创新品牌体验团队

by George Krasadakis

通过乔治·克拉萨达基斯(George Krasadakis)

如何领导创新并推动工程团队的变革 (How to lead innovation and drive change in engineering teams)

Innovation is difficult.

创新是困难的。

To empower innovation and transform how teams work, you need the right mix of culture, technology, processes and inspiration — and this takes time. Typically, it requires an ambitious, long-term transformation programme.

为了增强创新能力并改变团队的工作方式，您需要文化，技术，流程和灵感的正确组合-这需要时间。 通常，它需要一个雄心勃勃的长期转型计划。

In the context of software business, this program could face additional challenges. As engineers focus heavily on technical excellence — which is great — they frequently find themselves disconnected from the commercial world or the end-users of their products.

在软件业务方面，该计划可能面临其他挑战。 工程师高度重视技术卓越性(这是很棒的)时，他们经常发现自己与商业世界或产品的最终用户失去了联系。

To become truly innovative, engineering teams need to also capture the ‘big picture’ and fully understand the purpose and the commercial aspects of the business.

为了实现真正的创新 ，工程团队还需要抓住“全局”，并充分了解业务的目的和商业方面。

Novelty, innovation and success could all mean different things and have various priorities in an engineering team. This means that you need to adjust your innovation strategy, communication style, and tactics.

创新，创新和成功可能意味着不同的事物，并且在工程团队中具有不同的优先级。 这意味着您需要调整创新策略，沟通方式和策略。

1.定义“创新” (1. Define ‘Innovation’)

In the corporate world, innovation could be anything novel that creates value for its users and has potential for commercial success.

在企业界，创新可以是为用户创造价值并具有商业成功潜力的任何新颖事物。

Innovation could be incremental or breakthrough. It can happen at any time, such as following a ‘call to innovate’ like a hackathon or design sprint, or randomly — driven by original ideas, genuine talent and inspiration.

创新可以是渐进的，也可以是突破性的。 它可以随时发生，例如跟随“ 马拉松”或设计冲刺之类的“创新呼吁”，也可以是随机发生的，这是由原始想法，真正的才能和灵感驱动的。

Innovative thinking typically leads to ideas and concepts regarding products or product features. In an engineering context, the outcome of innovation may also take other forms — from abstract technical concepts, patents, algorithms, data models to architecture patterns and functional prototypes.

创新思维通常会导致有关产品或产品功能的想法和概念。 在工程环境中，创新的结果还可以采用其他形式-从抽象的技术概念，专利，算法，数据模型到体系结构模式和功能原型。

It can also trigger process improvements. For instance, novel ways and tools to speed up your overall development lifecycle and boost DevOps KPIs.

它还可以触发流程改进。 例如，新颖的方法和工具可加快您的总体开发生命周期并提高DevOps KPI。

工程师担任创新领导者 (Engineers as innovation leaders)

In many cases, software engineers innovate ‘silently’, inside their own microcosm. This can be at a lower level (the actual design and implementation) or at a higher level (components and system’s architecture).

在许多情况下，软件工程师会在自己的微观世界中“默默地”创新。 这可以处于较低的级别(实际设计和实现)，也可以位于较高的级别(组件和系统的体系结构)。

But, engineers can play a more important role in leading innovation.

但是，工程师可以在领导创新中扮演更重要的角色。

In fact, they have a great advantage in driving innovation efforts. They are the ones with deep understanding of technology and they are often passionate about it. This allows engineers to easily spot both the opportunities and the underlying constraints of technology.

实际上，它们在推动创新方面具有巨大优势。 他们是对技术有深刻理解的人，他们通常对技术充满热情。 这使工程师可以轻松地发现技术的机会和潜在的限制。

Moreover, engineers are expected to understand the principles of experimentation and be ready to take risks following a ‘fail fast, fail-safe’ approach.

此外，期望工程师了解实验原理，并愿意采取“快速故障，故障安全”的方法来承担风险。

Either as part of wider multidisciplinary team or as an independent software development unit, skillful engineers can thrive in leading real innovation, beyond the hype. What is needed is the right culture and steering — the key signals and a clear direction from the leadership.

