Lessons Learnt: Creating Nimble Environment that Permits Innovation

It is time to tell something how my “Create Nimble Environment that Permits Innovation” task is proceeding and what kind of observations I have encountered. As I wrote in my first blog post that I will try to get external ideas from the community for my task and then I can refine them to concrete actions. Now I have learned that it is easier said than done.

What I have learnt is following:

• Own activity: I must be very active to get contributions from community to my task. Activeness is followed by…
• Visibility: When I am active in different discussions in Symbian and other forums I may get more visibility to my task. So own activity and visibility comes together.
• Creating buzz: One way to get more visibility is to create buzz around the task and this is not simple thing. I was too optimistic at the beginning when I wrote my first blog article related to this task. It is not enough to create buzz and now I know that this takes more time and cigarettes.
• Contributions: They follow when we have buzz and visibility. I got few contributions as comments to blog posts and e-mails but it is not enough and I need to think how to get more contributions to this activity.
• There are lots of good things in “community way of working” that can be used also in daily work. Every day I face challenges when people are working multisite and how information is distributed between teams. Open source communities have solved many of those challenges already. Everybody can learn from open source communities!

Next Steps

On next week we will have Release Council meetings at Tokyo and I must report the status of my task and next steps. If the ultimate goal is to “create nimble environment that permits innovation” then I need to split it to sub-goals or objectives. On next period I will focus to following objectives:

• Narrowing the scope: focus on council work and how innovative environment is enabled there (best practices, communication and collaboration methods etc.)
• Get more people participated to this action (people from other member companies)
• Networking with people who are interested about this action
• Spread the word: increasing visibility in different forums and keep the discussions on-going

Let’s see how our meetings proceed on next week and do I have more actions (or refined objectives). If you have some ideas I recommend you to share them! Thank you for reading this post!