Innovation Workshop
Strategic Planning and Execution
Business Need
For a worldwide technology leader in Silicon Valley, innovation means to be at the forefront with enterprise product offerings for its customers. There was a need to create spaces for generating new product ideas from the ground up. A Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems wanted to begin a series of workshops to foster a culture of continuous innovation. I was already an embedded consultant and gladly accepted the invitation to pioneer the design and execution of the first workshop of that kind.
Challenge
Technically centered. Steering the mindset of an enterprise engineering organization from purely technical to include the customer needs as part of the brainstorming.
Time productivity. The workshop design had to accommodate for considerations of limited time and labor costs implications, as engineers were going to be taken away from their daily responsibilities. Activities had to be strategic to produce tangible outcomes in a specific timeframe.
Size of cross-functional groups. To create productive environment for collaboration, we needed to get a well balanced ratio of participants; Product Managers, Technical Marketing Engineers, Software and Field Engineers, from the areas of Wireless , Switching, Routing, and Internet-of-Things.
Top-down approaches. The organizational culture valued directive approaches. I needed to advocate for a bottom-up strategy to ensure smoothness and effectiveness in ideation process and participant engagement.
Approach
Lean and Kanban methodologies to maximize time and value. I designed all the workshop activities based on the Lean and Kanban principles: visualization of the work using post-it notes, white boards, dot voting for prioritization and discussion, with personas and customer needs, management of the Work-In-Progress to prevent waste (or going off tangent), and continuous process improvement with a group Retrospective activity.
User-centered Personas. Designed the workshop to have each group of participants create Personas as a starting point. This technique of having a fictional character representing a customer, his/her needs, experiences and behaviors helped to focus the workshop’s ideation on the customers and not only the technical aspects of the products.
Championed a shift to a bottom-up approach. Explicitly communicated expectations about what it meant to act in a non-directive and non-judgmental way. Created and shared guidelines to foster the inclusive of ideas, and self-organizing to empower to everyone to feel comfortable and do their best in creating collectively.
Recommended total number of invitees and group sizes for effective collaboration. Partnered with stakeholders (VPs and directors) in advance to keep groups small enough between 3 to 5 participants each. The list of invitees was reviewed to ensure a well balanced mix of cross-functional roles (engineers and product managers).
Results
40 new customer-centered product ideas were generated within the half-day workshop.
Top 3 ideas were identified by self-organization and cross-functional consensus among 20 participants.
Outputs for Proof of Concepts, Hack-a-Thons, and further Research and Development
Met the needs of the organization, stakeholders, and participants.
Introduced new approaches for ideation, workshop design, and execution that engineers found very productive and fun.