无论是作为更广泛的跨学科团队的一部分，还是作为独立的软件开发部门，熟练的工程师都可以在大肆宣传之外，引领真正的创新。 所需要的是正确的文化和指导-关键信号和领导者的明确方向。

2.赋予创新能力 (2. Empower Innovation)

设定正确的环境 (Set the right context)

The culture in engineering teams is special. Engineers tend to have limited engagement with over-hyped business terms and marketing buzzwords — and innovation is one of them.

工程团队的文化很特别。 工程师往往对宣传过度的业务术语和营销流行语的参与有限，而创新就是其中之一。

To change that perception, engineering leaders need to define innovation in the context of the company and with the right language for the team.

为了改变这种看法，工程领导者需要在公司的背景下并使用适合团队的语言来定义创新。

The discussion on innovation must be supported by solid definitions, examples, programs and tools. Teams need to relate to innovation success stories — and understand what ‘innovation success’ means in their specific setup.

关于创新的讨论必须有可靠的定义，示例，程序和工具的支持。 团队需要与创新成功案例相关联，并了解“创新成功”在其特定设置中的含义。

Examples and references could come from the public domain, or ideally from the recent history of the company.

示例和参考可以来自公共领域，或者理想情况下来自公司的近期历史。

建立正确的文化 (Establish the right culture)

Engineers need to see themselves as innovators, creators, and builders. They need to realize that they don’t just implement a feature, a component or a process in isolation. They are part of something bigger which typically drives significant financial value, or other important corporate KPIs.

工程师需要将自己视为创新者，创造者和建造者。 他们需要意识到，他们不只是孤立地实现功能，组件或过程。 它们是更大的事物的一部分，通常会带来可观的财务价值或其他重要的公司KPI。

As an engineering leader, you need to encourage teams and fellow engineers to share their ideas and thoughts. But not only in their domain of expertise — literally on anything in your business reality. And you need the mechanisms to capture these thoughts and enable effective discovery and collaboration scenarios.

作为工程主管，您需要鼓励团队和其他工程师分享他们的想法和想法。 但是，不仅在他们的专业知识领域内-实际上在您业务现实中的任何事情上。 您需要一种机制来捕获这些想法并实现有效的发现和协作方案。

Your engineers need to feel trusted, also in terms of time and focus. They need to have some autonomy on when and how to pursue their ideas. And this is where you need a strategy and a framework to ensure that you maintain the right balance between productivity and ‘dreaming’.

您的工程师需要在时间和精力上都值得信赖。 他们需要在何时以及如何追求自己的想法上拥有一定的自主权。 这就是您需要战略和框架以确保在生产力和“梦想”之间保持适当平衡的地方。

Having productivity baselines along with metrics on innovation activity can help you monitor, understand and steer the innovation efforts.

具有生产率基准以及创新活动的度量标准可以帮助您监视，理解和指导创新工作。

Depending on the current workload and velocity of the team, you can set the appropriate balance between productivity and innovation. For example, by de-prioritizing innovation-related work/ideas or reducing the frequency of ideation sessions.

根据团队当前的工作量和速度，您可以在生产力和创新之间设置适当的平衡。 例如，通过取消与创新相关的工作/思想的优先级或减少构想会议的频率。

Technology can provide great support here. Intelligent ideation platforms can easily capture and automatically handle ideas, thoughts, problem statements and even connect this innovation stream to your product backlog with relevance and intelligent prioritization.

技术可以在这里提供强大的支持。 智能构思平台可以轻松捕获并自动处理想法，想法，问题陈述，甚至可以通过相关性和智能优先级将此创新流连接到您的产品积压。

投资技术 (Invest in technology)

Modern teams need an always-on channel for ideation and collaboration — which could also get connected to your engineering processes.

现代团队需要始终在线的想法和协作渠道 -这也可以与您的工程流程建立联系。

Imagine if your product’s backlog entries were seamlessly matched with incoming ideas. Or, if ideas were automatically scored against backlog relevance, or having an intelligent process that groups and summarises all known-issues, bugs, performance limitations, system constraints, negative user feedback etc. as well-defined, prioritized ‘problems to be solved’.

