Russ Peña from IHG (Intercontinental Hotels Group) presented at our EBA Summit how work can be as easy as talking to each other. In light of “just talking,” IHG uses an “Innovation Center” to give customers–their guests–a seat at the table.
Find Russ’s presentation and recording here.
Russ Peña – Transforming Marketing and Design | EBA Summit from AgilityHealth on Vimeo.
The teams had been using the older waterfall method for product development, P.I.P.E.R.:
The P.I.P.E.R. method created scads of lost time and money spent communicating brand concepts to outside designers, waiting for weeks or months for something that didn’t quite work. Once marketing and design adopted Agile and implemented two-week sprints, they saw a jump in:
The Innovation Center gives stakeholders (guests, franchise owners, IHG leaders) a low-cost way to react to new product concepts and give feedback so that IHG may rework and perfect the product before going to market broadly.
IHG started this design approach with Holiday Inn and it’s now thriving across most of the brands.
Russ described the deliberate, low-cost approach for collecting real-time feedback on products before launching broadly:
*Products may include a sleeping room, lobby, meeting space, or fitness center, for instance.
Every decision is put in the Agile process:
Additionally, the architecture process has been adapted to Agile. And they have even patented some of their sleeping room designs.
Ultimately the “cost per key” needs to be balanced with the best experience for guests. Implementing, embracing, and living Agile across business groups, where products are everything but technology and software, has allowed them to achieve these business goals.