agile innovation and problem solving skills

edX Professional Certificate Programs Agile Project Management

Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills

Learn how to deliver greater value through Agile solution targeting and theory of constraints that unleash your team's innovative potential.

What You Will Learn

• How Agile manages solution risk and return more effectively
• Accurate, effective requirements gathering that avoids delusional "perspective taking"
• Paradox of structure, aka "how constraints drive creativity and luck!"
• Test-driven development for faster, better solutions in complex systems
• How to target scope to meet Performance Objectives via the Theory of Constraints

About This Course

Innovative products and services change lives, and having the right innovative process creates an competitive advantage. Ultimately, innovation is about one thing: problem solving.

As an agile problem solver, you'll need to expand your critical thinking skills to address the key sources of risk in developing best solutions for your new products and business lines. The Problem-solving techniques covered begin with problem definition, beginning with job descriptions and applying the right soft skills to enhance requirements gathering. This ensures you're targeting a good problem to solve, and that you understand the business model. The course then moves on to practices such as "brainstorm and storm drain" to target new creative solutions. You will learn how innovation works on fast feedback cycles to test possible solutions and target root causes of defects. Creative thinking isn't a straight line, and neither should the problem-solving process be a straight line. Each course of action needs early and frequent testing. ****

Key lessons taught in this course are:

Delivering business value, not technical scope with User Stories

Why innovating is the key to risk management and gaining a competitive advantage

The best innovation process for startups in new markets or disruptive innovations, versus sustaining product and process innovations

How to employ an innovation process that fits your business model and situation

Using Cross-functional teams and user stories to gather accurate requirements

Leveraging constraints to apply tested solutions to new technology and new innovations

Applying Test-Driven Design (TDD) to deliver better designs with less designing

By following best practices of Agile, including timeboxes, constraint-based thinking processes, and empathetic problem solving, you'll learn how to provide a sustainable innovation environment for your teams.

While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how agile innova Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

At A Glance

• Expert Instruction Build Skills
• Self-Paced Progress at your own speed
• 4 Weeks 2-3 hours per week
• Free or $199.00 For the full program experience Discounted to $179.10 when you purchase the full Agile Project Management Professional Certificate Program .
• 10 Professional Development Units (PDUs) Earn PDUs toward your Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Mangement Professional (PMP) certification

Related Articles

• Deliver Faster and More Innovative Solutions with Agile Project Management

John Johnson

I'm passionate about what works as both scientific principles and best practices in project and product management. Teaching is leading leaders, so my first goal is to engage with compelling reasons to change their thinking. Our shared goal is to empower their teams to delight customers while also serving the organization and society that supports them.

What Our Students Are Saying

• I really enjoyed this course. The videos, real-life examples, and test cases were interesting and stimulating. It was interesting to see how different skill sets were pulled into the process of innovation. Overall, it was very enjoyable and informative. Serena Bonini
• Excellent course! I'm a Systems Engineer and it answered the doubts I was having about my startup. It's a breath of fresh air about business and project management considerations for those aiming at innovation. The series of other courses focused on agile management concepts are relatable to everyone with a business. I highly recommend it to everyone on the startup path. Daniel Romero A.
• The course is well-designed and has excellent content. The course provides evidence-based approaches to agile project management and demonstrates an awareness of what motivates teams to understand the customer context, perform well, and deliver on time. Skender Dega
• This was great course for me, especially working in the Agile environment for 4 years. This course was able to give me a theoretical view to the Agile and it will be used in my real life work experience. Vaibhav Surwade
• Well designed course with great content. The course teaches evidence-based approaches to agile project management, and shows an understanding of what drives teams to understand the client context, perform, and deliver with a high success rate. I'm a project manager with an Australian university, and I'm already applying many of the principles and practices to improve our performance in education projects. Well done! Anonymous

The first week of Innovation revisits concepts of capability delivery from technical perspective; asking how do we achieve a project's purpose to innovate? What are the risks and methods to be successful in delivering a defined output under uncertain conditions? Here the Theory of Constraints (TOC) is used to target innovation for maximum impact.

