Creating a Culture of Innovation: 3 Lessons on Innovation from Pixar

CNBC aired a great biography recently on the story of Pixar. I was expecting the typical rags to riches story but instead, this was a story of building a culture of innovation. I learned how a few people with a passion for their craft and the confidence and willingness to push the limits of technology can not only, win the infusion of $10 million in investor dollars (from Mr. Steve Jobs) , but also win the hearts of millions of Americans -young and old - by blazing new trails while doing what they LOVE. Now, we can't all be blessed to have careers that bring pure joy to the young and young at heart, but we can take a lesson in how to foster innovation and push people to use their talent to the fullest. So what did Pixar do that we can apply? Here's what I learned:

Create a space that encourages unplanned collaboration

Even if you are bound by the limits of traditional cube-farm style office space, there can be ways to create a more open feel. Place team tables in central places. Centrally located white boards and easels are great ways to signify that this is a space where thoughts can be developed. Give the space a feeling of having a place to "squat" when the need arises instead of relying on planned meetings and pre-arranged meeting space. Keeping open collaborative space provides the canvas for impromptu idea generation and problem solving.

Treat individual office space as an empty canvas

If you've seen any stories in the news about the Zappos company culture, you'll understand this. Zappos allows employs to decorate cubicles and offices with as much style and individual flair required to inspire them. Just the fact that employees have that freedom to personalize their space is empowering to the employee. That feeling of empowerment and individuality helps create a culture where people feel safe to be themselves. When the guard is down that's when some of the best unedited ideas start flowing.

Embed frequent candid, critical feedback loops as part of your product development process

Pixar does this by having daily meetings where editing teams meet to present the movie segment they worked on to peers. The peers give candid and critical feedback. It's not sugar coated. But in an environment where people feel safe, they don't take feedback personal. This free flowing feedback early and often can help turn something that is good into something great quickly.

Innovation is not just a buzz word but is something that good companies truly work at. Apple as the poster child for innovation. Companies that see everyday things differently and create a culture where people are empowered, feel safe, and have the freedom to be themselves are the ones the others are trying to catch up to.

What does your company do to support idea generation, creative thinking, and innovation?

4 Enterprise Barriers to Agile Transformation

Delivering projects (both business process and technology focused) for the bulk of my career, I have found these themes to ring true as barriers to agile transformation within the enterprise:

Resource Management

While resources are cross-functional often wearing many hats, they are often part of a matrix organization and deployed to simultaneous projects at once. This creates conflicting priorities, lack of visibility, and the inability to fully participate in the day to day needs of any one project team. The Agile solution - dedicate resources to a single team. Allow resources to fully participate in the daily team interactions, forge relationships, and share accountability for the overall project goal. Dedicated participation will speed the overall delivery and ease communication barriers. Freeing the resources to move onto the next priority rather than working on several at once.

Physical Location

Large corporations (even the not-so-large) have always been fond of cubicles. Building physical walls between people for privacy. What suffers is team communication. So meetings become the main way for talking with each other. Instead, break down the walls and allow the team members instant communication anytime it's needed. Co-located team members is also a huge issue. The business often lives in one building and the technical in another. Again, creating physical barriers to communication and collaboration. Keep project teams together and break down the physical wall for the duration of the project.

Requirements

Requirements are a huge stumbling block in large enterprises. Not only the requirements themselves but the politics surrounding them. Politics such as - who had input? who signed off? when were they signed-off? are they in scope? when is a change request required? The traditional assumption around requirements is that the business knows exactly what it wants and that it won't change for the duration. Any changes are considered risks to project delivery. The agile mindset says - keep requirements light, keep them just-in-time, allow them to evolve with the needs of the business. This works because the cross-functional team is in constant communication. As requirements evolve real-time business decisions can be made based on the current state of the product. Together, the team takes input from a product owner to help craft ultimately how the product meets the goal. The product owner isn't expected to give detailed how-to requirements. Only to know what the business needs and, through a series of product demos, collaborate with the team to make the product just right. Traditionally the enterprise has encouraged a long very detailed upfront requirements gathering phase in which everything is written in documentation prior to building. This produces nice documentation that can quickly become outdated as business needs change (and business needs ALWAYS change). The project starts swirling around creating change requests before one line of code has even been developed. Stop the madness, document what's necessary to give the team a running start, evolve the documented requirements as the product evolves, not vice-versa.

Compliance Requirements

Agile promotes just enough process to get the job done. Sometimes in larger enterprises the "just-enough" becomes too heavy weight and prescriptive in the name of compliance. This is a huge misfortune and one of the largest barriers to starting and being successful at Agile. The key to compliance is a keen understanding of what controls need to be in place and what the purpose of the control is. The enterprise must provide the tools, resources, and guidance necessary for teams to be successful in meeting the controls NOT provide a detailed how-to for doing something. Education and shared accountability with actionable recourse are keys to compliance.

What are your experiences and barriers encountered when bringing Agile principles to your projects?

