Innovation is a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of many consulting firms these days. Knowing how to build a compelling PowerPoint deck isn’t enough in today’s world; instead, clients are looking for consultants who will be able to provide them with hands-on support in the design, implementation and scaling of innovative products and solutions. Clients today understand the role that innovation can play as a catalyst for digital transformation—and they want to work with consulting firms who share that understanding.
But as a result of its ubiquity, ‘innovation’ can sometimes feel like a bit of a buzzword in today’s consulting industry. So, to demystify the term a bit—and to learn what an effective innovation framework looks like—we sat down with Debbie Vavangas, a VP at IBM and the Global Lead of IBM Garage.
How important is the concept of innovation to consulting firms and their clients?
Innovation tends to pop up and down the priority list for both professional services firms and their clients. There are some clients out there who are very wary of it, because they've invested heavily in building their innovation capabilities but that investment hasn't delivered the type of business value they were expecting. That's typically because they set it up as an independent department, in isolation from the rest of the business. But that approach just doesn't work; you can't have your core business and your innovation arm spinning independently, you need those two wheels to collide and crash into each other if you're going to succeed in building something new that creates lasting value across an enterprise. Innovation needs scale to have impact, scale needs transformation.
What is IBM Garage—and how does it embody that philosophy of innovation you’ve outlined?
IBM Garage is our framework for innovation. It's more than just a method; it brings together assets, tools, accelerators and platforms for the purpose of putting innovation right at the heart of the client enterprise in order to drive transformation. We don't believe in innovation for innovation's sake. Instead, we believe that innovation is a tool that can be used to drive value realisation and help clients achieve their strategic goals. That's why IBM Garage isn't a separate division, but is instead a framework that underpins a significant percentage of the work we do across our business. It can be deployed in any number of contexts—the only real requirement being that the client wants to use it.
The idea of collaboration is central to the work that we do in our IBM Garages. It's all about self-enablement of the client; we're not trying to create cash cows who are continuously dependent on us, we're trying to help the client learn to develop new products and services, but crucially new ways of thinking and new ways of working and doing, so their team members come away from the experience with skills and knowledge they didn't have going in.
What do you see as the key skills that consulting firms need access to in order to help clients innovate?
In order to enable the work we do in our IBM Garages, we've invested in upskilling many of our existing employees. It's not about learning an entirely different skillset; instead, it's about developing your career path in line with this particular way of working. Whether you're a designer or an engineer or a consultant, we want to help you put the skills you already have to use in this kind of environment. We've already trained over 24,000 people through our Garage Skills Academy, and we've also launched a badging and certification programme. On top of that, we have deep expertise in each Geo and Market—who are responsible for working across the accounts and teams to drive and grow our Garages.
In our IBM Garages, we promote a 'squads not bods' mindset. What that means is that, for any given outcome we're trying to achieve, we start by trying to understand the total skills we need across the delivery team in order to execute on that outcome—not what skills any one individual needs to have. Generally, we're looking for practitioners with T-shaped skill profiles; people who can slot into a specialist role—be that as a product owner, a data science lead, a tech lead, a front-end developer, or whatever—but can also collaborate effectively with everyone else working on the engagement.
There are three categories of skills that are particularly unique to the work we do in our IBM Garages. The first of these is product ownership; the product owner mindset is absolutely core to the way we work, driven from user research and customer insight. Then, there's value orchestration, because our focus on realising outcomes—aka business value—runs all the way though our engagements. And finally, there's Garage leadership. Although it might look similar to a project management or delivery leadership role, it's actually very different, and requires people with very different backgrounds, mindset and skills. Garage is about enablement—servant leadership and entrepreneurial mindsets are key tenets.
Many consulting firms have invested heavily in their innovation capabilities over the past few years. What do you see as the thing that sets your approach to innovation at IBM apart from your competitors’?
Our maniacal focus on outcomes is one of the things that sets IBM Garage apart from our competitors. Our guarantee to clients is that we'll never get to the end of a project and be unsure of what value we've created. Instead, we promise to put value realisation front and centre at every stage—from product innovation through to building MVPs through to scaling and deploying. Our mantra is that if we can't measure the value of something, we're not going to do it. That also means that we have to be extremely transparent in the way that we work. We can't allow our truth to differ from the client's truth; we have to ensure that there's a single version of the truth, and that everything flows through the same DevOps pipeline and the same collaboration frameworks.
There are a lot of innovation frameworks out there—but one of the things that distinguishes our approach at IBM Garage is the true end-to-end nature of it. And I'm not just talking about our ability to provide clients with support through to scaling and product launch; we want to go beyond that, and help transform our clients’ businesses and embed lasting cultural change so that they can continue innovating well after the project and product ends.
How did the pandemic impact the relative importance clients place on innovation?
One of the changes that we've seen because of COVID is an increase in the number of clients who recognise the role that innovation can play as a vehicle for business continuity. Your DevOps backlog can be the start of your golden thread—a living strategy document that gives you the ability to pivot your business model quickly when something fundamental changes about the market you're operating in. One of our clients, for example, is a food and drink manufacturer—and when COVID hit, they realised that they didn't have access to any B2C channels. So, we worked with them and their ecosystem to very quickly spin up and launch a direct commerce platform, which put them in a much better position to withstand the crisis.
Traditionally, we tend to think of innovation as a very hands-on process—all about getting people together around the same whiteboard or flipchart. How did you have to change your approach to innovation, and the way you run your Garages, in response to the pandemic and the rise of virtual working?
We found that the transition to remote working was remarkably easy for our IBM Garages. The work we do there, by its very nature, was already completely digitally embedded; we were already making heavy use of collaboration platforms and open-source tools, so it was relatively straightforward for us to make the jump to fully virtual working. In fact, all of our Garages around the world switched to 100% virtual with zero days lost productivity, and we generally saw an increase in both velocity and productivity—up to 40%, in some cases. One of the benefits of this way of working is that it opens up the entire world; it's a lot easier now to bring different specialists together, regardless of where they're located. Of course, there are still some tasks where it would be great to be able to get everyone in the same room, around the same whiteboard. So, I think we'll ultimately end up adopting a hybrid model that blends the two—and we'll allow the balance between physical and virtual working to be determined largely by what our clients want and need.
Before COVID, we were running about 600 Garages. Now, that number is up to over 2,500, because we've seen a huge growth in the number of clients that want to operate in that way, want to empower and enable themselves, and need to realise value faster. Sixteen percent of our client engagements now involve our Garage framework, and our ambition is to get that number closer to 50% over the next few years.
How do you expect IBM’s approach to innovation—and the role of its Garages—to change over the next few years?
In our IBM Garages, we deal with a huge range of client challenges—everything from 'My business results aren't what I'd like them to be and I want to throw ideas at the wall to see what can help' all the way to 'We've built a new platform and we've done all the legwork but we don't know how to take it to market'. One of the things we plan to focus on over the next few months is codifying more of the repeatable patterns across those different types of engagement, as a way of further accelerating our ability to create value. So, we'll have, for example, a starter kit for supply chain transformation, or a starter kit for workflow transformation.
The future is already here, we'll see more clients using our IBM Garages not just as an innovation lab for creating and launching individual products, but as a way of facilitating much broader transformation programmes. Already, we're seeing some evidence of this; increasingly, we're using our Garages to win big, complex deals like enterprise-wide cloud transformations—the sort of deals that aren't usually synonymous with agile ways of working and experience led mindset.