The second week dives into the requirements gathering and validation process, and the science behind the most powerful requirement tool, a User Story, and how it forms the basis for Test-Drive Development (TDD).

• Productivity

The third week looks at how adding constraints to solutioning unleashes creativity, luck, and productivity towards solving hard, uncertain problems.

• TOC Thinking Processes
• User Stories
• Constraints

The fourth week culminates with the application of the TOC Thinking Processes, User Stories, and Constraints along with the use of the powerful system engineering solutioning techniques (isolation, absorption, acceleration, etc.) and tools like TRIZ.

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Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills

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Course details.

Week 1: The first week of Innovation revisits concepts of capability delivery from technical perspective; asking how do we achieve a project's purpose to innovate? What are the risks and methods to be successful in delivering a defined output under uncertain conditions? Here the Theory of Constraints (TOC) is used to target innovation for maximum impact.

Week 2: The second week dives into the requirements gathering and validation process, and the science behind the most powerful requirement tool, a User Story, and how it forms the basis for Test-Drive Development (TDD).

Week 3: The third week looks at how adding constraints to solutioning unleashes creativity, luck, and productivity towards solving hard, uncertain problems.

Week 4: The fourth week culminates with the application of the TOC Thinking Processes, User Stories, and Constraints along with the use of the powerful system engineering solutioning techniques (isolation, absorption, acceleration, etc.) and tools like TRIZ.

Prerequisite

Instructors.

John Johnson Professional Programs Manager, Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Maryland is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's leading public research universities. A world leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 37,000 students, 9,000 faculty and staff, and 250 academic programs. 

Its faculty includes three Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners, 47 members of national academies and a large number of Fulbright scholars. The institution has an operating budget of $1.8 billion, raises $500 million a year in external research funding and recently completed a $1 billion fundraising campaign.

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Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills

This course is a part of Agile Project Management, a 5-course Professional Certificate series from edX.

Innovative products and services change lives, and having the right innovative process creates an competitive advantage. Ultimately, innovation is about one thing: problem solving.

As an agile problem solver, you'll need to expand your critical thinking skills to address the key sources of risk in developing best solutions for your new products and business lines. The Problem-solving techniques covered begin with problem definition, beginning with job descriptions and applying the right soft skills to enhance requirements gathering. This ensures you're targeting a good problem to solve, and that you understand the business model. The course then moves on to practices such as "brainstorm and storm drain" to target new creative solutions. You will learn how innovation works on fast feedback cycles to test possible solutions and target root causes of defects. Creative thinking isn't a straight line, and neither should the problem-solving process be a straight line. Each course of action needs early and frequent testing.

Key lessons taught in this course are:

Delivering business value, not technical scope with User Stories

Why innovating is the key to risk management and gaining a competitive advantage

The best innovation process for startups in new markets or disruptive innovations, versus sustaining product and process innovations

How to employ an innovation process that fits your business model and situation

Using Cross-functional teams and user stories to gather accurate requirements

Leveraging constraints to apply tested solutions to new technology and new innovations

Applying Test-Driven Design (TDD) to deliver better designs with less designing

By following best practices of Agile, including timeboxes, constraint-based thinking processes, and empathetic problem solving, you'll learn how to provide a sustainable innovation environment for your teams.

While this course will not make you an agile certified practitioner (PMI-ACP), or certified scrum master (CSM), it offers a more fundamental agile certification based on agile principles and how agile innovation is accomplished in industry today. You'll finish this course more than ready to continue your agile journey, which we hope takes you to the next course in the series on “Agile Leadership Principles and Practices.”

Upon successful completion of this course, learners can earn 10 Professional Development Unit (PDU) credits, which are recognized by the Project Management Institute (PMI). PDU credits are essential to those looking to maintain certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP).

What you'll learn

• How Agile manages solution risk and return more effectively
• Accurate, effective requirements gathering that avoids delusional "perspective taking"
• Paradox of structure, aka "how constraints drive creativity and luck!"
• Test-driven development for faster, better solutions in complex systems
• How to target scope to meet Performance Objectives via the Theory of Constraints

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great content broken down in one review

I recomend i,m very thankful is simple Great content broken down into nice bite size pieces which were perfect for fitting into my already busy day.

