinks current role in /thoughtworks allows her to do this daily. Emerging leadership series - In conversation with Gayathri Sribharath 13 Feb 2023 Gayathri is the Global IT-Compliance Lead for /thoughtworks and an auditor with a strong focus on Information Technology audits. Professionally, she loves collaborating and accomplishing big things as a part of a team and her thinks current role in /thoughtworks allows her to do this daily. How would you introduce yourself? Hello! Thank you for taking a few minutes to read about my journey. I am the Global IT Compliance Lead for /thoughtworks. I am an auditor with a strong focus on Information Technology audits. I work closely with product and software development teams and help drive best practices in information security, SOX compliance, data security, access management, change management etc. In the current role, I act as the liaison between external auditors, business and technology teams and help organisations comply with the ever increasing and complex requirements of various security and risk standards. I have a keen interest on working with teams to solve Compliance issues using technology. Some of my professional degrees and certifications include Chartered accountancy, Certified Information systems auditing etc. Of late, I have developed interest in Data Privacy and GDPR. On the personal front, I am married to Sri Bharath - an ardent supporter of all that I do and my sounding board. I have a beautiful and talented daughter. I love to learn to cook different South Indian cuisines. I like to go on long solo drives in my car and a lover of the beach and sunsets. Can you tell me a bit about your career journey? What inspired you to take on the leadership role? Born and brought up in Coimbatore, a city that is famous for its visionaries and innovative ideas in business, there is always a thirst to learn and explore new things. It’s in our DNA and I think that has been a factor in the way my career journey has been shaped. My career journey is shaped by the mentors and great thinkers I had the chance to work with. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who helped shape my career and encouraged my thought process to be different. As any other intern, I started working on internal and tax audits. But the audit consultancy I worked for believed in me and gave opportunities to work in other specialisations like information security, IT audits etc. This helped me understand my strengths. After almost 5 years of working for the audit consultancy, I moved on to work for technology consulting companies and be a part of their internal audit and compliance teams that focus on IT audits. I have performed so many different types of audits like SSAE 16, SOX, ERP audits, etc. I have had opportunities to consult teams and audit them as well. This exposure and experience are what makes me confident in my leadership role. What were the top challenges you faced during your journey and how did you overcome them? One of the difficult challenges that I had to overcome was to learn how to network and navigate through an organization’s system. This skill is very important for anyone, more so in my role where I must work with so many stakeholders, internal and external. A very powerful leadership development program that I completed a few years ago in one of the organizations I worked for helped me identify my areas of weakness using a SWOT analysis. I took support from my mentors to arrive at a series of things to do improve my communication skills and confidence levels. This enabled me to easily converse with various types of stakeholders. I was able to create the visibility required for the role. A big portion of my success can be attributed now to the relationships I have built with my peers, colleagues and important stakeholders in my career journey. What motivates you everyday? Personally, my daughter, of course. I want her to see a strong mother who does smart-work and someone who is independent. Professionally, I love collaborating and accomplishing big things as a part of a team. My current role in /thoughtworks allows me to do this daily. Isn’t it wonderful to do something that has a meaningful impact on the organization? I travel often. I do some workcations too! This helps me stay not glued to my desk and be one with nature and that motivates me to do what I do best. Do you have a role model in your life? Can you name a few people who you look up to? I have many role models in my life. To being with it is my mother who I look up to first. She has overcome a lot of challenges to raise us and is a very strong woman who looks for solutions and leads the family to its success. And then all my mentors. I am naming a few here. CN Srivatsan & Gita Srivatsan, Meena Swaminathan, Uday Bikkasani, Leena Pandya, Nitin Raina, Sasikala Mahesh. What does leadership mean to you? How would you describe your leadership style? When people feel safe enough to raise their hands and say ‘I made a mistake’ or ‘I need some help’, that leader has succeeded to Put people first and create a congenial environment for them. That to me is a good leader. Leaders are the ones who see the world not as it is, but as it could be. They inspire others to follow them because they believe in something larger than themselves. And that "something" is not a destination or a goal, but a vision- something worth sacrificing for and fighting for. What would be your advice to other leaders? Believe in yourself first and then believe in the people that surround you. A good leader should be able to create more leaders. A good leader should prefer actions over authority. Listen to your heart and put people first. Rest all can wait. My favorite quote by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev – Integrity, Insight and Inclusiveness are the three essential qualities of leadership.

