 One of the phrases I've used pretty frequently to describe the GitLab DevOps platform is everything you need to go from ideation to production. Now, historically in the DevOps community, we have spent a lot of time thinking about the end of that phrase. How we create software, how we deploy that software, how we monitor it once we've created it and deployed it. And that's really important, but I feel like we haven't necessarily spent enough time on the beginning of that, on the ideas themselves, how we manage them, prioritize them, align them with our business objectives, and then connect those to the work that we're doing. Now, nurturing and managing and prioritizing ideas is not just a critical part of the development process. It's a fully realized discipline of its own. It has its own processes and its own tools. And our next speaker, Tom Brazil, will be talking about how you can use the GitLab platform to embrace those processes and potentially replace those tools so that you can manage and nurture your ideas in the same system where you're actually making them reality and turning them into value that you're deploying to your users. Let's listen. Just to give you a brief introduction, my name is Tom Brazil. I'm the Chief Digital and Innovation Officer of Integrated Computer Solutions. We're a 24-year-old veteran-owned small business, largely serving the Department of Defense. We've been GitLab partners for a couple of years now, and we've used GitLab platform for the integrated development of our microservice mesh architecture, our DevSecOps innovations, our AI ML training pipeline, and of course, the topic of today's presentation, which is Agile Innovation Management. My career has historically been on the software side of the house, first as a developer in the Air Force, working on an innovation tiger team that traveled from base to base in the Pacific, then on to the commercial side as an R&D product lead, R&D director, innovation team lead, chief architect, and a variety of other product development management roles along the way. The overwhelming majority of the time, though, my focus was on leading teams that created innovative software products that bring business value. In 2019, I was asked to join the board of directors of the International Association of Innovation Professionals. They are the largest and the only ANSI and ISO recognized global certifying body for innovation professionals, and there are members in over 140 countries. I was then appointed by ANSI to represent the United States as an innovation management expert on the US Technical Advisory Group that is charged with creating the global ISO 56,000 series of innovation management guidance standards. So enough of the background, let's move forward. Into how do you use GitLab as an agile innovation management platform? There's some native and inherent capabilities of GitLab that makes it possible. But first, we need to define some terms. So let's talk about some terms and a short backdrop for understanding. What is innovation management? If you go back 10 years, the term innovation management was introduced as the means by which innovation ideas are gathered and managed. Over the last eight years or so, there's been a lot of enhancement around how ideas are collected, managed, and how collaboration among and between people and partners can shape and evolve and produce the greatest value. Today, there's a couple dozen innovation management platforms and tool sets with a few recognized leaders. Still, they largely focus on the management of ideas. Regarding the evolution of innovation management, surveys have shown that all the way through 2018, the number one consideration for innovation management capabilities was idea management, how to solicit, refine, evolve ideas into complete concepts that can then be transformed into value. In 2018, agile innovation platform capabilities appeared on the horizon. A good friend of mine, Langdon Morris of Innovation Labs, he's a globally recognized innovation thought leader. He wrote a book called The Agile Innovation Master Plan. And that book recognized that it wasn't so much that we needed better idea management. It was the realization that with the current way of thinking, the pace of change was too rapid for organizations to keep up with. Organizations needed the ability to transform their ideas into value at a faster place by applying agile principles. So we implemented the Agile Innovation Master Plan in our organization and uncovered some additional considerations that must be addressed to make that happen. I wrote a book about it called Implementing an Agile Innovation Management System that provides tips and tricks to help people implement it without the bumps and bruises that we experienced. Some of these I'll cover today because they turn out to be native GitLab platform capabilities. A year or so after Langdon's book came out, the Agile Innovation Platform needs in those surveys jumped to number four. Well, for the very first time, idea management dropped from number one. And then in 2020, the need for Agile Innovation Platform capabilities jumped all the way to number one. Something else happened in 2019 that's having a global impact. ISO 56,000 Innovation Management Systems' guidance standards started to appear with the recognition that idea management is just one facet of an effective innovation management system. People started wondering, how could you put standards on innovation? But that's not what we're talking about. What these guidance standards do is provide a global understanding of innovation management best practices to include the link between strategic objectives and innovation intent to achieve strategic clarity. The direct relationship between your objectives and the innovation portfolio, the need for a rigorous process using a systems approach to ensure consistent and reliable innovation outcomes in the most efficient manner possible, a collaborative culture with future-focused leaders and the infrastructure to support it all. So today over 40 countries have already converted to using these innovation management guidance standards. But as you can see, the term innovation management is no longer just about idea management. There are many organizations today that use value stream delivery platforms like GitLab that also use separate idea management tools. And if you're developing software using GitLab and also have separate idea management tools, after this presentation, you may just be able to eliminate yet another tool. So let's take a look at the construct for a typical idea management platform. This is a typical model for idea management. You have five blue arrows at the top representing the stages from idea inception all the way through the outcome. On the left vertical, you have some example roles, corresponding swim lanes horizontally that show involvement of those roles. On the bottom row, you have the ideation tool. There are about 20 of these in the innovation management market and they perform several functions. They're important