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Aiuta molto ad entrare nel mondo Agile

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A must for every person who aspires to be an effective leader Good course, excellent for Agile Methodologies, I have a good experience and the material was wonderful, the topics of Innovation was update and the chapter about user stories was interesting.

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It is a very theoretical course, interesting, full of examples, but is lacking the low level detail of each example provided.

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Nonetheless, as a BA and Finance Professional I would like to see a bit more of cases focused on enterprises and banks with financial examples and not so many military stories.

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Real learning gets to the heart of what it means to be human. Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning. —Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline [1]

Continuous Learning Culture

The Continuous Learning Culture (CLC) competency describes a set of values and practices that encourage individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation.

It is one of the seven core competencies of Business Agility, each of which is essential to achieving Business Agility. Each core competency is supported by a specific assessment, enabling the enterprise to assess its proficiency. The Measure and Grow article provides these core competency assessments and recommended improvement opportunities.

Why Continuous Learning Culture?

Organizations today face an onslaught of forces that create both uncertainty and opportunity. The pace of technological innovation is beyond exponential. Startup companies challenge the status quo by transforming, disrupting, and in some cases eliminating entire markets. Juggernaut companies like Amazon and Google are entering new markets like banking and healthcare. At any moment, political, economic, and environmental turmoil threatens to change the rules. Expectations from new generations of workers, customers, and society challenge companies to think and act beyond balance sheets and quarterly earnings reports. Due to these factors and more, one thing is sure: organizations in the digital age must be able to adapt rapidly and continuously or face decline—and, ultimately, extinction.

What’s the solution? Organizations must evolve into adaptive engines of change to thrive in the current climate, powered by a fast and effective learning culture. Learning organizations leverage the collective knowledge, experience, and creativity of their workforce, customers, supply chain, and the broader ecosystem. They harness the forces of change to their advantage. In these enterprises, curiosity, exploration, invention, entrepreneurship, and informed risk-taking replace commitment to the status quo while providing stability and predictability. Rigid, siloed top-down structures give way to fluid organizational constructs that can shift as needed to optimize the flow of value. Decentralized decision-making becomes the norm as leaders focus on vision and strategy and enable organization members to achieve their fullest potential.

Any organization can begin the journey to a continuous learning culture by focusing its transformation on three critical dimensions, as shown in Figure 1.

The three dimensions are:

• Learning Organization – Employees at every level are learning and growing so that the organization can transform and adapt to an ever-changing world.
• Innovation Culture – Employees are encouraged and empowered to explore and implement creative ideas that enable future value delivery.
• Relentless Improvement – Every part of the enterprise focuses on continuously improving its solutions, products, and processes.

The sections below describe each of these dimensions.

Learning Organization

Learning organizations invest in and facilitate the ongoing growth of their employees. When everyone in the organization continuously learns, it fuels the enterprise’s ability to dynamically transform itself to anticipate and exploit opportunities that create a competitive advantage. Learning organizations excel at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge while modifying practices to integrate new insights [1,2]. These organizations understand and foster people’s intrinsic nature to learn and gain mastery, harnessing that impulse for the benefit of the enterprise [3].

Learning organizations are different from those using the scientific management methods promoted by Frederick Taylor. In Taylor’s model, learning is limited to those at the top while everyone else follows the policies and practices created by management. Becoming a learning organization is not an altruistic exercise. It’s an antidote to the status-quo thinking that drove many former market leaders to bankruptcy. Learning drives innovation, leads to greater information sharing, enhances problem-solving, increases the sense of community, and surfaces opportunities for more efficiency [4].

The transformation into a learning organization requires five distinct disciplines, as described by Senge. The best practices for developing these disciplines include:

Personal Mastery – Employees develop as ‘T-shaped’ people who build a breadth of knowledge in multiple disciplines for efficient collaboration and deep expertise aligned with their interests and skills. T-shaped employees are a critical foundation of Agile teams.

Shared Vision – Forward-looking leaders envision, align with, and articulate exciting possibilities. Then, they invite others to share and contribute to a common view of the future. The vision is compelling and motivates employees to contribute to achieving it.

