Turning and Managing Innovation into Automation for Higher Competitive Productivity

Innovation boosts productivity and drives prosperity. In the new millennium's competitive high tech environment, innovation allows companies to stay competitive in their own sectors while enabling them to advance further into additional areas. Effective leaders rely on and leverage both people skills and automated machine power to maximize the team productivity. While innovators prove the tools and best practices to boost productivity, adaptors integrate these innovations in daily life environment and realize the maximum long term gains for the company. While flexible environment prosper innovation, stable structure nurtures adaptation. There are a number of challenges that leaders have to face in order to first facilitate an environment for managed innovation, then finally automate and integrate it into the process. This paper discusses the challenges faced by the Advanced Regression/Research Facility (ARF) at Cisco Systems in leading and creating an environment that embraces changes seamlessly. In order to complement the traditional regression testing, innovation concepts were proven, automated and integrated into ARF's daily business to improve its defect finding rate. The innovations resulted in changes and introduced management challenges but paid handsome dividend in the end by improving its productivity 900% within 6 years in an information-sharing and individual-recognition environment