想象一下，您的产品的积压条目是否与传入的想法无缝匹配。 或者，如果想法是根据积压工作的相关性自动评分的，或者具有将所有已知问题，错误，性能限制，系统约束，负面的用户反馈等分组并汇总的智能流程，以及定义明确的优先级“要解决的问题” 。

Innovators from within your team or across the organization could discover relevant-to-them content and respond with novel ideas on potential improvements and fixes, or innovative ways to solve the problems stated.

您团队中或整个组织中的创新者可以发现与他们相关的内容，并对潜在的改进和修正提出新颖的想法，或者以创新的方式解决上述问题。

实现快速原型设计和实验 (Enable rapid prototyping and experimentation)

Failure is part of the overall innovation process — as soon as it is fast and safe, it provides important learning opportunities through insights and findings.

失败是整个创新过程的一部分-快速而安全地通过失败的洞察力和发现提供重要的学习机会。

Following practices like ‘rapid prototyping’ and ‘fail fast’, ideas can be quickly tested with real users, to support informed decisions, as early as possible and at minimum cost.

遵循“快速原型制作”和“快速失败”之类的实践，可以与真实用户快速测试创意，以尽早并以最低成本支持明智的决策。

Rapid prototyping is also a key principle: in contrast to the ‘production mode’ where engineers need to follow certain processes, coding principles and protocols, ‘rapid mode’ allows engineers to use shortcuts, make assumptions, hard-code if necessary and use artificial data to quickly build functional instances of an idea. This rapid mode, focuses on building prototypes, that can be exposed to selected users and capture feedback towards possible next steps in the development process.

快速原型制作也是关键原则：与“生产模式”(工程师需要遵循某些流程，编码原则和协议)不同，“快速模式”允许工程师使用快捷方式，进行假设，必要时进行硬编码并使用人工数据以快速构建构想的功能实例。 这种快速模式侧重于构建原型，该原型可以向选定的用户公开并捕获对开发过程中可能的后续步骤的反馈。

‘Rapid prototyping’ requires both ‘a different mode of operation’ for your developers, but also the right technology readiness. You need to maintain, reusable components, APIs, UI elements, standardized data sets and other assets, to enable quick assembly of realistic, functional prototypes, without wasting effort on functionality which is not directly relevant to the core idea — the one to be tested or validated.

“快速原型制作”既需要开发人员使用“不同的操作模式”，又需要适当的技术准备。 您需要维护可重用的组件，API，UI元素，标准化数据集和其他资产，以便能够快速组装现实的功能性原型，而又不浪费精力与与核心概念(即要测试的核心概念)没有直接关系的功能或已验证。

3.衡量创新 (3. Measure Innovation)

Quantifying innovation is difficult. Measuring innovation activity is easier. You need to introduce a framework to capture events which are relevant to innovation — this could be ideation, contribution to ideas, prototyping efforts, patent filing etc. Having a rich, reliable history of such activity is fundamental in defining related baselines and reference points. Innovation activity metrics could then be linked to certain KPIs and analysed against product and financial performance.

量化创新是困难的。 测量创新活动比较容易。 您需要引入一个框架来捕获与创新相关的事件-可能是构想，对构想的贡献，原型设计工作，专利申请等。拥有丰富而可靠的此类活动的历史对于定义相关基准和参考点至关重要。 然后，可以将创新活动指标与某些KPI关联起来，并根据产品和财务绩效进行分析。

Qualitative assessment regarding the overall innovation performance within your team and the entire corporation can also be very useful. As an additional set of innovation indicators, domain experts could assess the novelty and level of innovation in specific deliverables or product releases, against the corresponding state of the art.

对您的团队和整个公司的整体创新绩效进行定性评估也非常有用。 作为一组附加的创新指标，领域专家可以根据相应的最新技术评估特定交付成果或产品发布中的新颖性和创新水平。

All the above could be linked and presented in a solid Innovation Performance dashboard for both management purposes and for achieving a general awareness related to innovation performance.

可以将以上所有内容链接起来，并显示在可靠的创新绩效仪表板中，以用于管理目的和实现与创新绩效相关的一般意识。

As published in ‘Perspectives in Engineering’ by GitPrime

作为发表在“在工程设计方面” GitPrime

翻译自: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/leading-innovation-in-engineering-teams-ca9890bcad7c/

创新品牌体验团队