Until someone says it is wrong, it probably isn’t right
Genuine product and service innovations are often met with varying degrees of skepticism in existing organizations. There are a myriad of reasons for this—they aren’t understood; they infringe on someone’s existing turf; they ROI is uncertain; and so forth. One thing I’ve learned is that unless someone in a well established organization is complaining the innovation probably isn’t as innovative as it could be. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not suggesting that you’re goal is to piss off your colleagues (and I feel foolish that I would have to even write that!). I am saying that pushing the envelope—taking yourself and others out your comfort zone—means that innovators have to have a thick skin, because when you’re incubating something that is genuinely new within an existing organization—someone (and maybe lots of someones!) is going to complain.
November 2nd, 2005 at 02 Nov 2005
Great observation. I might add that the particular issues you list pertain to different stakeholders. When a small group at our company first started to build an Agile practice internally, the main thing we had to demonstrate was ROI. The people who cared the most about ROI were customers, not necessarily IT management or technical staff. As the practice grew, the next obstacle was lack of understanding. The people involved there were primarily technical staff. Now that the practice has become an officially-accepted part of the larger IT organization, the last obstacle is turf infringement. The people most worried about that are IT management.