5 things that are killing innovation in your development team

For software development team managers

Innovation is the key factor for your business/business unit’s long term success. Even then, it easy to miss setting up the innovation environment for your team. There are a lot of teams, which knowingly or unknowingly do things that kill innovation. As a team manager, it is your job to get this right. Here is a list of the most common ones and how to tackle them.

TL;DR

To get your team to innovate, fix these common issues.

• High cost of change
• High cost of getting something wrong
• Heavy workload
• Team culture
• Talent mismatch

High Cost of change

When your cost of change is high, the team is always catching up with work. Small changes also require a lot of effort from your team and that just drains the energy out of your team. A higher cost of change is also a typical indication that your software quality is going down.

What can you do?

• Lower the feedback loop cycle. Make sure you have collaboration tools that help quick and effective communication within the team. Also, make sure your processes encourage communication and questioning.
• Quality first mindset. Drill in a quality first mindset to your team. A higher cost of change is also an indication that the development earlier had been rushed. Encourage your team to build quality software, and provide the time to get there. It is your job as a manager to get buy-in for this from the business.
• Configuration over coding. Encourage your team to build configurable software, such that most common changes can be done by modifying the configuration. Although this approach will need a lot of architectural knowledge, it is a very effective way to bring down the cost of change.
• Automation. Focus on automation of QA and any other aspect of development. Automation will give back your team, the time wasted on a repetitive job and the time wasted on the feedback loop.
• Ensure the right tools & processes are in place. Ensure you have the right tools and processes in place to get your team most productive.

Cost of getting things wrong

When your team has to spend a lot of time when something goes wrong, and you have to spend money, it will automatically discourage experimentation. Mistakes are an inevitable consequence of experimentation. But innovation only exists where there is experimentation. So, only by making the cost of mistakes lower, and giving your team confidence that experimentation is OK, you will be able to drive innovation.

What can you do?

• Strong quality gates. The cost of an issue increases after every stage. If an issue is identified at dev level, the cost is lowest. The cost increase with each stage — integration, QA and Production. The worst cost is when it creeps into production, costing your customer trust and in turn business. Ensure there are strong quality gates at every stage of development.
• Quality infrastructure. Build infrastructure for quality. Automation at unit, integration and behaviour level can be a very powerful tool. Encourage the development of quick ways for catching issues early.
• Collaboration. Make sure your team is collaborating such that QA’s get a clear indication of what has changed. That way, QA’s can adjust testing strategies accordingly.

Workload

When your team is drowning from the workload, they will not have any time for innovation. Innovation cannot be done outside with a separate team. It has to happen within the team, which is continuously working on the software.

Development also gets rushed with a high workload, causing lower quality software. Over time the cost of change increases further and this is a vicious cycle which leads to bulky software, with a lot of technical debts, burning money to maintain.

What can you do?

• Clear realistic expectations. Set clear and realistic expectations to the business, about the team capacity and delivery. Estimation of development time is one of the most difficult things to get right but can be achieved to a good level of certainty. Follow up on the schedule, and correct issues in your schedule early.
• Tracking and Burndown. Have a tracking of what's done, and what's pending against your schedule. Avoid crowding features close to the release.
• Quick fixes. Ask the team for any quick fixes that can help ease. They are the closest to actual development, and they know what works and what doesn't. Encourage them to come up with solutions.
• Buy time from the business. Explain to the business at the earliest if you are not looking good to hit any deadlines. Buy time from the business that is realistic.

Team culture

When your team culture is one of hierarchy and one where the boss is always right, you will never be able to drive innovation. Hearing out and implementing ideas from even the newest and least experienced member of the team is the basis for innovation.

What can you do?

• Flat hierarchy. Encourage questioning of methods and techniques irrespective of their position. Encourage everyone to know why something is done a particular way in your team. Everyone in the team needs to know and understand, they can question methods of anybody.
• OK to be wrong — mindset. Be accepting of issues when things go wrong while making sure they learn from mistakes. Set processes such that they are of minimum impact.
• Give voice to your team — Collaboration and processes. Set up meetings to discuss new ideas. Discussion of ideas and methods should be
• Co-operation vs competition. Make sure you have the right balance between co-operation and competition. Do not allow one to dominate the other. Too much co-operation, a chance for people to hide. Too much competition, nobody is willing to share ideas wanting all the credit. You need to tune your team and get at the right balance.

Talent mismatch

Even after doing everything right if your talent is mismatched, innovation will be far fetched. Your team should be fit for the job and be capable. They should be matched to the jobs/tasks they perform in order to deliver the best results.

What can you do?

• Identify and hire the best fit for the job. You always need to hire the right talent for the job, not necessarily the best one. Ideally, the job should be slightly outside the person’s comfort zone, such that they are not bored, but not so difficult, that they cannot accomplish.
• Give control over what people work on. Having control over what they work on has a big impact on team performance and energy. Give them control on splitting tasks up in the team, and encourage completion to get best tasks.
• Match talent in the team to tasks. Match the talent to the tasks in hand. Some people perform best when the task is well defined, others when there’s a little ambiguity. Identify these perks and utilise them.

Innovation is a journey

Innovation is a continuous journey. Setting the right environment for your team will give you the best chance for driving innovation on a continuous basis. The key is to get small innovations continuously and building the habit of experimentation in your team.