Tips on managing the risks on production environment < Back Managing risks in operations & production support environment Tips on managing the risks on production environment Managing risks in a production environment, that is making money for customers, is extremely essential. However, most often, due to the unpredictable nature of the production support or operations management work, the fear of unknown increases drastically. More often than not, for an operations analyst or a production support analyst every day is a new day and every problem is a new problem and hence the traditional risk management model that suggest to Identify->Analyze->Plan->Track->Control. The traditional model assumes there is a significant time available that will allow you to analyze and assess the risks after you identify it. However, in the production support or operations management area, the time is something that is not available and you are expected to react it quickly. Risk & rewards In my previous experiences about awarding the winners in an organization, it was observed that the companies, most often, tend to reward the people who do better crisis management than the people who do better risk management and that often means that the risks are tend to be reacted only when they are realized and become a bigger problem. So, at the end of the discussion, it was more or less agreed that the Risk Management in a production environment is all about behavioral change and mindset. Interesting ? .. read ahead! If you consider the possible responses to a risk once you identify it, they could broadly classified as follows, Terminate - terminate the risk at the source and do not accept the same Transfer - transfer the risk to the concerned stakeholders and ensure they are mitigated Treat - accept the risk immediately and start controlling Tolerate - accept the risk and do nothing ! If you revisit all the scenarios you had experienced related production support or operations business, they are more often than not demand urgent attention. A priority 1 ticket is waiting or some incident is threatening to take the shape of a bigger problem. Now, for such situations, can you terminate the risk? Can you tolerate the risk or can you transfer the risk and keep quiet? I would think no! In all such cases, you would have taken quick action to either resolve the risk yourself or ensure that the risk is resolved at the earliest. Now, coming back to my earlier statement of relating the Treat, you would agree that to treat the risk in an production environment that requires collaboration across multiple teams, you need to develop the ownership & risk taking mindset. Someone needs to take the ownership and drive the problem through to the solution or mitigate the risk in full. Few tips on mitigating the production risks are as follows, Keep customers informed of more bad news than the good news. Even if you do not believe, the customers are more prepared to listen to worse news than you can possibly give the. Expose your vulnerability without going into victim mindset! Be honest in explaining the reasons, but do not over explain things. #operations #risktaking #productionsupport #mindset #riskmanagement #behaviour Previous Next

IT departments are on the verge of being irrelevant to businesses. .. < Back Why IT departments must reinvent themselves - Part I IT departments are on the verge of being irrelevant to businesses. .. IT departments are on the verge of being irrelevant to businesses. Increasingly, there is a need to reinvent themselves and align better with the business. The industry is at crossroads, where they need to choose between being merely seen as a cost center in the organization, and instead, take the lead to be an important and influential partner in the business. At Thoughtworks, we have been thinking a lot about the direction that the IT team needs to take. In the last 4-5 years, we have been continuously challenging ourselves and evolving along with our changing business. In this blog, I elaborate on the thought process behind this change in direction and focus and hope that it will get you thinking about the opportunities that exist for your IT departments. IT departments need to reinvent and re-purpose themselves Let’s think of some factors that impact the direction of IT teams so much and so often: The nature of the business is changing, at a rapid pace - With the technologies in the space of Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning taking center stage, companies need to look beyond traditional ways of doing business. Technology adoption for business is no longer an afterthought, but a driving force. As an operations partner of the business, IT departments need to keep an eye on the changing nature of the business and be proactive to change and evolve along with the business. IT departments have an opportunity to drive future of business - By being a partner, IT departments have an opportunity to disrupt business processes through technology led innovation. They can work with the business to identify customer needs, market trends and help in developing the right capabilities through experimentation and application of technology to their internal solutions. With technology innovation disrupting more and more businesses, IT teams can play an important part to shape the future of the organization. The same work doesn’t give same value year on year - Doing the same work year on year, with the same people and teams offers diminishing returns for companies. As operating costs and people costs increase each year, companies cannot afford to spend more money for the same outcome. There is an increasing need to use technology in business and IT operations to reduce costs and bring in more efficiencies. Having said that, we should also keep in mind the current situation of IT departments and business. Finances will keep getting tighter – Just as customers ask companies to deliver more year on year with same costs, the same expectation is on IT teams as well - to deliver more without a proportionate increase in costs. IT departments need to be clever in cost optimization as their budgets do not keep up the pace with the growth and complexity of the business. Value first – While people are the most important asset of organizations, the outcome is