3. Innovation Jam – What Is It? Short focused period of “innovation” Think and act outside the box Learn some new technologies Work with different people Collaborate in a different and very focused way Do stuff at a different pace than the day to day Improve productivity and creativity Ours took place over about a week 1 week of idea gathering and collaboration 1 weekend of development
4. How Gather ideas from community Had a set of suggested categories: usability, visualization, BI, mobility, etc. Elaborate and commit Choose Elaborate some more Commit some more Develop Present All in a very short time
6. Gathering Ideas 38 ideas 250 comments Lots of votes Not just comments and voting but “Are you willing to work on this idea?” Competition started at this point!
7. Selection Exec committee Normal exec criteria – ROI, target customer, cost, immediate impact to market, etc. Execs engaged the whole time (and sponsored!) Top five ideas then go to “code jam” Teams rejiggered as needed PM Designer (shared) Developers (including an architect, usually) QA Idea gathering and selection – 1 week total
9. Execution/Development aka “Code Jam” Over 1 weekend Friday morning Pacific to Sunday evening Pacific (Friday night India to Monday morning India) Highly distributed Open Skype chat Dev in the “cloud” Lots of emails All teams were working on new technologies (to them) iPad Mobile (HTML 5) Sencha for visualization Google Docs API
10. End Game Final presentation on Monday morning Refined “marketing” presentation Demo All teams but one had working code Execs selected winning team and runners up Prizes awarded
11. Lessons Learned One of the projects is nearly in production, expected later this year Lots of coding got done! But… … The prototype is not the product All required 2+ more FTE months of dev to get to v1 One weekend is not enough for a product Many have been reviewed with customers All are on the roadmap In normal prioritization queue Ideal for testing ideas Teams *loved* it Especially opportunity to learn/work in new technologies Prizes may have motivated, but intrinsic motivation was more important Everyone in the company had a chance to contribute to product progress 80% of Accept people involved in one or more phases We *will* do it again
