Application Areas
Within the Teamovate Approach, there are four application areas that create capabilities in a distributed manner. These areas are familiar to most organizations. Using the Teamovate Approach, teams incorporate insights and respond to disturbances in an adaptable manner. Each application area addresses innovation with suitable catalytic practices. A catalytic practice is one where the effort is disarmingly low but the effect is large because it narrows the focus on an essential aspect of the application area.
- The Adaptable Organization is foundational, as it focuses on shaping conversations conducive to innovation within the team, and is used in the other application areas.
- Adaptable Design focuses on capability development, by honing in on usage patterns.
- Adaptable Operations focuses on delivering value from existing capabilities, while at the same time understanding where and how to innovate within the existing system.
- Adaptable Usage focuses on understanding how users derive or could derive value from existing capabilities, and learning where and how to introduce innovative enhancements.
The Adaptable Design, Operations and Usage application areas symbiotically interact with each other, adding concepts to each other’s Innovation Generator hoppers.
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Adaptable Organization
An adaptable organization is one that can distill a broad range of information into effective action towards emergent goals, all the while absorbing disturbances and leveraging insights.
The central tools of the adaptable organization are the Teamovate Innovation Generator and the Teamovate Breakroom. The Teamovate Innovation Generator catalytic practices focus on concept development, using calibrated statements to generate common understanding of the concepts, and regular cadence calls that give concepts time to mingle into essential insights. The Teamovate Breakroom catalytic practices focus on creating a cohesive viewpoint stew, where members with divergent viewpoints are able to see how those divergent viewpoints fit into a single continuum. Those viewpoints can create a savory blend of insights that would otherwise be hidden. The Teamovate Breakroom enables the team to adapt to changes in team composition over time.
Adaptable Design
An adaptable design process uses catalytic practices that put usage patterns as a main focus. Other aspects, such as cost, quality, and schedule follow as pleasant side effects when the system ‘just works’ in a robust and extensible manner. Many designs include a combination of organizational, software and physical elements. Such catalytic design practices result in systems with terms and tasks that come naturally to users. These kinds of systems lower build, test, training and support costs while increasing user engagement.
For example, adaptable software design uses catalytic practices such as domain driven design and component driven architecture to create coherent and cohesive boundaries for each component. Human and digital teams can understand and test each system component in isolation, with straightforward instructions that assemble the components into a useful system. Once assembled, these components can be rearranged in ways that adapt to emergent usage patterns.
Adaptable Operations
Adaptable operations work within an existing system to adapt that system into one that ‘just works’. It recognizes that delivery is important, so it emphasizes latent error elimination and effort duplication reduction. Latent errors are ‘incidents waiting to happen’. When those incidents occur, they typically happen at inopportune times, and tend to absorb key resources while the team recovers from cascading side effects. Effort duplication happens when a team follows labor intensive procedures to fulfill routine customer requests. Such labor intensive procedures take time away from activities that could streamline the system.
A catalytic practice for latent errors is to conduct a cross functional debrief immediately following an incident, after service has been restored, while all the details are fresh. This debrief captures seemingly insignificant information from one team member’s perspective that may provide a key insight to another team member. That other team member might possess asymmetric knowledge, which could point to a way to eliminate the latent error.
A catalytic practice for analyzing any operations procedure is to look at the wall clock taken to complete the procedure, differentiating between internal tasks and external tasks. Such a procedure may include organizational, software and physical elements to fulfill a customer request. An internal task is any task that someone or something performs after a customer places their request. An external task is any task that can be prepared ahead of time, before the customer places their request. The wall clock time is the elapsed time from when the customer places their request, to the time the procedure fulfills the request. By measuring the wall clock time, and converting internal tasks to external tasks, the team is able to shorten the fulfillment time, which benefits the customers directly. It also benefits the team and systems performing the procedure by freeing up hours that would otherwise be spent on repetitive internal tasks. The emphasis on customer fulfillment puts the focus on essential tasks.
Yet another catalytic practice for operations is to use statistics to distinguish one-time incidents from chronic issues. A team might resolve a one-time incident by an appropriate repair or adjusting the existing process. On the other hand, a team has to resolve chronic issues through redesign. If a team is able to make the distinction between one-time incidents and chronic issues, then the team can fix the one-time incidents and also provide a crisp set of design parameters for a possibly separate adaptable design team. Both activities create robust systems, which sets up a virtuous cycle that bootstraps even more capabilities.
Adaptable Usage
Adaptable usage gathers information about how users interact with a system. This information points towards places where users could benefit from a smoother system, which then feeds the adaptable design and adaptable operations processes.
Adaptable usage is most amenable to software systems where instrumentation can capture user interactions directly. Such a catalytic software practice instruments the software elements for places where users make errors, take a long time to complete a task, or even abandon a task. This level of detail pinpoints specific areas that focus the team on making the usage experience better.
Dedicated studies may be set up to monitor usage for physical devices, but these are more expensive to implement than software instrumentation.
The same statistical catalytic practice used in the adaptable operations area also applies to adaptable usage. The team differentiates between one-time usage incidents and chronic issues. This helps the team pass essential details to both the design and operations teams. The subsequent smoother usage frees up hours from support tickets, which sets up a virtuous cycle that bootstraps even more capabilities.