Innovation on the menu?
An Innovation practice is great way to bring together like minded individuals to work together providing the role model behaviours that will help build the cultural change you seek. In a previous article I looked at the need for the right leadership, the right funding method and then to take action.
Helping you to take action, is a clear understanding of the outcome you are trying to achieve. Over dozens of projects we have developed a framework to help your business sponsors to be clear on what they can expect and, equally importantly, what is the level of risk and what their responsibilities are for next steps:
Consider the three choices below
By selecting to "Test and Invest" the sponsors are clear about the experimental nature of the activity. The chance of failure is higher and the key outcome is learnings. If successful then investment will be needed.
Integrating multiple technologies we delivered a chat bot which delivered broker advice. The test was a small scale live operation with 5 brokers to demonstrate that typical queries could be handled by an automation. The interactions via chat were so lifelike, many brokers closed their chat with a "Thank You." Once the test was successfully completed, further investment was needed to take on to wider-scale rollout.
"Land and Expand" is a situation where a basic development is needed to create your initial functionality, following which further expansion of product lines / services / channels can be developed. Utilising new technologies and new ways of working to ensure a faster pace of change, there is much lower risk and an initial delivery (generation 1) delivery is achieved.
A highly configurable simple products portal was developed using rapid application development techniques, and agile scrum approach and utilising the power of low code development tools. The whole solution was developed in 3 months but the flexible design provided the ability for future expansion opportunities into other products and services.
Cloud based SaaS (software as a service) products provide the opportunity for "One and Done," typically a balance of technology delivery and developing new capabilities locally. Development or configuration is handled by expert business users rather than the need for IT services.
The provisioning of a new video coaching tool is a great example of one and done. After a successful pilot activity, new processes established, key users were trained on operation and the whole service rolled out to users in a rapid delivery approach.
We can provide many practical examples of how to successfully implement a successful framework for your innovation practice. Contact Wzard Innovation at info@wzard.co.uk .