always measured in terms of the value they bring to the organization and their users. The same goes with costs and investments too, as they are always evaluated in terms of the value they generate. Considering these situations, it becomes important for internal IT departments to continuously move up the business value chain. Workspaces at Thoughtworks Let me tell you what happened with my team at Thoughtworks few years ago (earlier known as the Offices and Devices team). We realized that the regional business paradigm is shifting and we needed to gear ourselves to support the future of business. The expectations from the immediate stakeholders were changing and the traditional way of working as support teams in isolation was no longer good enough. We needed to foster the true spirit of leadership, partnership and collaboration within and beyond our teams. To get there, during the last few years we have: Reworked our vision to focus on the ‘future of work’ and ‘strong regional IT partnership’ Rebranded ourselves as ‘The Workspaces’ team that allows us to go beyond previously established scope of work Created smaller region-focused product teams by breaking down one big global team On-boarded experienced and business-focused product owners to lead the teams into regions Evolved the structure of the team to ensure that decisions are made at region level Established a framework for team capability development that aligns with the vision of our team and the regional business Put in place a stronger governance mechanism with the regional businesses While there is still some way to go, these steps have helped us start moving from being a ‘business support’ team to being true business partners. What is the future? The next challenge is for us to think on “ How to move up from being business relevant to become business influencers? ” While business support work such as help desk and customer support, laptop and office support, client project and infrastructure support is important, we can’t move ahead without changing our approach holistically and making the IT department integral to the business. The transition has not been an easy one, but this change in approach has helped us make giant strides in redefining the future of this department. In Part 2 of this blog, I will share my thoughts and ideas on how we can transform from here to become real business influencers. Previous Next

There are two kinds of emotions that one can experience. Simple enough to guess ... < Back Learning Emotional Intelligence There are two kinds of emotions that one can experience. Simple enough to guess ... So, to start with, do you know what is an “Emotion”? It seems so simple, but when asked this question during the training, probably none could give an exact answer. The answers were such as, ‘ An emotion is a feeling.’ , ‘An emotion is a thought in one’s mind.’ . The answer that the trainer gave was ‘An emotion is an energy within the body that creates an awareness of its state through feeling’, which probably was a sensible answer! There are two kinds of emotions that one can experience. Simple enough to guess, they are Good emotions and Bad emotions. Good emotions (happiness etc) are the ones that the body likes to carry and the Bad emotions (fear etc) are the ones that the body does NOT like to carry. The mind is an invisible force that resides within the human body and assists the human being to experience various states of emotions. The mind plays an important part in managing the emotional state of a person. The equation is simple, Mind is a slate on which the external situation, understood by 5 senses (see, smell, hear, touch, taste) and governed by one’s intelligence, intellect, memory, beliefs & values create an emotion that is visible through the gesture of a human being. Now, what does EI tells us? EI has 5 basic competencies as follows, Self awareness Self awareness is all about being aware of the emotional state of oneself. It also extends to expressing the emotions at right time and not suppressing them within yourself. If you are getting angry, upset, disappointed or frustrated, then its essential to identify the state of emotion and take a corrective action immediately. Self management This is all about managing one’s emotions and how you appear to others. For example, if in a meeting, due to some lengthy arguments and counter arguments you are feeling angry, then its better to announce that I am getting angry, and I suppose I need to take a break. than continuing with the meting, which is likely to affect your judgment and might end into something you might repent ! Self motivation Self motivations tells you to have a passion in life. It tells you to discover your own passion and pursue it in order to keep you motivated in life. It suggest you to have a goal in life (personal & professional) so you can go all about pursuing the goal. Doing the job you love and loving the job you do is the mantra of keeping one highly motivated. Empathy Empathy is all about getting in someone else’s shoes and DO nothing ! Yes, do nothing ! It suggest you should empathize with others to understand what situation they are going through before taking any decision about anyone. It helps you to understand what pains or problems someone is going through and how it might affect someone’s performance at work. It also suggest that one should empathize with oneself. It helps understand what emotional state you are going through and what situation you are under. Self empathy is all about giving time to yourself every day to ensure you are in a good emotional state to realize your situation control limits. Effective relationships Effective relationships is the relationship that is Goal Oriented. In the discussion, after much debate, it was convinced that all relationships you can think of are goal oriented. An effective relationship is also one the one that comes with expectations and the one where the expectations are met. Its recommended that you have a clear understanding of emotions with whom you get into an effective relationship. Finally, in my own words, I would define EI as, EI is all about knowing and motivating yourself, controlling your behavior irrespective of situation type, understanding others better, relate to them for betterment of your social and work life that could translate into more happiness and help earn more money and growth. #personality #EQ #thoughts #emotions #emotionalintelligence Previous Next

