Can Social Media (SM) be used to gain greater Business Agility? Can SM significantly contribute to more Agile Innovation or Development cycles? Potentially. Let’s see how Agility objectives and SM capabilities line up.
Agility Schmagility … What are we really talking about here?
What’s the ultimate “Agile Goal”? Often the goal is expressed as “shortest time to value.” I boil it down a little further—the ultimate goal is to maximize the amount of output per quantity of input. Agility is about minimizing wasted time, wasted resources, and unnecessary drag.
There’s a lot of hubbub about Agility. But below the noise, there are few bottom line “Agile Capabilities” that significantly contribute to this ultimate “Agile Goal”:
1. One core “Agile Capability” is rapid course correction. Of course, the less the course has to be corrected, the smaller the quantity of work that will be wasted. What this means is that you really want to be on an as-close-to-ideal-as-possible course initially, and then have relatively subtle course adjustments. If your course corrections are equivalent to hard turns, then you will have more time and effort wasted as you wildly zigzag back and forth.
2. A second core “Agile Capability” is efficient testing or vetting of assumptions, models, or prototypes. When you truly are in “uncharted waters” there may not be any knowledge or experience to draw upon. In this case you need to be able to quickly and frequently vet your course with a decent-sized group.
There are other core “Agile Capabilities,” but let’s stop the list there for the time being, and look at how SM might contribute.
What Role can SM Play?
Rapid Course Correction:
It’s easy to look at your small internal team, and say “hey, we can change course quickly.” But for setting an as-close-to-ideal-as-possible course initially, and then having each subsequent course correction be optimal, there is no substitute for tapping a broad base of knowledge and experience. SM has made a broader base of knowledge and experience readily, quickly, and inexpensively available than ever before. If used wisely, this can save you a phenomenal amount of wasted time, effort, and money.
In a SM context we often talk about crowd-sourcing — frequently focusing on the co-creation of content. In this case we’re talking about something a little different. To avoid confusion, let’s call is “crowd-inquiring.” You’re looking for knowledge and expertise that you solicit piecemeal and then synthesize to meet your internal requirements. It’s not the same kind of exercise as crowd-sourcing finished or nearly-finished content.
Crowd-Inquiring Example:
If you post a really complex question on LinkedIn Q&A, leading domain experts from around the world will scramble over each other to provide the best answer. It’s a win-win. They get the exposure of demonstrating their expertise in a public forum, and you benefit from a pool of expert advice.
Efficient Testing or Vetting:
Putting together in-person focus groups has always been costly, cumbersome and error prone. The person who has the free time to participate in a focus group may not be the person you’d ideally like to target with the product or service that you’re developing. We need lightweight and inexpensive methodologies that allow us to get feedback from a group that is large enough so that our findings are statistically valid.
SM can provide the channels through which this kind of lightweight, inexpensive, and adequate-scale vetting can take place. Once again, this is a little different that conventional crowd-sourcing. Let’s call it “crowd-vetting.”
In the Crowd-Inquiring Example we discussed how the responding experts were “compensated” for their contributions. For crowd-vetting to be sustainable there also needs to be some value for the participants. This can simply be belonging to a community, having earlier access to information and offerings, or getting discounts or exclusive offers.
Crowd-Vetting Example:
Your company develops mobile accessories targeted at young consumers. You set up a private Facebook “Insiders” group and send invitations to age-group-filtered customers in three major urban markets. In exchange for feedback, you provide invitations to sponsored events, and early product information. Your cost of feedback is cut by 75% versus focus groups for each product cycle, despite the fact that your sample set and sample rate is 20 times higher.
What Else?
Crowd-inquiring and crowd-vetting are just two ways that SM can contribute to the Agility equation. Which other Agile capabilities are supported by SM? Which SM channels should we leverage in order to minimize wasted time and effort, and to reach our goals as quickly as possible?
1 September 2009, Julian Keith Loren, Paris
Tags: Agile Methodologies, Agility, Crowd-sourcing, Social Media
Those are great examples, LinkedIn and Twitter are great places to solicit opinions on best practices so that we can learn from the experience of others when initiating new projects. They can also warn us quickly if we’re going down the wrong path.
Ning networks are also useful in the way that they connect peer groups. For example I’m a member of the University Web Developers Ning Network. There users can ask questions ranging from what content management system they should employ to questions of ongoing support. The network has groups dedicated to topics ranging from design to specific software programs used in Web development. Having access to a a group of peers who face similar challenges and problems is a great resource. It’s like having a team of mentors on call.
Social media also helps keep us up-to-date in our fields by exposing us to articles recommended by peers and is a great way to solve tiny problems quickly. If one needs a quick fix on something technical, the answer is probably a moment away on Twitter. I think this also supports agility because it helps us spend more time on the important things and less time researching problems that often amount to troubleshooting. Tapping into the collective wisdom is helpful on a variety of levels.
[...] This post was Twitted by ajmunn [...]
[...] Distilled: The Essence of Agility Inspired by “Agility Schmagility … What are we really talking about here?”, consider [...]
> you really want to be on an as-close-to-ideal-as-possible course initially
Indeed, and IMHO an ‘adequately agile’ approach reduces the cost of any
necessary hard turn (major adjustment).
> you need to be able to quickly and frequently vet your course with a
> decent-sized group.
Group members qualities are determinant (better a handful of adequates ones than an army of morons). Hoping to enlist an adequate set of people, often small (let’s say ‘a handful’), by attracting many may work, but replacing a handful by many (not containing any handful) is doomed.
There is no wisdom in a crowd, as such (someone wrote that any crowd is a headless monster), but only a few folks who are ‘gems’ for the topic at hand because they master it and like (or have) to show it. They know the topic because they care (and vice-versa: positive feedback), while others don’t. This is true for sourcing, inquiring and collaborative work.
Some experiments showed that crowds are able to select a better-than-average solution, but it only works when there is a stake for the crowd. Those people bet and hoped rewards, therefore they taped into their own social networks in order to gain useful hints.
Identify ‘the handful’ it is only possible while interacting with the crowd, one cannot specify its characteristics beforehand. Moreover there are many ‘handful’ types, for example some able to describe problems and others solutions.
In my opinion the best focus group is, in most cases, a set of existing customers and serious prospects selected because they emitted, for example through your support service (or bug-tracking system) reports (’files’/'tickets’/…).
Neglect any blatantly non pertinent report (things solved thru corrective maintenance, RTMF…)
Let your sales and marketing teams preselect a fraction (10%?) of those wishes. They will favor financially promising stuff.
Then have your developers select, among the retained fraction, a very small set of “interesting” ones. They will favor innovation and letting them select will have them eager to fulfill the mission.
Beware: no one has the right to modify the ticket, only use what the customer wrote/said!
Then contact all the customers and select the wish backed by a willing, serious and available one. Analyze the wish in order to define its generic components, what can be done in order to extend the usefulness of a tool fulfilling it. Grab customers and prospects interested by the generic problem, let all those people (customers, mktg and developers) meet, maybe offer tools to collaborate, but let the customers & prospect be the large fraction of the audience, and have your people only there to catalyze the dialog and to listen. Focus in order to produce a good description of the problem to be solved, of the need, the constraints (not the solution!). Fight hard in order to have the most charismatic, highly motivated and available attendee become the group leader. Maybe offer a collaborative platform for their work.
As a co-founder and CTO of IDEALX, which became http://www.opentrust.com/, I already applied most of this.