Team Learning – Teams work collectively to achieve common objectives by sharing knowledge, suspending assumptions, and ‘thinking together.’ They complement each other’s skills for group problem-solving and learning.

Mental Models – Teams surface their existing assumptions and generalizations while working with an open mind to create new models based on a shared understanding of the Lean-Agile way of working and their customer domains. These models make complex concepts easy to understand and apply.

Systems Thinking – The organization sees the larger picture and recognizes that optimizing individual components does not optimize the system. Instead, the business takes a holistic learning, problem-solving, and solution-development approach. This optimization extends to business practices such as Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), which ensures that the enterprise invests in experimentation and learning to drive the system forward.

Many of SAFe’s principles and practices directly support these efforts, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Here are some of the ways SAFe promotes a learning organization:

• Lean-Agile leaders who are insatiable learners use successes and failures in SAFe practices as learning moments to build mastery.
• A shared vision is iteratively refined during each PI Planning period. This shared vision influences Business Owners, the teams on each Agile Release Train (ART), and the entire organization.
• Teams learn continuously through daily collaboration and problem-solving, supported by events such as team retrospectives and Inspect & Adapt.
• Systems Thinking is a cornerstone of Lean-Agile and one of the ten SAFe principles.
• SAFe also provides regular dedicated time and space for learning through the Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration that occurs every PI.
• People working in a SAFe organization are encouraged to build learning networks across organizational boundaries and outside the organization. (Learning networks consist of trusted connections with whom an individual interacts and learns from regularly.)

Innovation Culture

An organization’s innovativeness is essential to competing in the digital age. Such efforts cannot be infrequent or random. It requires an innovation culture . An innovation culture exists when leaders create an environment that supports creative thinking and curiosity and challenges the status quo. When an organization has an innovation culture, employees are encouraged and enabled to:

• Explore ideas for enhancements to existing products
• Experiment with ideas for new products
• Pursue fixes to chronic defects
• Create improvements to processes that reduce waste
• Remove impediments to productivity

Some organizations support innovation with paid time for exploring and experimenting, intrapreneurship programs, and innovation labs. SAFe goes further by providing consistent time each PI for all Agile Release Train (ART) participants to pursue innovation activities during the Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration. Innovation is also integral to Agile Product Delivery and the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.

The following sections provide practical guidance for initiating and continuously improving an innovation culture.

Innovative People

The foundation of an innovation culture recognizes that systems and cultures don’t innovate: people innovate. Instilling innovation as a core organizational capability requires cultivating the courage and aptitude for innovation and encouraging employee risk-taking. For existing organization members, this may necessitate coaching, mentoring, and formal training in the skills and behaviors of entrepreneurship and innovation. Individual goals and learning plans should include language that enables and empowers growth as an innovator. Rewards and recognition that balance intrinsic and extrinsic motivation reinforce the importance of everyone as an innovator. Criteria for hiring new employees should include evaluating how candidates will fit in an innovation culture. Opportunities and paths for advancement should be clear and available for people who demonstrate exceptional talent and performance as innovation agents and champions [5].

Time and Space for Innovation

Building time and space for innovation includes providing work areas conducive to creative activities and setting aside dedicated time from routine work to explore and experiment. Innovation space can also include:

• Broad cross-domain interactions involving customers, the supply chain, and even the physical or professional communities connected to the organization
• Temporary and limited suspension of norms, policies, and systems (within legal, ethical, and safety boundaries) to challenge existing assumptions and explore what’s possible
• Systematic activities (IP iteration, hackathons, dojos, and so on) and opportunistic innovation activities (continuous, accidental, unplanned)
• Perpetual innovation forums on collaboration platforms and Communities of Practice (CoPs) create the opportunity for ongoing conversations across the organization.

The best innovation ideas are often sparked by seeing the problems to be solved first-hand—witnessing how customers interact with products or the challenges they face using existing processes and systems. Gemba is a Lean term and practice from Japan, meaning ‘the real place,’ where the customers’ work is performed. SAFe explicitly supports this concept through Continuous Exploration. First-hand observations and hypotheses channel the creative energy of the entire organization toward conceiving innovative solutions. Leaders should also openly share their views on the opportunities and challenges the organization faces to focus innovation efforts on the things with the highest potential to benefit the enterprise.