Ying started her career with Thoughtworks and has played roles like Developer, Delivery Lead, Product Owner, Head of Operations and now playing the role of the Program Manager. Women leadership series - In conversation with Ying Fu 5 Mar 2022 Ying started her career with Thoughtworks and has played roles like Developer, Delivery Lead, Product Owner, Head of Operations and now playing the role of the Program Manager. How would you introduce yourself? Hello, I am Fu Ying and I would introduce myself as a program manager, as a driver to lead the team to move forward in the right direction. Can you tell me a bit about your career journey? When did you first get into a leadership role? My whole career so far is within TW and the journey started as a developer, eventually, shifting the role to Delivery lead, Product Owner, Head of Operation, Program manager. Majority of my career is work under multiple culture environments. Which helps me look at things from different angles. The first time I got a leadership role is quite interesting, it is not an officially "assigned" leadership role. It was the 2nd year I joined TW. There is an NGO project which needs to work with clients from Africa and the UK, and with a group of people from TW Inida. From China, and it was just me and a new hire who have 10 years experience. Given I have longer experience in TW and know about the project, I start to take the ownership and drive the delivery of the work. Even providing suggestions to my teammate. I saw this as the first time I took the leadership role even though at that time, I didn't feel this way. What were the top challenges you faced during your journey and how did you overcome them? My top challenge when I was in a leadership role was the balance of growing people and doing things by myself. As a leader, when I step into an area that I'm not familiar with, I need to build up the team to move things forward instead of doing things by myself (I even can't do it by myself). This will need me to better think about the impact of work and set the right expectations with the team. I'm not overcome them yet. Still working on it. But I'm more and more patient on this now. What motivates you? Ownership motivates me to keep driving the thing forward. Curiosity motivates me to explore different areas from PS to Operation. Willing to get things done motivates me to remove blocker and build connections. Do you have a role model in your life? Can you name a few people who you look up to? I don't have a specific role model. I do learn things from different people. For example: Matheus, he was a very supportive leader who gave space to team members to grow and provide support when they needed it. David, he is great at balancing different parties within TechOps. Jade, putting things better organized. Yuntao, think things from a balanced view, and care about people's career development. Xiaoli, be very clear about what is the target to achieve. Gao Li, very calm and easily takes up new roles. There are still more people I'm learning from. I can't summarize all of them. What does leadership mean to you? How would you describe your leadership style? Leadership means responsibility, means good influence to others. My leadership style is more empowering, creating a safe space and opportunities for team members to leverage their strength and desire. Through supporting their success to make me and the team successful. What would be your advice to young leaders? People are always important. Always think about how to support your people's success and make the work successful.

In continuation from my previous blogs, here I write about the direction ... < Back Why IT departments must reinvent themselves - Part 3 In continuation from my previous blogs, here I write about the direction ... In continuation from my previous blogs, here I write about the direction we intended to take with Workspaces. In this part, I offer my thoughts on the perennial debate around what is BAU and what is innovation. I have recently been a part of several conversations that have led me to believe that confusion exists within a team like Workspaces where the majority of the work is BAU. I hosted a workshop on innovation at a team offsite sometime ago which was really useful in discovering what the team thought of innovation and some of the challenges and opportunities they perceived. Although the team has changed a lot since then, when I look at the notes from the workshop, I believe some of the perceptions about innovation remain same. How interesting! I have been recently interviewed on my thoughts on innovation and also took part in a global IT survey for innovation (hosted outside of Thoughtworks). It was a good time to reminisce on my thoughts on innovation. I present some of these thoughts to you: Innovation is a culture of thinking differently and challenging oneself to do things differently Failures in innovation is great learning and offers important lessons Successful innovations often result in reduction of time while doing the same work, reduces effort taken towards any task, saves cost or improves quality Innovation does not only mean building a product or an app or a software but also innovation in process, service or pretty much everything you see around Innovation doesn't only happen in the NASAs and ISROs of the world. It happens in smaller bits around you that will help you solve your daily problems and issues. We just need to build a curious mind and challenge status quo to think about innovation and ideas that can improve things for us and around us. With so much focus on innovation, does it mean the BAU is not appreciated? What about those of us who enjoy our work? Well, the answer to this is partly yes and partly no. Let me explain. Yes, because if we continue to do the same and routine work over and over again, the value of that depreciates over a period of time and we have to think of doing the same work differently or keep questioning why we are doing it. No, because there will always be some work that we will have to continue doing to keep the lights on. And let’s be honest, it’s a vicious circle. For things around you to change