functions. First is the acceptance of ideas. But is that something that GitLab can do today? Yeah, of course, through its own interface or via various plugins like Slack or Mattermost, Teams, bots, or using the API to roll your own. So we have integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams and even a Power Automate chatbot that allows people to submit ideas into GitLab from anywhere. So of course, it has the native capabilities there. But what about the next one, right? Can GitLab allow comments, likes, markup, designs, upvotes, downvotes, and all types of collaboration on an idea? Of course, if you've been to gitlab.com to see how GitLab itself is developed and how the community all get together and collaborate on ideas and development features and functions, that's a native part of GitLab. What about the next one, changing the status of an idea or updating its description and applying labels? Of course, native functions of GitLab. So now here is the disconnect and kind of where the light bulb went off for us. All these shaded areas, this is where you spend time on the collaboration and the evolution of the idea, getting a diverse set of thought to help us think 360 degrees around a problem. You help converge on the key themes that you wanna explore and evolve the idea to a complete concept. And of course, that's what the ideation tool is for. But then what happens? You toss it over the fence and hand it to the developers to develop and GitLab. So we break the link with the entire community of collaborators. We disconnect from the history of that collaboration and we introduce the risk of going off course in the development of the concept. Why? Because you use the separate tool instead of GitLab's native and inherent capabilities because they can do all that. In reality, you do not need a separate ideation tool. You just need GitLab. So what is an agile innovation management system and what is agile innovation management? So this is all about applying agile principles and methods to innovation management best practices to produce that continuous value stream that is always aligned to organizational strategic objectives and priorities. So let's talk about the five key tracks of an effective agile innovation management system and then we'll show how GitLab capabilities enable them. So an agile innovation management system requires five key tracks which derive from five basic questions. Why innovate? So this is about your organizational strategy and how you achieve strategic clarity by breaking down your strategy into executable strategic objectives and then prioritizing or waiting those objectives in terms of what is most important now. What to innovate? And this is the portfolio that has built and maintained to stay constantly aligned with those objectives. And those objectives remember they can and they do change due to dynamic conditions or events. So deviation from the strategic intent is a waste of resources. So you need to make sure that you stay in alignment. It also means that some projects whenever the portfolio changes some projects might come off the back burner and may now be relevant. And it also may mean that you have to cancel or kill or maybe defer some projects that are active and it might open up new gaps in your portfolio that you need to start a campaign to fill new ideas related to new objectives. Agile portfolio management is crucial for future fit organizations. The next one is how? How are you gonna innovate? And this is the systems approach that you need. So you need a rigorous and a repeatable process that ensures the proper integration of knowledge management that can be executed through Agile innovation sprints that ensures intelligent fast failure. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. Agile innovation sprints are something I'll also cover in a later slide. And who innovates, right? So this is the culture. You need at least three key roles. You need innovation leaders to provide the bridge between your executive leadership and the rest of the organization. You need innovative champions or innovation managers, certified managers are the best that manage your portfolio, remove roadblocks, provide mentoring, training, et cetera. And of course, the creative types. And there's probably more of those in your organization than you're aware of. The where, that's your infrastructure, the space, the tools, the methods that you use. All right, what I'd like to talk about here though is the intersection between the why and the what. It's so crucial. So every organization has a vision, right? And in order to achieve the vision, you have to have a strategy or a plan. But the plan itself, from the strategy, it's not executable. You got to break it up into executable pieces called strategic objectives. And those strategic objectives can have different weightings or priorities, right? So this image here is to show you that your portfolio should always be directly aligned and continuously aligned to your strategic objectives. And because of the pace of change, those changes can occur at a fast pace. Entire markets can come and go in weeks. You can have massive and rapid technological change, even societal change. And you need to be able to adapt quickly. The next part is the how, right? And this is the Agile Innovation Sprint I was talking about. It's six stages in the phase called understanding, diverging, converging, simulation and prototyping, validation and the inospective. And I'll talk about this in detail. So how does GitLab enable Agile Innovation Management? So it has some inherent capabilities that provide for things like strategic clarity. So we're able to integrate executive leadership's current organizational strategic objectives and priorities into our portfolio management using native GitLab capabilities. And I'll show you an example. You've heard, of course, the horror stories or maybe experienced them about leadership and pet projects, but this is a way to keep leadership involved while keeping their sticky fingers out of the portfolio. They have an important role, but it is about setting strategic objectives and priorities and not managing the innovation portfolio. The GitLab platform provides the capabilities to define the stages of an Agile Innovation Sprint for exploration and prototyping. And of course, the full DevOps and Agile Development, a rigorous process, right? Which is exactly what you need. It also provides the ability to intelligently fail and feedback that knowledge into the system for the next iteration. It provides for an engaged culture by getting everyone involved from leadership through management to development, delivery and operations. And of course, the right tool to develop and transform the idea and development and all be done with GitLab. So here's how we do it using some native GitLab capabilities. So what's important to see here is not the full content of these snapshots. I'm just gonna talk about the key elements that I'm highlighting. So first we have a project that serves as a proxy for the entire portfolio of ideas which are entered as issues. Earlier I talked about this. We have a Slack interface, a Teams interface, a Chatbot interface. People can enter ideas from left and right and collaborate wherever they are, right? In this first screenshot, it shows that the ICS Labs governance project has 44 open issues. Those are 44 active ideas. And this approach allows us to manage the entire innovation portfolio in one location. We built a standard template issue that is instantiated with each new idea that is added. When you look at the proxy projects list of issues which is the ideas in the portfolio, you see all of the open and completed ideas. 