Experimentation and Feedback

Innovation cultures embrace the idea that conducting experiments designed to progress iteratively towards a goal is the most effective path to learning that creates successful breakthroughs. Regarding the many unsuccessful experiments to make an incandescent light bulb, Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” [6] Experiments don’t fail in the scientific method; they produce the data needed to accept or reject a hypothesis. Many companies don’t innovate sufficiently due to a fear of failure culture. Such fear cripples innovation.

In contrast, innovation cultures depend on learning from experiments and incorporating those insights into future exploration. When leaders create the psychological safety described in the Lean-Agile Leadership article, people are encouraged to experiment (within guardrails). They feel they have permission to solve big problems, seize opportunities, and do so without fear of blame, even when the results of the experiments suggest moving in a different direction.

Pivot Without Mercy or Guilt

Every innovation begins as a hypothesis – a set of assumptions and beliefs regarding how a new or improved product will delight customers and help the organization achieve its business objectives. However, hypotheses are just informed guesses until real customers provide validated feedback. As Eric Ries promotes in The Startup Way , the fastest way to accept or reject a product development hypothesis is to experiment by building a Minimum Viable Product or MVP [7]. An MVP is the simplest thing that can possibly work to test the proposed innovation to see if it leads to the desired results. Customers and intended users of the system must test MVPs in the target market for fast feedback. In many cases, the feedback is positive, and further investment is warranted to bring the innovation to market or into production. In other instances, the feedback dictates a change in direction. This change could be as simple as a set of modifications to the product followed by additional experiments for feedback, or it could prompt a ‘pivot’ to an entirely different product or strategy. When the fact-based evidence indicates that a pivot is required, the shift in direction should occur as quickly as possible without blame or consideration of sunk costs in the initial experiments.

Innovation Riptides

Organizations must go beyond catchy slogans, ‘innovation teams,’ and popular techniques like hackathons and dojos to create an innovation culture. A fundamental rewiring of the enterprise’s DNA is needed to fully leverage the innovation mindset and develop the processes and systems that promote sustained innovation. As shown in Figure 3, SAFe provides these required structures.

The continuous flow of innovation is built on SAFe principle #9, which promotes decentralized decision-making. Some innovation starts as strategic portfolio concerns realized through Epics and Lean Budgets applied to value streams. In building the solution to realize Epics, teams, suppliers, customers, and business leaders identify opportunities for improving the solution. The potential innovations that result can be considered an ‘innovation riptide’ that flows back into the structures SAFe provides for building solutions. Smaller, less expensive innovations flow into the ART Kanban as Features. In contrast, more significant, costly innovations require an Epic and Lean Business Case and flow into the Portfolio Kanban.

Relentless Improvement

Since its inception in the Toyota Production System, kaizen , or the relentless pursuit of perfection, has been one of the core tenets of Lean. While unattainable, striving for perfection leads to continuous improvements to products and services. In the process, companies have created more and better products for less money and with happier customers, leading to higher revenues and greater profitability. Taiichi Ohno, the creator of Lean, emphasized that the only way to achieve kaizen is for every employee always to have a mindset of continuous improvement. The entire enterprise as a system—executives, product development, accounting, finance, and sales—is continuously being challenged to improve [8].

But improvement requires learning. Rarely are the causes and solutions for problems that organizations face clear and easily identified. The Lean model for continuous improvement is based on small iterative and incremental improvements and experiments that enable the organization to learn its way to the most promising answer to a problem.

Relentless improvement is one of the four SAFe Core Values, conveying that improvement activities are essential to the survival of an organization and should be given priority, visibility, and resources. The following sections illustrate how a continuous learning culture is a critical component of relentless improvement.