and become better, you need time and because you are so busy with day to day work, you just don’t have time to think or act or even suggest improvement. In my opinion, the change will not start unless we really want to change and think of getting out of doing ‘only’ routine stuff. In some ways, we have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone to think about and bring a change around us. Lots of us have ideas and most of them are really good. Talking about the idea in a social forum and within the team is the first step towards thinking about the change. Being accepting of someone else’s idea and contributing through discussions is another thing that helps us follow and think about the change. I also believe that the best ideas will come from people who are closest to the problems. The success of the idea will truly be dependent on how participative we can make it for everyone. I believe that with ‘Workspaces Global Ideas’, we have taken the first step to share our ideas.The showcases that we schedule have the potential to become one of the most important tech showcases within Thoughtworks, if we do them right. So, in summary, I feel that innovation will come from people around us, who are looking at the same things differently. BAU is important and so is innovation, but they are not mutually exclusive. You can not do one ignoring the other. For TechOps, 'innovation' means not accepting the way things are, especially if it can be better for our customers and ourselves. It could be an incremental improvement or a disruptive game-changer. Either way, innovation really should be our business as usual. We hope TechOps will increasingly incorporate a true learning culture where we are always observing and experimenting together. Previous Next

Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. .. < Back Innovate to impact framework Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. And often, the reason for failure is that organizations are trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Good luck with that. Instead, we prefer to plan for success. In this article, we’re going to dive into the practical details of our fluency model — the Innovate to Impact framework — looking at each stage of the journey and outlining the steps you need to take to proceed to the next level. The framework relies on a collaborative approach to innovation — avoiding the pitfalls of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches that so often end in frustration (see article one for a fuller description of the collaborative approach). But success demands more than just setting up a team and hoping for the best. Let’s look a little closer at how your journey towards sustainable innovation can map out. It starts with a vision: how you see ways to differentiate yourself from the competition. Stage 1: Experimenter (Build the capability & innovation engine) The first stage of your journey is all about building capability and the innovation engine that will help you with experimentation. Your innovation team needs to understand all key stakeholders; the roles team members will play; how to source ideas from people across the enterprise; and how to establish communication channels and build a process that will allow efficient execution of the experiments that you’re going to conduct. Experimentation, however, needs to be aligned to a purpose: that of getting you closer to your vision for strategic customer differentiation objective. Successful experimentation will help you scale through the steps of this framework, and smooth the path towards sustainable innovation. As part of the innovation engine, your team needs to get accustomed to the discipline of sourcing ideas; validating them; ensure the focus is aligned to business priorities; and evaluate experiments’ success in ways that are tangible to the business. This helps the team to be lean in their approach of building an innovation engine for experimentation. As part of this stage, the following are the aspects you need to consider: Purpose To build the capability and set foundations to carry out experiments in the most efficient manner. What you need to do? At this stage, you will need to: Identify the purpose of your innovation programme and set a long term charter for the programme Identify the key stakeholders and team members Build relations and alignment with leadership and understand strategic objectives of the organization Generate, validate and select a set of ideas and experiments in collaboration with people across organization Prioritize a set of ideas and run experiments using the rapid innovation framework Review your process to identify the most efficient and impactful way to build experiments Repeat the process for different types of experiments to fine-tune your innovation engine Expected outcome This phase is all about building an innovation capability that turn your ideas into products, prototypes or some tangible results (success or failure) in the most efficient manner. Once you’ve taken the above steps, its expected that you would have: Built the team that’s capable of running experiments in the most efficient manner Understood the communication pathways and decision points within your organization Proven your capability that you can turn ideas into products, prototypes or some tangible results (success or failures) within a definite period of time This should invite more attention for you innovation programme and possibly enable you to secure additional funding. Possible risks One of the biggest challenges for this early-stage Experimenter team is that the projects may fail, or at least not produce the anticipated results. Maybe more experiments fail than succeed. This can undoubtedly impact morale. So you should raise this possibility with the team at the outset. Because at this formative stage, successful projects aren’t the only goal: it’s essential that your team learns to adapt and quickly identify when projects aren’t delivering. They’ll learn far more from projects that go awry than those that are plain sailing. Innovation in practice Google X is a great example of how experimentation-oriented innovation labs can be set up. X is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. Its goal? 