Developing an innovative organization culture does not happen overnight. It takes years to establish a system that helps your organization innovate. You need a clearly defined and communicated vision from leaders, full commitment from employees to translate the vision into reality and a ton of planning.
If your business is struggling with IT innovation or has become static, you will slowly be left behind in the race and eventually become irrelevant. That is why it is important for businesses to keep innovating. With customers and businesses demanding new products and services, you have to constantly come up with innovative products and services to keep your customers engaged.
How can you foster IT innovation at your organization? That is exactly the question we will try to answer in this article. In this article, AntiDdos will learn about seven effective ways to foster innovation at your organization.
Define IT Innovation
Innovation can mean a lot of different things to different businesses and people. That is why it is important to define what innovation means for you. This will give your employees the clarity they need regarding the goals. When defining innovation, make sure to go deeper and discuss the specifics instead of giving vague and generic statements.
Discuss everything from improvement of technical processes, business processes hardware or software enhancements or organization culture that is covered under your definition of innovation. Your target might be to minimize costs, boost productivity or gaining a competitive advantage through innovation or deliver business value. Make sure that your definition of innovation aligns with your current business needs and future goals and vision.
Differentiate Between R&D and Project Management
Most IT projects fall under the category of project management. This means that they have a set deadline, clearly outlined deliverables and cost calculations. In fact, they also have expected return on investments. On the flipside, research and development projects follow a completely different pattern. From expectations to metrics, they follow a different set of rules.
There are no fixed deliverables, deadlines and ROI calculations in research and development projects. Moreover, you can not accurately estimate the total cost for a research and development project. This makes it more difficult for business owners to track progress and hold employees accountable for their actions.
Whether you opt for a project management approach or follow research and development rules, it is important you know the differences between the two. Approach each type of project according to its needs. For instance, if you are following a project based criteria, everything in the project should reflect that from set deadlines to allocated budget, deliverables to return on investment, work breakdown structure to project timelines. The same goes for research and development projects.
Create an Innovation Pipeline
Innovation is not like setting it and forgetting it. Your business can not thrive without continuous innovation. For that, you have to create an innovation pipeline that can churn out innovative products and services on a consistent basis. You should implement standardized processes that are easily repeatable and deliver exceptional results every time.
Your process should cover everything from finding innovative ideas, collecting them, evaluating them and implementing them. Did you notice I mentioned collecting innovative ideas here? Because innovative ideas can come from a wide range of different sources and at any time. It could come from employees, business partners, customers, competitors or even vendors. If you can capture these ideas and take advantage of them, your business can succeed.
Learn How to Handle Unfair Expectations
When you operate in a competitive industry like information technology, expect to be compared to your competitors. Sometimes, your customers might compare you with more expensive and premium offerings that cost many times more and set unfair expectations. They expect you to deliver the highest level of service quality, meet all the standards and follow all the industry best practices as your policy alternatives.
This approach also tackles business leaders who tend to evaluate new technology initiatives such as DNS DDoS protection with that perspective. When it fails to deliver on those guidelines, they are rejected. This is truly unfair. That is why IT leaders must learn to handle those unfair expectations.
As an IT leader, you should set the right expectation from the beginning. Setting the wrong expectations and letting it grow can put a huge dent on the reputation of your IT department as they fail to meet the set standards. Regular failure to meet the expectation could force business leaders to stop trusting your IT department. As a CIO, you would never want that to happen to your IT department.
Take the Form and Content Approach
As the name suggests, form and content doctrine forces IT leaders to associate form and content to each and every deliverable. Form refers to how it looks and content highlights how it works. Make sure all implemented ideas follow the same approach. With all the details clearly laid out for every deliverable, it is much easier for you to complete every deliverable.
With more deliverables ticked off the checklist, your project is more likely to succeed than fail. You should be crystal clear about the purpose of innovation and it should follow the same pattern set via form and content method. If you move away from it, your innovation requests won’t be well received.
Encourage Internal Innovation
Most employees put more effort into tasks and activities that their managers consider important. Team leads should not only push innovation but also encourage employees to take action. Reward employees who actively participate in innovation initiatives. This would encourage other employees who are not interested, to start taking keen interest in it.
Soon, your team will be on the same page working towards innovation. This is when you will see real progress towards innovation. You can create healthy competition amongst employees by announcing the most innovative employee every month.
What steps do you take to encourage innovation at your organization? Share it with us in the comments section below.