Constant Sense of Urgency

Succeeding in the digital age requires sensing shifting market conditions and responding quickly. It requires inviting continuous feedback from customers even if the learning gained leads to change. Delivering needed improvements rapidly is as important as identifying what needs to change. Faster time-to-market requires a bias for action and a constant sense of urgency. In SAFe, this means addressing time-critical improvements frequently. Agile teams make improvements daily as needed and through the effective use of cadence-based SAFe events such as team retrospectives, the problem-solving workshop during Inspect & Adapt (I&A), and the IP iteration. Improvement Features and Stories that emerge from the I&A are incorporated into team plans and prioritized in work planned for the following PI. Time-critical improvements are addressed even more quickly using techniques such as an expedite lane in team and ART Kanbans or simply pausing routine work to swarm on high-impact issues.

Problem Solving Culture

In Lean, problem-solving is the driver for continuous improvement. It recognizes that a gap exists between the current and desired states, requiring an iterative process to achieve the target state. The steps of problem-solving are both fractal and scalable. They apply to teams trying to optimize response time in a software system and to enterprises attempting to reverse a steady decline in market share. Iterative Plan-Do-Check-Adjust (PDCA) cycles, as shown in Figure 4, provide the process for iterative problem solving that is applied until the target state is achieved. This model treats problems as opportunities for improvement in a blameless process. Employees at all levels are empowered and equipped with the time and resources to identify and solve problems. More importantly, every employee views solving problems as part of their ongoing responsibilities, empowered by decentralized decision-making (SAFe Principle #9). Techniques such as retrospectives, problem-solving workshops, hackathons, and communities of practice are ways SAFe reinforces a problem-solving culture.

Reflect and Adapt Frequently

Improvement activities are often deferred in favor of ‘more urgent’ work, such as new feature development, fixing defects, and responding to the latest outage. Relentless improvement requires a disciplined structure to avoid neglecting this critical activity. For individual teams, SAFe encourages retrospectives at iteration boundaries at a minimum, daily as part of team sync events, and in real-time when possible through techniques like pairing, peer review, and swarming. ARTs and Solution Trains reflect every PI as part of the I&A problem-solving workshop. These cadence-based milestones provide predictability, consistency, and rigor to the process of relentless improvement in large enterprises.

Fact-based Improvement

Fact-based improvement leads to changes guided by the data surrounding the problem and informed solutions over opinions and conjecture. Tools and techniques like the Problem-Solving Workshop in SAFe can help determine the fact-based root cause of inefficiencies and lead to effective countermeasures that can be applied rapidly. Root cause analysis is exponentially more effective when supported by data. The self-assessments described in Measure and Grow provide one type of data-driven feedback to help focus improvement work. Organizations practicing the disciplines outlined in Big Data have even more powerful tools and analytics to deliver data-driven insights that lead to more targeted and effective improvement efforts.

Optimize the Whole

‘Optimize the whole’ suggests that improvements should be designed to increase the effectiveness of the entire system that produces the sustainable flow of value instead of optimizing individual teams, silos, or subsystems. Organizing around value in ARTs, Solution Trains, and value streams creates opportunities for people in all domains to have regular cross-functional conversations about enhancing overall quality, the flow of value, and customer satisfaction. Participants in Lean Portfolio Management bring leaders together from across the organization to prioritize investments for improvements and new solutions holistically, representing a fundamental shift from past funding practices and prioritizing initiatives within silos.

Too often, organizations assume that the culture, processes, and products that led to today’s success will also guarantee future results. That mindset increases the risk of decline and failure. The enterprises that will dominate their markets in the future will be adaptive learning organizations with the ability to learn, innovate, and relentlessly improve more effectively and faster than their competition.

Competing in the digital age requires investment in time and resources for innovation, built upon a culture of creative thinking and curiosity—an environment where norms can be challenged, and new products and processes emerge. Alongside this, relentless improvement acknowledges that the survival of an organization is never guaranteed. Everyone in the organization will be challenged to find and make incremental improvements, and leaders will give priority and visibility to this work.

A continuous learning culture will likely be the most effective way for this next generation of workers to improve relentlessly and ensure the success of the companies that employ them.

Last update: 11 October 2023

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When Do Agile Teams Make Time for Innovation?