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement. It approaches projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research, and tries to tackle them with the speed and ambition of a startup. Some of its best known ideas include Project Loon (balloons to deliver internet in rural areas) and Project Wing (Drones for good deliveries). Stage 2: Value creator (Build enhanced credibility and strengthen leadership support by targeting internal value creation) Once you have a solid engine that enables you to turn your ideas into tangible results and has proven its worth through a series of experimentation, you should then turn your focus onto building impact within the organization. This can be done through targeted value generation using your engine. As a part of value creator, your focus should now be to partner with important business functions within the organization, identifying opportunities where impact of innovation can be highest and partner with the users or functions to deliver those innovations to them. The important difference between the experimenter phase and value creator phase is that in the latter, you identify specific areas (such as recruitment, staffing or operations) and work with the end users to establish a hypothesis of value and agree on it before starting to work on solving the problem and delivering an innovation. In this phase, your working team becomes bigger as you welcome the potential users and functional people into your team and focus on co-creation to deliver impactful innovation through your engine. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to strengthen the partnership with the organizational leadership by providing direct and tangible benefits to the important business functions through your innovation engine. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Identify and partner with an internal business function, which is strategically important for the organization (say staffing, recruiting, sales) Talk to the users and understand their problems, as well as opportunities in the area Ideate within the context to understand the possibilities for innovation Map idea to potential value /outcome and target specific idea for experimentation Create a working group with users and functional people that would work with your team to co-create the solution Use your experimentation engine to build the solution/product/prototype and targetedly deliver the value Measure the value delivered Expected outcome Because your innovation team is now working with a target group within the enterprise, you can expect the team to hone their ability to generate ideas that solve specific problems for that team. This can help build the culture of purpose-led innovation. Innovation is driven by customer value and market differentiation. It's sustained with strategic alignment and people participation. The innovation efforts through this phase should directly help your organization achieve part of its strategic goals or push your functions closer to achieving their strategic goals. In a nutshell, deliver impact for an important business function within your organization. Possible risks The choice of targeted teams within your organization will determine your success. That’s because this needs to be a close working relationship. If your stakeholders can’t make time for, you can’t deliver. This can be a challenge. As we saw in the first article, when business-as-usual is the priority, innovation suffers. You can’t afford to be seen as a distraction, rather than a strategic enabler. Innovation in practice In a commercial aircraft’s galley, space is at a premium. And with hundreds of passengers to please, every square centimeter is precious. So when looking at how to maximize use of this space, Delta Airlines’ innovation team, The Hanger, came up with an neat idea to reclaim nearly two carts’ worth of space: turning the coffee mug handles to face each other . Sometimes, valuable ideas don’t need to cost the earth. Stage 3: Business enabler (Build customer-focused innovation engine to support sales and new client solutions) Once you’ve proven yourself to be a value creator for the business, it’s time to take the next step and start thinking of directly contributing to the business growth. As you start thinking of growing the impact of your innovation program, it’s important that you start thinking of impacting the sales and demand efforts of your organization and to an extent, your organization’s clients. This phase, the Business enabler, specifically targets value creation for the revenue-earning departments or in some cases, directly for the clients. Using the work done for building the delivery engine and value creation for internal functions, you’d have built a repository of innovations that could possibly be ready to be showcased to your clients as a part of your proposal, or a sales pitch. In some cases, there may be a need to do a targeted prototyping or concept designing for clients based on certain pre-sales activities. Your innovation team can partner with the client account teams or sales and demand teams to proactively identify opportunities to showcase your innovations to clients or create new innovations that will assist sales efforts with existing and new clients. This is where the focus of the innovation shifts from delivering targeted value to an internal function to target supporting business development efforts of the organization through innovation. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to directly support the pre-sales, client account teams and business development efforts by targeting specific client or market opportunities to help win more business. