Inside Open Innovation Labs Residency (Part 3)

This article is the final in a series taking the reader on a journey. We're taking a peek inside life in a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency.

This is the top tier experience for any customer*, exposing them to open collaboration, open technologies, and fast agile application delivery methods.

This experience often escapes organizations attempting digital transformation, so through submersion in an Open Innovation Labs residency Red Hat shares its experience in managing, developing, and delivering solutions with communities, open technologies and open collaboration.

Join me as I share experiences from inside a real life residency, watching Red Hat work intimately with a customer, exposing new ways of working, leveraging open technologies using fast, agile application delivery methods and open collaboration.

In the first part, I shared what's in a Red Hat Open Innovation Labs Residency. Then in part two, I looked at what I encountered as the residency progressed towards delivery. All that's left is to share the delivery week, known as Demo Day.

Delivering on the Promises

If you read part two already, then you know that the residency was divided into four weeks, with each of the weeks being segmented into sprints.

Trying to get the builds green for demo day!

These sprints were setup to support a promise made by the team, a promise that we delivered on each week with an internal team demonstration of the progress made on the product being developed.

The entire residency was also setup with an outcome defined by the team, which also has to be delivered on at the end of the fourth and final sprint week.

This last sprint works towards delivering a final demonstration which is normally targeting not only the team itself, but also external business stakeholders.

We have three target outcomes for Demo Day:

• Demonstrate we delivered the target business outcomes
• Show HOW we did it as a team using Agile, DevOps, TDD and automation and CI/CD.
• We want the stakeholders to keep the product team together and to get other teams working in the same way.

In this case, the business stakeholders were spread across several global locations and timezones. This meant we held two separate demo presentations.

The first was held on Thursday in a conference room including a rather nice video conferencing system with large screens holding each of the stakeholders on the other side of the globe.

Customer team members walk through the process, the sprints, and showcase some of the achievements in the product showcase.

Artist at work capturing the residency
in images on a single poster.

Stakeholders can ask questions, make suggestions and provide feedback during this demonstration.

The first demo day went off without a problem and the feedback was very encouraging.

The process wins over hearts and minds, with stakeholders left feeling like their team had done more in less time than ever before.

The important part of this message is that the process, tools and methodologies are now in place.

These things stay with the customer, providing real potential to continue forward with the progress made on culture and change within the stakeholders team.

The final demo day included a special guest, Ellie from Inky Thinking, in the room to listen and live capture the process, sprints and residency storyline.

The image at the top of these posts shows the final graphic Ellie produced, but on the right you'll notice a few of the images showing the artist capturing it during the live demo day.

Delivering on their residency promises!

The team was very happy to have finished up their residency, to have learned to work in new ways, leveraging new processes, working with new delivery methods, and above all to have a lot of fun delivering a business outcome.

Interested in more about the Open Innovation Labs?

If you missed the first two parts, rewind and catch up on part one in this series examining the residency process.


* Note that when referring to a customer, I am also referring to our partners and the various opportunities that might be looking to become a customer.