Posted on
January 19th, 2012
Xebia India takes great pride in paying high amount of attention to writing QUALITY code. “Doing it Right” is almost a religion here. For us the buck does not stop at showing a demo of working software to the client, but also ensuring the underlying code is written in the best possible manner using best known software development practices.
To achieve this, it needs a different kind of a culture in the organization that encourages people to go after Quality. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Most developers at Xebia will agree that we have a slightly different approach to work (Some call it our culture). A lot of developers joining Xebia India experience these differences first hand & in due course of time, unknowingly they end up picking up these practices themselves. In this article, I list below some changes & practices that I have picked up in the last 2 odd years of my relatively short stay here that helped me be a better programmer.
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Posted on
April 7th, 2010
Are you trying to figure out problems in your product/services? Are you trying to prioritize your product's road map in a way that is best suited for your customer needs? Are you trying to find ways to improve on existing processes? All these are simple questions that are faced by organizations across the world. This article intends to discuss a technique called "Innovation Games ®" that can help get answers to such questions. It also talks about our recent experience with the same. Please Read on .........
The seemingly simple questions described above are usually difficult to answer. One reason that increases its difficulty is that sometime the people who have data (or knowledge) that can help in answering these questions are too busy or simply do not bother to share what they know. For this reason, organizations uses different ways to extract this useful information from concerned people. Filling up an on-line survey or a feedback form or similar Market Research Tools are examples of how this is being done traditionally. Unfortunately the trouble with these tools is that many people find them un-interesting as a result the data generated may not be high quality. This is where Innovation Games come in.
So What is Innovation Games®? Simply put it is a set of Games (YES you read that correctly) that you can play within a group to generate useful information. The objective here is to extract information from the right set of people in a Game like environment. In other words, it is a fun way to get really really useful information from the right people. It consists of a set of 12 odd games each designed to handle a specific kind of problem. Problems like prioritizing a list (of anything), Getting Feedback (about anything), Discovering Problems (in any product/process) etc. These games can be applied to any industry, any type of product (hardware/software/non IT etc). They can also be used to simplify regular day to day functioning. For example a Scrum Team, can use a game called "Buy A Feature" to prioritize their backlog.
We recently attended a training session by Luke Hohmann - the founder of Innovation Games® where we learnt various aspects of facilitating these games in different example scenarios. We could immediately see the concept was really simple and even obvious. Even though we were excited, we decided to put it to test internally and see how useful it is. We quickly discovered an area in-house where we could play a game: At Xebia we run a Knowledge Exchange program called XKE where colleagues share knowledge with each other through tech presentations. With a rapidly growing organization XKE sessions were getting less interesting for various reasons. People were not enjoying the sessions as much as they used to. We did make many attempts to get people to come up with ways in which we can improve the XKE program, but without too much success. So after our Innovation Games training from Luke, we decided to play a game called "Product Box" to generate fresh ideas on how to improve our XKE program.
The outcome was phenomenal. The game continued for 3 hours with 50 odd people participating in small teams of 3-4. People enjoyed playing the game so much that the organizer was actually booed for announcing a break. The enthusiasm can almost be felt in images taken during the session available here. The ideas that were generated were also amazing both in quantity and quality - so much so that people continued to write emails to the XKE organizing team with more ideas days after playing the game.
With this small yet useful experience, we at Xebia are confident about the usefulness of Innovation Games®. Being trained facilitators, we now believe that we can apply them in various situations - We have already started to plan another one in-house. If you have any query or any area where you think a game might be of some help, We'll be happy to help you.