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Partner with the market-facing or revenue-generating departments within your organization to understand the opportunities Understand about the existing clients and potential clients that your organization wants to target Collaborate with client account teams and sales teams to identify opportunities where innovation bring an impact on business development Identify opportunities to showcase your innovations to relevant clients (existing / potential) as a part of sales efforts Deliver new innovations that would be relevant / showcaseable to clients (existing / potential) that would open up new business opportunities Continue aligning with the business functions within the organization to deliver concepts / prototypes / innovations relevant to the market Expected outcome As part of this phase, your team is now working with the direct revenue-earning (or maybe winning) departments of the organization, you can expect the team to contribute to winning more business for the organization. This is especially true when it comes to existing revenue-generating streams. You can do this by supporting the sales efforts by delivering innovative example PoCs, concepts, prototypes aligned with the clients or market you are targeting. The innovations that you deliver should be targeted to help open up new conversations with existing clients for more work, innovative work and help convince new clients about your capability of delivering work. By running experiments that are targeted towards customers, clients and the business, you should get quicker way at market and opportunity assessment. It should become second nature for your teams to know about market conditions and identify where opportunities lie. Possible risks The stakes are rising. You may need larger investments for the experiments you’re running — and that’s often a business challenge. Especially because you are doing a pre-investment into delivering potential revenue earning innovations that may or may not necessarily guarantee new business. There’s a danger that customers may still be thinking about yesteryear’s ideas and may not be really prepared for your innovation to drive their growth. So in many cases there is a likelihood that you may present a shiny new innovation to them and they may think: “This looks great, but probably we need time to be ready for this kind of work.” Innovation in practice At US insurance group USSA, business enhancements are achieved by going to its customers directly. It runs new ideas past its customers via USAA Labs, where members are invited to evaluate and test new ideas and concepts. For instance, members might be asked to evaluate the firm’s process for handling natural disasters or maybe a guide for managing debt. Through its innovation process, it can run experiments that target specific value and get to production through a targeted innovation process, where it has proven customer needs. Stage 4: Strategic differentiator (Define your own blue ocean and find your sweet spot, led by innovation) Now that you have mastered building your innovation engine, understood how to create significant value for internal stakeholders and the organization, and also mastered the art of building innovations for clients and help strengthening existing revenue streams, it’s time to take a jump and take the next step. To grow significantly faster, you need to create your own blue oceans and deliver differentiated value to clients through your innovation engine. You need to create a value proposition such that it differentiates you positively against your competition and potentially, makes the competition irrelevant. This is the whole point of innovation and through this phase, you should aim to create a strategic differentiation for yourself against your competition. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to use innovation to build a strategic differentiator for yourself against your competition and position yourself positively in the market you operate. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Invest in R&D to understand and spot potential new market opportunities that would provide significant new value to your customers Use your market research skills to come up with new offerings, services or products for your existing customers, or to spot an entirely new customer segment Understand how this could differentiate yourself against your competition and provide you an advantage in the market Invest in building a strategic capability to support the delivery of the new offering, services or a product for your customer segment Successfully delivery value to customers and run a full cycle of acquisition, retention and growth with your customer (i.e., acquiring, retaining and growing the customer) Think about building a strategic partnership with your customers and help them to graduate through their own innovation journey You can think of being successful if you are able to help customers draw significant value in the markets they operate through your new innovative offering Expected outcome As a part of your strategic investment in innovation efforts, you need to create a new product, service offering or a value proposition for customers that’s innovative and positively differentiates you against your competition. This can be done by establishing a strategic innovation partnering with your customers and help them shape up their own innovation journey and help them deliver significant value to their customers. Possible risks The biggest risk in this is the lack of belief of leadership in investing into R&D to create true differentiation through innovation. It’s often seen that the leadership prefers to take low-risk approach to exploring new opportunities and it may mean that they’d miss out on creating a significant differentiator for organizations through this approach. This phase requires organizations to take a radical new approach and may impact culture, people and the way the business is done etc. and it needs strong and visionary leadership to take this step. Innovation in practice Airbnb is a great example of how innovation has enabled an entire new business to be set up; one that’s disrupted the hospitality industry globally. Its unique rental platform lets people list, find, and rent short-term lodging in 65,000 cities and more than 191 countries across the globe. Innovation has proven to be a big strategic differentiator for Airbnb and allows itself to create a blue ocean for itself against the competition within the hospitality industry. In n ext part of this series, we'll explore how this fluency model has been implemented in practice. Previous Next