44 open, 118 closed. All of the pre-development collaboration takes place on this issue acting as a proxy for that idea. And when it comes time to develop the idea, a separate development project is created with backward and forward links to this issue. This allows us to make sure that you don't have any disconnect between what goes on in development and what goes on for the collaboration phase. Everybody stays connected all the time. When you click an idea in the portfolio, you see that it is instantiated with that direct link to the actual development project. So that's the first set of native capabilities that enable GitLab to be used as an agile innovation management system. What gave us this idea though was when Scope Labels came out a couple of years ago. You can see this, gitlab.com comment by Suri Patel. Scope Labels are great, best invention since sliced bread. I have to agree. It was a game changer for us. The capability of having GitLab automatically add innovation pipeline stage labels for us and remove the old ones when we drag and dropped ideas into the next innovation pipeline stage on a board. That was exactly what we needed. So we use Scope Labels for a variety of things where the label values were mutually exclusive. The type of innovation, such as incremental breakthrough business model, the name of a customer, the priority of an idea or a project, even dual scoped strategic objective labels with a score to show the closeness of fit. And that's what we use to pivot an entire innovation portfolio when strategic objectives or priorities change. But the essential components were the innovation pipeline stages and the agile innovation sprint phases that allowed GitLab to automatically create value stream analytics on those flows. So let's take a look at how we use those labels. So we have an innovation council. It's made up of five IAOIP certified managers of innovation and they manage the portfolio. The council ensures leadership provides us with the strategic objectives and priorities anytime they change and we score the ideas for closeness of fit to those objectives and priorities which allows us to order the ideas for relevance to the organization. And when we activate an idea we start with the kickoff stage where we assign roles and responsibilities for stewarding the idea through the collaboration phases. We use a GitLab board that maps to the stage scoped labels and drag and drop the idea from one stage to next in the GitLab innovation pipeline board. The research stage is where we begin the Agile Innovation Sprint. The understanding phase of the Agile Innovation Sprint is about ensuring everyone involved in the collaboration has a complete understanding of the idea with the idea owner leading the way. In the diverging phase we open up the collaboration to all interested parties. We wanna make sure we get the experience and insight from as many people as possible so we can explore the world of potentials. We then converge on what the key elements are that we need to explore in order to create and validate the value proposition. And that's essential to have before you can determine whether or not you're gonna explore it further. The idea then enters what we call the selection pipeline. And this is where the Innovation Council votes on whether to proceed to the prototype stage. So here it's important because there could be multiple ideas that are waiting to move forward into the prototype stage and we have limited development and exploration teams. So we implemented a microservice that automatically competes the ideas against each other to determine which one is the most closely aligned to the current strategic objectives and priorities which of course are set by leadership. I can take questions about that offline if you have any questions. Once we go into prototype evaluation well we have a limited budget and a limited timeframe to explore. So you have key themes that we obtained in the diverging and converging phase. And then you have to go ahead and try to prototype to see if you can produce the value that you expect, right? And this is a iterative process just like your experience in Agile DevOps. And at the end you have an inospective. It's like a retrospective to determine ways to improve. And if the prototype has shown that it does achieve the value it enters the funding pipeline stage. It may not though and there's other stages I'll talk about in a moment. If it gets funded for full development it is at this time that a standard GitLab project is created and linked to the idea in the portfolio forward and backward links. And so that ensures developers have built in access to the history of collaboration and so that the collaborators have access to what is happening during development and can keep up the collaboration as needed. The rest, it's just standard Agile DevOps iterations. There are other stages though I talked about outside the main flow that are useful for tracking other value streams. We have deferred stages when priorities change but we don't wanna kill the idea. We have incubating when we need more time to consider organizational readiness to proceed. Now we have an abandoned stage when the idea or the project no longer aligns to new leadership objectives and we have to make sure that we don't waste money on things that aren't gonna bring value and aren't aligned to the organization. And we have killed as a stage when the prototype shows that we will not achieve the expected value at all. Finally, we have the intelligent failure. And we use that to track ideas that did not achieve the expected value but we learn something about our approach and with some modification from the knowledge we can go back to the research stage and try again. So we created two value streams, one for Agile Innovation Sprint Stages and one for end-to-end innovation pipeline. And using these value streams, we get automated measurements about how we're executing, where we need to improve, et cetera, simply by dragging and dropping these ideas and projects using the Agile Innovation Boards. It's really amazing. So in summary, I hope I've shown that GitLab is not just an all-in-one DevOps tool using it to manage the complete life cycle of the transformation of ideas and the value as well as the entire innovation portfolio makes entirely too much sense. We couldn't pass it up. Hope you have the same experience. Thank you.