Innovation is a word tossed around frequently in organizations today. The standard clichés are "Do more with less" and "Be creative." Companies want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, implement, prioritize, and track their innovation efforts. Using the Innovation to Types- model, Jennifer Bonine will help you transform your thinking regarding innovation and understand if your team and company goals match their innovation efforts. Learn how to classify your activities as "core" (to the business) or "context" (essential, but non-revenue generating). Once you understand how your innovation activities are related to revenue generating activities, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core or context activities.

When do you ship an application and expose it to your customers and users? The answer seems simple-you ship it when it's ready. However, there are many possible definitions of "ready." According to Peter Varhol, customers, users, and development teams must all agree on what this term means-before work begins on the project. Otherwise, you may be tempted to deploy an application before its product goals are met. Peter Varhol presents different approaches to determining when an application has the required quality to be ready to ship. He describes how to determine and track quality measures, so that the team actively works toward getting the application ready to deploy and knows what needs to be done to ensure fitness for deployment. Learn what factors on which to base your ready-to-ship decision so that the project team and the business will know whether to continue working or declare, "Ready."

Some days you leave work feeling as if the day went by without an inkling of progress or productivity. Other days, you leave feeling as if you conquered the world, with an internal spark of satisfaction and anticipating resuming progress the next day. So, what is it that makes the difference?

Arlen Bankston, vice president of LitheSpeed, LLC, is a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Certified ScrumMaster Trainer. Heather Shanholtzer recently talked to Arlen about what it takes to apply agile at the enterprise level and the challenges he faces when team members aren’t collocated.