One of the core principles of our Innovate to Impact framework ... < Back Innovation in practice One of the core principles of our Innovate to Impact framework ... [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Making good on ideas Four phases of innovation One of the core principles of our Innovate to Impact framework is the notion that we’re creating something that adds new value to the business. And as we’ve seen, that value might be realized in new revenue streams, new customer services or internal efficiencies. As you move through the four-stage maturity model, the goal is to build out more impactful innovations. But as discussed, there’s little point in expecting the business to appreciate and support your efforts unless you can articulate the value derived. Validation and measurement are key. So the four stages of innovation throughout the Innovate to Impact framework can be summarized as: Ideate. Generate a backlog of ideas through voice of customers, crowdsourcing, hackathons, workshops. Your initial focus should be on quantity. Validate. Test your initial set of ideas against a defined set of parameters to understand the likely impact. Prioritize those with the biggest potential returns. Incubate. Build rapid prototypes, regularly showcase your work, co-create the product with your stakeholders to target value delivery Measure. How have you performed against expected targets? Measuring your impact. Let’s take a look at these phases in detail. Ideate The purpose here is to generate ideas. Every idea is welcome as long as it’s in keeping with the theme of the task. Whether something strikes you as a flash of genius or total clanger: park your judgement for now. You want to encourage your innovation team to become an ideation powerhouse. So gather up every idea coming your way. Some form of ideation workshop can be a great way to kickstart the process. Of course, not every idea has to be new. Your stakeholders are likely to already have their own ideas in mind, so you’ll want to ensure you involve them in the ideation process too. IT might also be necessary to do some for of discovery to identify what ideas are already out there. Another mechanism for encouraging the flow of ideas is by using the lens of the customers’ voice. What are their pain points or their needs? What are they telling you about potential opportunities to improve your offerings? Validate Here, your focus is validating your pool of ideas against predefined criteria to score ideas’ potential value. This helps us prioritize and identify which ideas bring the biggest impact. The validation process forms part of what I’ve dubbed the ‘ideas funnel’. Taking a set of ideas and narrowing it down through understanding which ones will offer you the most bang for your buck. When scoring, you may want to consider some of the following criteria: Commercial viability . Is the idea commercially marketable? Can it be showcased to, or used by, potential clients? Would this influence our clients or staff? Usability (Proof of value) . Is the idea usable in the current condition and within the existing context of your organization? Is it simple and intuitive to use by people? Is it easier to deploy and maintain? User adaptation . How easy would it be to get first 100/1000 etc. users to adopt this? Would they find it easy to get on board? How likely are they going to be repeat users? Strategy alignment . Is it aligned with the organizational strategy, vision and objectives? Does it help your organization achieve its goals? Feasibility . How feasible the idea is to qualify as incubator idea? Is it likely to result in a large programme of work? Can it be implemented in a definite period of time? What are the considerations for costs, efforts, team etc. needed to build this? Incubate Once you have validated your ideas, you’ll need to move fast to deliver a product or prototype. The incubate phase is based on high-touch engagement, high-speed decisions, intrapreneurship thinking and bringing a sense of urgency into the process so that we can meet the desired outcome with speed. To succeed here, your working team needs to be rapidly established. It should comprise of decision makers and people with domain expertise, so that they can collaborate with your incubator team. Their first task is to dive deeper into the problem at hand while developing a shared context within the working team so that they all coalesce around desired outcomes and possible measures of success. We advocate daily showcases to ensure everyone is aware of what’s coming up, how the solution is shaping up and what the early indicators suggest about chances of success. Changes is an integral part of incubation — you shouldn’t expect that you have the perfect solution from the get-go; but this iterative process should help you stay on track to meet your goals. Measure In some ways, measurements should take place at every stage of this incubation process. It’s essential to ensure you’re on the right track. But if you’re looking to create sustainable innovation within your enterprise, measurement comes into its own once you’re first solution is finished and you’re building a pipeline of ideas. You might start by measuring what I’d describe as targeted innovation. Make qualitative assessments on your impact on the business — as well as their perception of the incubator team. This enables you to track your overall success as an innovation engine. But you’ll also want to keep tabs on things at the initiative level. Can you show that your initiatives have saved money, time or effort? Have new market opportunities opened up? Has your organizational decision making improved? Can you demonstrate a return on investment? Ultimately, your success as an innovation team will depend on the number of ideas that you’ve turned into long-term products. So you should plan to track this from the outset.  Always learn, always The path towards sustainable innovation isn’t about producing the perfect solution. What matters is continuously measuring the impact of your actions and learning from that. As the diagram above shows, what this means in practice continually revisiting your backlog of ideas. Things that may once have seemed impractical might now look urgent. Likewise, if some ideas haven’t produced the anticipated results, can you identify why not and plot a course to success? By constantly challenging yourself and your incubator team you won’t just come up with one quick win, but a sustainable program of improvements over the long term. In Part Four of this series, we’ll take a look at how all these ideas have played out in practice. Previous Next