Creating innovative organizations with lean thinking

Since Peter Drucker put forward the concept of "innovative organization", it became a hot word in the mouths of business managers. Especially IT companies, every family wants to create a very innovative team. However, there have been many theoretical discussions on innovative organizations, and few practical discussions on "how to create innovative organizations". Innovative organizations are still like the moon in the sky: they look beautiful, but they don't know how to hold them in their hands.

As the head of Chengdu Company of a multinational IT company, the author has always promoted organizational innovation ability as one of the focus of work in the process of running this branch, and has obtained some achievements. This article will share with readers the results and our practical experience in creating innovative organizations.

A case of an innovative organization

ThoughtWorks Chengdu Company is the thoughtworks of the global 28 subsidiaries in the Junior. Starting at the end of 2011 and opening in April 2012, the company has just passed its own age. Relying on the excellent educational resources and industrial environment in Chengdu, the new company thrived in its first year. Now ThoughtWorks Chengdu Company has more than 90 IT professionals to provide services from overseas and domestic customers, of which more than 80% are locally recruited staff in Chengdu. In the office, in addition to English and Mandarin, Sichuan dialect is also a common language everywhere can be heard.

It is such a short time, a relatively high degree of localization of enterprises, in just a year time not only to achieve the survival and development of business objectives, but also developed in the IT industry, or even a wider range of influential innovation, such as:

One employee, Zheng, felt that system integration was difficult to test and developed a test tool called "Moco" [1]. Within a few months, the tool is used by a number of commercial software development projects around the world, an article on how to use the tool to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of integrated testing in the famous IT Professional website Infoq published [2], immediately translated into English in the Infoq Global station [3], and by the software master Martin Fowler is recommended on Twitter.

Wang Qiu, Zhang Yi, Chen Xianjun, Liu Yan, Zeng Xuehai and other employees creatively use advanced IT technology to help organizations plan, design, develop and operate IT systems. They helped the public Welfare library develop a book donation for iOS applications [4], making love donations more organized, purposeful, and effective. They also helped educate the great discovery community to develop a "new classroom" of experiential teaching online platforms [5], the project has been unanimously praised by the public welfare industry, was allowed to stay free from July 1 this year to live in the community service Park, and access to the park to provide resources docking, project support, financial support and team management and other aspects of support.

In addition to these already small and fruitful innovations, Chengdu also has a lot of innovative ideas in the bud, some of which have begun to have an impact in the form of articles or public speeches, such as Yiao Yao's speech "How to plan the enterprise online digital channel strategy" [6], Liu Yan article "How to select the Server Performance Test Tool" [7], Chen Xianjun's speech, "through the phenomenon to see the essence: How to truly achieve data visualization?" "[8] and so on. There are more innovative ideas still "raised in the purdah people do not know", are eager to wait for the opportunity to shoot.

Even in ThoughtWorks, a multinational company that has always been the banner of technology leadership and innovative thinking, the precedent for rapid and intensive output of innovation, such as the entire branch, is rare. This makes ThoughtWorks Chengdu a noteworthy case: How has the company become a highly innovative organization?

The significance of innovative organization

Before delving into "how to create an innovative organization", it is necessary to answer one question: Why is innovation so important to thoughtworks? In combination with the answer to this question, readers can also compare their own business situation, considering how important innovation ability is for themselves and how much attention and resources they deserve to devote.

For ThoughtWorks, the innovation ability is the enterprise's own, the customer and the staff tripartite common request, may say is this enterprise one of core competitiveness.

From the perspective of the enterprise itself, ThoughtWorks is an IT professional service enterprise, the main business includes IT strategic consulting, product planning and design, customized software delivery, it organization transformation and process reengineering consulting. In short, ThoughtWorks is not a software company that sells packaged software as its main business, and its core competencies come from the company's ability to use it technology and skills to solve customer problems in a creative way. And these "creative ways" will soon become industry best practices, and are learned by customers and competitors. For example, Agile software development, a software development approach that shortens delivery cycles and lowers delivery risk, has been a popular development method in the industry, and has become commonplace in the past decade, with only a handful of companies headed by ThoughtWorks. Therefore, for ThoughtWorks, innovation is the lifeblood of the enterprise. Only by constantly finding newer, better solutions, can we maintain our "high-end IT professional services" status.

For ThoughtWorks customers, they choose to work with the company, and they have high expectations: they don't need a few people who can develop the software, but more importantly, experts with it expertise and innovation; they need these experts to help them solve problems in creative ways, And even use it innovation to drive business innovation. So for these customers, ThoughtWorks's innovation is one of the important reasons they choose to work with them.

For employees joining the ThoughtWorks, finding opportunities for improvement and innovation in their day-to-day work and trying to solve problems in new ways not only helps them to quickly improve their ability and professional competitiveness, but also makes the work itself more interesting. This atmosphere of encouraging innovation is also one of the reasons why ThoughtWorks can continue to attract talented software professionals.

To sum up, because of ThoughtWorks's own market positioning, innovation ability for this enterprise, its customers and its employees are critical. Therefore, it is not surprising that the head of a ThoughtWorks branch has taken "creating an innovative organization" as his important responsibility.