Experiments vs. Committed Programs: How to Drive Innovation and Meet Commitments

Innovation requires experimentation that allows for the possibility of failure but the whole point of creating a program commitment process is to avoid failure.

How do you as an engineering manager or executive:

1. Reconcile the need or experimentation to drive new capability development with the absolute requirement to meet your commitments to customers, partners, upper management and other departments.
2. Leverage a product portfolio to run experiments to minimize risk for future programs?
3. Sell and deploy new capabilities throughout engineering?

What questions can you as an engineering manager or executive ask to understand the scope of the risk?

Jeff Allison will present lessons learned from working with early adopters in a fast cycle or rapid prototyping approach that anticipates the need for a scalable reliable development process and lays the groundwork for it.

Speaker Bio:
Jeff Allison has worked in high tech industry for over 30 years. During that time he acquired a vast amount experience in product development, change management, new technology adoption, sales, and marketing.

Jeff worked at Cisco from 1992 to 2012 at a time of dynamic growth in the company and the networking industry. He joined Cisco as a manager responsible for EDA tools. Then spent the next 20 years at Cisco in various Engineering leadership positions and provided Engineering Design services for all the high-end routing platforms. He was vice president of engineering for the last decade and drove a significant number of cross functional internal and customer facing initiatives. These included a rationalization of best practices across engineering teams from various Cisco acquisitions and quality and customer satisfaction initiatives as Cisco established a leadership position in global service provider markets.

Jeff’s first position was working for Racal-Redac in the Engineering Design Automation (EDA) industry. At Redac he set up an Engineering sales support organization in North America for design entry and simulation tools. During that time, he experienced the rapid growth and consolidation in the EDA industry. Jeff graduated from the University of Wales in ’84 with degree in Engineering.