A team that I have been working with for a while now recently came up with, and executed, a great idea for inspiring innovation and improving collaboration in an agile environment.
It is worth noting that this has only been performed by the team once, so I am making some assumptions about how it may be executed in the future. The goal of this post is not only to document what happened but also provide a framework for moving the technique forward in the future.
What is the context of the product team?
Everyone works in different ways, agile or not, so here is a bit of context about this team that you can bear in mind if you want to apply the idea to your organisation.
The product team consists of two delivery / feature oriented sub-teams. Each of these teams contains programmers, a UX professional and a business analyst. There is also a product owner (from the UX discipline), a chief architect and another UX professional 'floating' across the two delivery teams. The entire product team works on two week sprint cycles, performing a demo and retrospective at the end of each sprint. A product release is performed every few sprints.
What is Dream Week?
At the beginning of a new release one week is set aside as Dream Week. Each member of the team comes up with ideas for work to be performed within the week. The only limitations for the ideas are that they must benefit the product and must be deliverable within the week. The ideas are then pitched to the product owner at the beginning of the sprint. The whole team helps to work out a common understanding of the idea, during which time the idea may change and go through a number of quick iterations. Once all the ideas have been pitched the product owner prioritises the ideas and then the team cracks on with delivering them in priority order.
The ideas that are pulled into the sprint are built to production quality and go into the product. Ideas do not have to be product features, they could be paying back technical debt or investigation into future technologies. However, the ideas are prioritised by the product owner, so just like every day stories, the payback of technical debt must be justified against improved product capability.
By running Dream Week at the beginning of a release it gives the team and the product owner the most freedom to follow potentially controversial ideas as any mistakes made can be corrected throughout the release. It is the least risky time to innovate.
Why only a week?
"Constraints breed creativity"
http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/constraints_breed_breakthrough_creativity.php
For many people given a free reign to come up with new product features, wild and fanciful ideas start to bubble up to the surface. This is a good thing. But that creativity needs to be harnessed. By requiring the idea to be implemented within a week, the would be innovator needs to pare down the idea and get very creative about the potential solution to allow the goal to be achieved within one week.
"A change is as good as a rest"
By using a shorter time period than the team is used to there is a buzz of excitement about the weeks work. The regular heartbeats of agile iterations are useful for creating a rhythm that the team can get into and create useful touch-points for the rest of the organisation. However, the change of pace and focus for a short period is good for getting the collective heart pumping.
How does it improve collaboration?
Anyone can suggest an idea, programmers, UX practitioners, business analysts, but everyone needs to be involved to deliver. The ideas are fresh so anyone has a chance to get involved to shape the solution. The time scale is short so everyone has to pull together to meet the deadline. Because the idea has originated from within the team there is an increased sense of ownership.
Dream Week creates a vacuum of time that must be filled by work generated within the team. It's more than likely there will be too much work to fit within the time. Sound familiar? In this environment your idea is competing for space with all the other ideas being presented, so you better sell it well. Figuring out the needs of the person you are selling to, and pitching the idea, is a great way to improve communication skills.
Did it work?
The team certainly seems to think so. We fixed a number of usability issues that had been hanging over the product for a while and introduced a new pattern to achieve a user goal in a much more effective manner. The teams enjoyed the process, the product owner is happy with the delivery and the next Dream Week is scheduled for the first week after the next release.
The team have actually decided to call it Innovation Week as this makes it an easier sell to business sponsors, but I'm personally a fan of Dream Week as innovation has become almost as overused as Agile.
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