Post by account_disabled on Sept 12, 2023 2:43:36 GMT -6
Before partnering and defining a co-creation model, it is important to understand your partner’s strengths and where they can contribute value to your organization’s priorities. For example, one partner may provide cloud architecture expertise, another may develop data integrations, and another may design and test the user experience. Understanding and setting expectations in advance ensures that the entire team has a unified perspective on roles and responsibilities.
You can participate in these conversations if you Phone Number List are invited to the process of reviewing potential partners, but if not, leaders should communicate the goals and objectives of partner selection.
The key to successful co-creation is for partners to not just do their jobs, but to act as true strategic assets and advisors that support the company’s bottom line,” said Mark Bishop, head of embedded payments/financing and partnerships at fintech firm Fortis. “The first thing to do for this is to ask questions at the candidate stage to check whether they have a good understanding of the unique characteristics of the industry you are currently in through long experience,” he said.
In addition to questions about skills and capabilities, you should also evaluate your partner's mindset, risk appetite, approach to quality, and other areas that must fit with your organization's business methods and culture. “When choosing a co-creation partner, it is important to evaluate the quality of the partner’s team culture,” said David Dremer, CEO of Very Good Ventures. “The impact of a partner’s culture on the team can yield greater long-term rewards than the work the partner delivers,” he said.
2. Document your product vision and goals
Most agile teams use a product vision to align product manager goals and roadmaps with the delivery team's architecture and development practices. The product vision defines customer and end-user personas, value proposition, success criteria, strategic goals, and other criteria that all team participants must understand.
“The key to co-creation is first aligning the desired outcomes and then leveraging individual capabilities to achieve those outcomes in new and improved ways,” said Fred Schoenenberg, founder of VentureFuel. “We need to understand the value of collaboration and why it is a real improvement over traditional, tried-and-true methods.”
That last point is important because the best-performing partnerships provide value and learning opportunities for all parties involved. When people within your organization can answer the question, “What’s in it for our partners?” it helps them focus more energy on achieving business goals.
3. Define organizational expectations
Bringing Scrum Masters, DevOps Engineers, and Data Scientists from multiple organizations together in one room may require a Rosetta Stone to unpack their respective perspectives on agile best practices, how to implement a deployment pipeline, or what naming convention to use for a database.
Organizations must set clear upfront expectations by defining standards development methodologies, collaboration practices, and compliance requirements. On the other side, it is important for partners to engage in co-creation programs with open minds. This is because the partner is likely to have best practices ahead of the organization's methodology, and there is potential for process improvement here.
“It is fundamental to have a playbook in everything where co-creation is concerned,” said Marko Anastasov, co-founder of Semaphore CI/CD. “The reason playbooks are essential is to lay the foundation and provide a unified interface for everyone. It's about making it. “For a playbook to be practical, it must be continually improved and updated as processes change.”
4. Shift to openness and transparency, but protecting critical data
“Us vs. To eliminate the “them” mentality, it is best to shift to more open, feedback-based, and transparent practices wherever possible, while ensuring compliance. Share information about performance issues and outages, get everyone involved in retrospectives, review customer complaints publicly, and expose the most challenging data quality issues.
Anastasov takes the open mindset one step further: “The most powerful approach to co-creating new products is to build them openly,” he says. “By embracing transparency and involving your audience, you foster trust, gain valuable feedback, and create new products.” “You can speed up your path to success,” he said.
One thing to keep in mind when it comes to openness and transparency is data security and system access rights. Most organizations follow the principle of separation of duties, require data masking of all data sets containing personally identifiable information, and define strict access policies for customer data and other confidential information sources. These compliance elements are important when contracting and collaborating with partners in a co-creation model.
5. Learn from experiments but remain accountable
Agile teams aim to define “done” with acceptance criteria, so they have a shared understanding of when a user story meets requirements. The team also does its best to keep sprint promises and meet customer expectations when deploying new features. But things don't always go as planned, and many teams use sprint retrospectives and adopt blameless postmortems so they can focus on improving without blaming each other.
This is a key way for teams to survive the pressures of meeting delivery dates and customer expectations. Organizational leaders should extend this approach to co-creation teams.
However, organizations should document essential behaviors, quality specifications, minimum service levels, and other expectations and hold partners accountable for non-negotiable areas.