A Single Trick for Remembering Passwords

In both our personal and work life we are faced with remembering countless passwords - ATMs, Amazon account, iTunes, the LAN at work. I found this interesting tip for creating secure passwords that are complex to crack but easy for you to remember.

Identity Management meets Augmented Reality

Imagine pointing your mobile device/smart phone at a co-worker and seeing a holographic depiction of all the system access assigned to that person. Sound far-fetched? It may be a reality sooner than you think.

Although still experimental, the technology is available. Using face recognition technology to match the person's face with a picture stored on the server, any stored information tied to that profile picture can be sent back and displayed to the requestor.

Imagine an environment where authorized people could perform spot Access Certification checks by simply pointing a mobile device equipped with a camera at a co-worker's face. System access is looked up and displayed in a meaningful way as a holographic image/text floating around that person's face. Think of the possibilities and enterprise use cases this immediate access to information could serve. Read more about this technical capability here:

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24639/?nlid=2766&a=f

Sound like an interesting concept? Please comment below to let me know what you think.

5 Best Practices for Developing a Mobile Strategy

Whether your company has already embraced mobile platforms as a business reality or just getting started, the "next big thing" is here. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when planning your approach to mobile.

1. Know "Why"
One of the first important questions to ask is "Why?" The mobile context is significantly different that the desktop world. What's driving your move to mobile? Simply porting your existing desktop content or creating miniature versions of existing websites for mobile is not a wise move. The content you are providing needs to be useful in the mobile setting. Your end consumer has different needs in the mobile context. As I outlined in previous blog, The 3 Cs of Mobile Website Design, visitor context is a huge factor when considering what to develop.

2. Decide what business functions should be mobilized
What functions will give you the biggest bang for your buck? When determining functionality to port into the mobile context, you want to pick something with a measurable ROI or something that gives your business a competitive advantage. Show value early to help build your business case for expanding into more mobile functionality.


Look at which applications are most important to your company, review your use cases, and re-define how those use cases look on the mobile context. How is the use case different for a mobile user? What's important in the mobile context? Keeping in mind that mobile users want to find not browse.

3. Deploy useful functionality incrementally
This isn't a 6 - 12 month initiative. You need to build and release quickly, solicit feedback, and refine. Think about how to chunk up functionality into small, agile releases. The sooner you get functionality out there the sooner you can start making it more useful. Consider piloting to a limited set of users on specific mobile devices. Start expanding audience and supported devices once it's been around the block a few times and you've had a chance to kick the tires.

4. Develop Standards
As an enterprise it's important to have technical standards in place before they get decided for you. Once the enterprise has momentum with mobile, it's not time to start figuring out what your standards are. Security standards, supported devices are all up for consideration when defining mobile guidelines.

Adopt and adhere to common body of knowledge development best practices. Organizations like the W3C have developed thought leadership and application development standards for mobile.


5. Decide How
App or Mobile website? The answer to this question is important and based on the device capabilities of your end users. If you are targeting an audience that will be using a common device than the robust offerings of a native device application may be the right answer. Native apps allow you to fully exploit the capabilities of the device for an optimal end-user experience. For supporting cross device compatibility a mobile website be the best approach. Although more testing time should be factored in, a mobile website offers widest range of possibilities for a broad user base.

In summary, Mobile is hot, but as with any emerging trend, don't implement technology for technologies sake. Know the audience you are serving, what they want, and what you expect to get out of it - your ROI. Strategic thinking and systematically rolling out mobile capabilities are the keys to success.

5 Tips for Giving a Great Presentation

In my role at Solstice Consulting, I do a lot of presenting on topics that interest me, case studies on project successes, and Solstice's domains of expertise. While my audience has ranged in size and background and the content is different each time, I have found a few prensentation techniques that seem to apply to all situations.

1. Be confident no matter how unprepared you feel. Projecting confidence is a sure fire way to build credibility with your audience and help ease your nerves.
2. Dress smart and confident. What you wear impacts how you feel about yourself. Splurge on that smart suit or stylish shirt.
3. Be interesting and engaging. Pull people into your world with stories, anecdotes, and humor. The more they laugh, the more they'll like you, and the more they will remember you.
4. Read the room and get a pulse on the audience. When you feel things are going south and people loosing interest, start asking them questions to keep them engaged. Get them talking and learning from each other. Your audience will appreciate your facilitating knowledge sharing. And they might have the content or answers that you don't.
5. Keep the slides light on text. The more text the more tempted you are to read directly from the slide. Use key phrases and words. This helps keep the presentation conversational when you use your own words and stories to deliver the content.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What are some techniques that work for you?

The Information Security Profession: Today and Beyond

The information security profession is changing. I've been asked to present my perspective at NetSecure on how the profession is changing and what's driving the change. If you can't make it to the event, here is a sneak preview of my presentation.

The Information Security Profession: Today and Beyond

View more presentations from kmanthey.