A typical journey starts with a Discovery loop with a focus on Why and Who. They use practices such as Impact Mapping, How Might We and Empathy Mapping to get a shared understanding of what problems they’re trying to solve, who they’re trying to solive them for and what pains and gains they’re trying to achieve.

The residency teams make heavy use of Domain Driven Design with practices such as Event Storming and Value Slicing used to drive out an initial set of target measurable outcomes to focus the team on.

This doesn’t take months or even weeks. Typically a Labs residency moves through this Discovery Loop in just a few days with “just enough” alignment and shared understanding of Options to commence delivery. These options are hypothesis that that cross-functional development team comprising Red Hat and customer engineers can run conduct research and experiments and implement ideas into increments of the product.

The residency team then works to validate hypothesis seeking feedback, learning and measurements along the way as they move around the Delivery Loop. Teams often work in one week iterations and then have the opportunity to pivot back into Discovery and process measurements and learning to enhance existing Discovery artefacts and understanding. Alternatively, if further options need to be delivered, they can do another iteration of Delivery. As the team and organisation matures, the practices used in the loops may also extend and mature by, for example, moving to a increased Continuous Delivery of value approach.

Of course, Red Hat’s expertise in modern software development is leveraged throughout residencies and beyond - teams learn foundation technical practices and are exposed to Red Hat’s open source culture of collaboration throughout - all of this underpins and enables the teams to move swiftly and seemlessly around the continuous loops of Discovery and Delivery. With so many practices being used to drive this way of working, people can find it difficult to recall which practices worked well and where, how they interconnected with each other and what principles they helped exhibit. So every residency builds up a “practice corner” which is incrementally built up as practices are first adopted and visualised on a Mobius Loop.

The culmination of every Open Innovation Labs residency is “Demo Day.” This is an opportunity for the customer team to showcase back to their organisation and stakeholders the outcomes that have been delivered and the ways of working adopted to get them there. The Mobius Loop is a powerful visualisation tool used in these events to bring everything together and to show how all the practices connect together to deliver these outcomes.