In his seminal book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries describes an entrepreneur as “anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty”, and entrepreneurs who operate inside an established organization as “intrapreneurs”. I’ll assume the spirit of these descriptions to share our recent experience on intrapreneurship – how the process of standing up a new consulting practice led to the creation of new products and platform, and how it subsequently resulted in establishment of an R&D and product development center.

Applied innovation, working at the interface of business and technology, has always been my active interest. This offshoot experience with product innovation and IP development has equipped me to be better by gaining stronger convictions and being much more grounded with hands-on experience.

Few years back, spawning from a major re-org, a larger cloud services division emerged in our organization, as part of which was to bootstrap a cloud advisory practice. Already having significant experience on strategic consulting and leading IT strategy, modernizations, and portfolio rationalization engagements, this seemed like a natural step to extrapolate. With a seed team in place, the first order of things was to build service offerings.

Drawing expert advice where required, we conceptualized and created of a methodology and framework to assess readiness of on-premise workloads for cloud migration. Crafted a scientific approach to gather and assess about 50+ attributes on each workload to determine its cloud suitability and recommendation. Formulating this framework was quite a thought-provoking exercise. It is because, as a practitioner, if providing any recommendation was tricky, then coming up with repeatable hypotheses and methodical constructs to enable someone else provide that recommendation is even trickier, by order of magnitude. To algorithmically generate recommendations, we designed Likert-type questions with shades-of-grey responses rather than binary yes-no questions. Carefully defining continuous but distinct shades of responses with explicit guidelines required us to codify our experience into a set of rules was hard.

Right at the onset of this practice, we noticed two undercurrents that had begun to prevail. First, the advisory services are positioned as wedge offerings whose conversion success rate increase only with volume of engagements. But we had limited headcount. To truly scale, we had to bring down the unit cost of assessments and pass those savings to our customers. Secondly, practitioners spent inordinate amount of time on mundane tasks on data gathering, basic cleansing and analysis, not on actual recommendations. One way to address these two factors was to infuse automation. This idea to automate cloud advisory got funded and we were set on to build a cloud migration platform.

In the next few quarters, we developed an online, SaaS-based, self-service, web and mobile platform. By enabling self-service, we could ‘late-bind’ practitioners into the process and thus allow them to effectively focus on customer dialogue. Allows better collaboration to contextualize the auto-generated recommendations and distill insight to drive ideation, planning and thought leadership.

Translating a product concept germinating in our minds into actionable statements and then inculcating the necessary rigor to see through the iterative value building was sometimes frustrating indeed, but to a great degree we felt it was intoxicating, especially when we watch someone using it – I suppose its all part of gaining the team a true experience of product innovation.

Why is this platform important and what difference did it make? Certainly, creating a framework and methodology was the first critical step – it helped codifying the practitioners’ mental model into an approach for Cloud readiness assessment; it did enable us to onboard others into the practice more consistently. But automation is a multiplier factor. By infusing automation, the grunt work of advisory functions got optimized and accelerated the engagements – reduced the duration by at least 60%. In addition, it tremendously increased the potential to mature our practice because the platform offered an avenue to make ideas portable across teams dispersed globally, which otherwise would have remained individualistic. Lastly, centralizing the data gathered paved way to harness a rich benchmark repository.

Over the course, we had established productive relationship with global leadership. The successful delivery of product led to collaboration and partnership with other innovation centers in the global organization. Our product scope grew to become part of larger platform to include automation of actual migration of workloads in addition to existing advisory automation.

With further sponsorship, we expanded the team and obtained dedicated office floor space. We rebuilt the space based on open-office principles such as reconfigurable workspaces, smaller teams, open collaborative areas, agile walls, video conferencing, and in general it reflected a vibrant, fun, startup-like environment. This later on became a showcase office unit for our otherwise non-differentiating workspaces.

Along with the framework and the automated platform, it is also the building of a high performance team empowered for execution based on true lean/agile principles and a culture to excel are the ones we would cherish the most. Setting up this team and facility warranted going against the grain of many existing processes optimized for efficient IT service delivery, not for R&D and disruptive cutting-edge work. Navigating through many such headwinds and bringing about a change of cultural mindset in large enterprise setting, even in one small pocket, was great learning experience.

Bring upon this change in a large organization was not easy. Quoting General McChrystal from his book Team of Teams that resonates the most – agility and adaptability are normally limited to smaller teams. The need to scale at enterprise level to create sustained organizational adaptability is only through the establishment of a team of teams. It is such assertion that we adopted to advocate necessary amendments in our operations rather than large-scale, sweeping changes. Given the wider implications of cloud and dramatic shifts in technology to IT services industry, this is certainly not an isolated sentiment. It’s just that we have demonstrated, within the sandbox we got to play with, a working template and model to re-energize our teams and create potential differentiation.

Rounding up: if someone were to ask us whats the most innovating thing we have achieved, we would point them to the intrapreneurship journey whereby we tried to propel the organization in the direction of internal innovation driven ecosystem that includes the product platform, a showcase office, a high-energy team and sound engineering practices.