• continuous improvement
• agile principles

Agile teams need space and safety to experiment with new ideas and approaches. To be successful, they must find new ways to effectively tackle complex problems.

I love the fact that the majority of those using an agile methodology like Scrum do two-week sprints. But I do think we might have lost something as we’ve moved to shorter sprints. It seems as if we’ve lost the ability to experiment freely and frequently. We've lost the feeling, at least, of having time for innovation.

Some organizations have tried to solve this by having a dedicated time for innovation (an innovation sprint) or a team dedicated to innovation. The problem is, experimentation shouldn't just be reserved for special circumstances. It should be part of every team's approach to problem solving.

Agile Innovation and Sprint Length

To see what I mean, consider a team in the early days of Scrum. Almost every early Scrum team would have planned four-week, or one-month, sprints. Imagine those teams are in sprint planning for an upcoming iteration, and are considering two options of how to achieve a goal.

• The first is the tried-and-true way. The team knows it will work.
• The second is possibly a better way but it’s unproven.

The experimental way may or may not work. It's riskier, but with four weeks to work with, it's not too risky to try. If it doesn't work, the team will have wasted some time. But the team will still have time to revert to the tried-and-true way and deliver the functionality by the end of the iteration.

Because they had more time, these early agile teams often chose to explore the breakthrough, innovative way. They felt safe to do so because they knew that they would likely only spend three or four days on the experiment. They knew that with four weeks to work with, they had plenty of time to recover and to switch back to the safe approach.

That's not always true with a shorter sprint. If a team tries something creative, and it doesn't work, it might mean the team doesn't deliver on its sprint commitment.

Agile Innovation and Problem Solving Skills Commented

But is failing to deliver on the sprint commitment the end of the world? I say no. In fact, I say teams that always deliver on their sprint commitment aren't stretching enough. They aren't finding new ways to approach "how" to deliver "what" their product owner has asked them for.

One unfortunate trend I've noticed with Scrum today is that many organizations have turned their sprints into checklists.

Did you finish all the items you said you would? Did you match or exceed your average velocity?

If you did, your team was successful. If you didn't, you’ve failed.

That's the wrong way to look at success.

I agree that a team should finish everything they've planned, most of the time. They need to be consistent and predictable so that others can depend on their estimates and plan accordingly. But they should only deliver everything most of the time.

About 20% of the time, a team that is stretching and reaching, will fall short. A team that is continuously innovating and continuously learning won't finish everything every time. And that's not only OK, it's desirable.

Without a focus on agile innovation, teams will stagnate. Teams that singularly focus on finishing are no longer responsive, but reactive. They are no longer reaching and learning to nimbly solve problems but are instead simply executing a list of tasks.

Experimentation and Psychological Safety

The unintended side effects of shorter sprints and sprint commitments can be devastating for creativity and breakthroughs. Teams that feel pressured by time or fear of failure aren't going to feel safe to experiment. In the absence of psychological safety, innovation recedes.

It's critical that agile teams push back against this pressure to deliver and never fail.

A recent Harvard Business Review article on psychological safety said, "In essence, agile’s core technology isn’t technical or mechanical. It’s cultural." Or as Entrepreneur.com put it , “Your company needs an innovation culture, not an innovation team. You don't become an innovative company by hiring a few people to work on it while everybody else goes through the motions”

As agilists, we must fight to establish experimentation as part of our company culture. Companies that value innovation empower self-organizing teams to try new things, encourage (and fund) continuous learning and improvemen t, solicit and act on feedback and ideas, and emphasize collaboration and communication.

Agile Innovation and Planning

Timing is critical with innovation. When planning a project, one consideration is to do risky things early, not late. That's the idea behind fail fast. Not just to deliver quickly--but to fail early enough that you pivot to something else.

Don't take wild gambles during the final sprint of a major project.

But towards the start of a project, it’s worth trying an innovative breakthrough approach that may not work. It’s worth a gamble to venture outside the tried-and-true approach.

A need to innovate quickly is one of the primary reasons organizations transition to agile in the first place. Make sure teams feel safe to experiment early and often so that you don’t miss out on this benefit of agile. 

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