The takeaway from this article is that organizations that don't find ways to partner and collaborate with third parties will have a hard time keeping up with the pace of innovation. Adopting a co-creation model can provide significant advantages over fully in-house or fully outsourced approaches, but it requires all team members to be committed to collaborating on goals and methodologies.
You can participate in these conversations if you Phone Number List are invited to the process of reviewing potential partners, but if not, leaders should communicate the goals and objectives of partner selection.
The key to successful co-creation is for partners to not just do their jobs, but to act as true strategic assets and advisors that support the company’s bottom line,” said Mark Bishop, head of embedded payments/financing and partnerships at fintech firm Fortis. “The first thing to do for this is to ask questions at the candidate stage to check whether they have a good understanding of the unique characteristics of the industry you are currently in through long experience,” he said.
In addition to questions about skills and capabilities, you should also evaluate your partner's mindset, risk appetite, approach to quality, and other areas that must fit with your organization's business methods and culture. “When choosing a co-creation partner, it is important to evaluate the quality of the partner’s team culture,” said David Dremer, CEO of Very Good Ventures. “The impact of a partner’s culture on the team can yield greater long-term rewards than the work the partner delivers,” he said.
2. Document your product vision and goals
Most agile teams use a product vision to align product manager goals and roadmaps with the delivery team's architecture and development practices. The product vision defines customer and end-user personas, value proposition, success criteria, strategic goals, and other criteria that all team participants must understand.
“The key to co-creation is first aligning the desired outcomes and then leveraging individual capabilities to achieve those outcomes in new and improved ways,” said Fred Schoenenberg, founder of VentureFuel. “We need to understand the value of collaboration and why it is a real improvement over traditional, tried-and-true methods.”
That last point is important because the best-performing partnerships provide value and learning opportunities for all parties involved. When people within your organization can answer the question, “What’s in it for our partners?” it helps them focus more energy on achieving business goals.
3. Define organizational expectations
Bringing Scrum Masters, DevOps Engineers, and Data Scientists from multiple organizations together in one room may require a Rosetta Stone to unpack their respective perspectives on agile best practices, how to implement a deployment pipeline, or what naming convention to use for a database.
Organizations must set clear upfront expectations by defining standards development methodologies, collaboration practices, and compliance requirements. On the other side, it is important for partners to engage in co-creation programs with open minds. This is because the partner is likely to have best practices ahead of the organization's methodology, and there is potential for process improvement here.
“It is fundamental to have a playbook in everything where co-creation is concerned,” said Marko Anastasov, co-founder of Semaphore CI/CD. “The reason playbooks are essential is to lay the foundation and provide a unified interface for everyone. It's about making it. “For a playbook to be practical, it must be continually improved and updated as processes change.”
4. Shift to openness and transparency, but protecting critical data
“Us vs. To eliminate the “them” mentality, it is best to shift to more open, feedback-based, and transparent practices wherever possible, while ensuring compliance. Share information about performance issues and outages, get everyone involved in retrospectives, review customer complaints publicly, and expose the most challenging data quality issues.
Anastasov takes the open mindset one step further: “The most powerful approach to co-creating new products is to build them openly,” he says. “By embracing transparency and involving your audience, you foster trust, gain valuable feedback, and create new products.” “You can speed up your path to success,” he said.
One thing to keep in mind when it comes to openness and transparency is data security and system access rights. Most organizations follow the principle of separation of duties, require data masking of all data sets containing personally identifiable information, and define strict access policies for customer data and other confidential information sources. These compliance elements are important when contracting and collaborating with partners in a co-creation model.
5. Learn from experiments but remain accountable
Agile teams aim to define “done” with acceptance criteria, so they have a shared understanding of when a user story meets requirements. The team also does its best to keep sprint promises and meet customer expectations when deploying new features. But things don't always go as planned, and many teams use sprint retrospectives and adopt blameless postmortems so they can focus on improving without blaming each other.
This is a key way for teams to survive the pressures of meeting delivery dates and customer expectations. Organizational leaders should extend this approach to co-creation teams.
However, organizations should document essential behaviors, quality specifications, minimum service levels, and other expectations and hold partners accountable for non-negotiable areas.
The takeaway from this article is that organizations that don't find ways to partner and collaborate with third parties will have a hard time keeping up with the pace of innovation. Adopting a co-creation model can provide significant advantages over fully in-house or fully outsourced approaches, but it requires all team members to be committed to collaborating on goals and methodologies.