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One principle you can use to grow and scale your Garage is to lead with business value and use business value to prioritize your backlog.
Focusing on Value
IBM Garages execute a wide variety of types of projects, everything from transforming a user’s experience to improving a company’s use of data.
The markers of success for this breadth of projects are equally wide, encompassing qualitative measures like system usability or Net Promoter Score (NPS) and quantitative ones like data model accuracy and predictive power.
The metric Garage focuses on most, though, is speed to value. It’s a bit of an awkward phrase, but it has an important imperative at its heart. Speed to value distills the variety and complexity of enterprise software into a simple equation: how quickly can we demonstrate we’re providing a business outcome? Or, put more simply, how quickly can Garages show IBM’s clients that we are making or saving them money?
There are a couple of reasons for this focus.
First, most of the C-suite stakeholders making funding decisions about Garage projects are judged against traditional business metrics. At its core, business is about revenues and profits. Executives care about (and are measured against) their ability to increase revenue, decrease costs, and reduce risk. They may understand the value of “making our customer happier”, but that is not the metric that is top of mind for executives.
Matt Certner
IBM Garage Leader
It is up to IBMers as our client’s partners to connect the dots and highlight how better customer experience translates to higher revenue. If you want to make the people that control the budgets happy, start with “how can I prove that IBM Garage is making or saving money for the client?” Show your clients the money and they will show you the investment.
Communicating the success of a Garage to an executive:
“We redesigned our account login process, and now our customers who log in are 22% happier.”
Wrong way to communicate the success of a Garage project to an executive
“We redesigned our account login process, and now we’re saving $4 million per year due to customers using self-service instead of calling a customer service rep.”
Right way to communicate the success of a Garage project to an executive
Second, the primary value proposition of IBM Garage is our ability to create business outcomes, fast. Clients have finite resources and we need to ensure the investments they make generate ongoing value. Putting speed to value at the center of your Garage allows you to consistently evaluate whether you’re focusing on the most impactful projects for your client. Basically, if we can’t measure it, we shouldn’t do it.