Success Factors for Creativity Workshops in RE Sebastian Adam, Marcus Trapp Fraunhofer IESE Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany {sebastian.adam, marcus.trapp}@iese.fraunhofer.de Abstract. In today’s economy, innovation is the key factor to remain competitive. However, due to the revolutionary and disruptive nature of innovations, it is apparent that traditional requirements engineering (RE) activities alone are not sufficient in this context (even though still highly important, of course). Rather, there is a strong need to enhance traditional RE activities with creativity techniques in a product or service development process. In the last seven years, we have supported several organizations from different domains in innovation finding during the RE phase. This paper presents our experiences from the creativity workshops we applied there, and it shows how such workshops can be integrated into RE processes. In this context, we list success factors that we observed and show the key ingredients of successful creativity workshops from our experience. Keywords: RE, innovation, creativity, workshop, elicitation 1 Introduction In today’s economy, innovation is the key factor to remain competitive. Without having real innovations that inspire and bind customers, almost every organization can easily be replaced by other organizations that provide the same services and products with higher quality or lower prices. However, innovation may not be mixed up with novelty. Adding a new feature to an existing product is typically an evolution but seldom an innovation. Real innovations change the way how customers experience a product, service or task in a certain domain, or they change the insights people can gain through it. Innovations therefore enhance the status quo and enable new benefits that did not exist there before. At least in projects in which there is the need to have disruptive ideas, external inspirations, or a creative involvement of different stakeholder groups, it is therefore apparent that traditional requirements engineering (RE) activities alone are not sufficient (even though still highly important, of course). This means that, in such a context, merely eliciting expectations and requirements from the stakeholders, or analyzing their problems and frustrations will probably not lead to a solution that is needed for changing this domain sustainably. The often cited statement from Henry Copyright © 2015 by the authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. 54 Ford, i.e., “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” is therefore still valid today. Thus, at least under the aforementioned circumstances, there is a strong need to enhance traditional RE activities with creativity techniques in a product or service development process. However, we claim that doing a brainstorming [1] or another creativity technique in isolation is not sufficient for systematically elaborating innovative ideas. Rather, creativity is a hard work, which needs clear guidance in a relaxed atmosphere, even though everyone can basically be more creative than he or she thinks. In the last seven years, we have supported several organizations from different domains in innovation finding during the RE phase. This paper presents our experiences from the creativity workshops we applied there, and it shows how such workshops can be integrated into RE processes. In this context, we argue that many things during such a workshop can go wrong if not carefully anticipated. Thus, we list the good and bad things we observed during our creativity workshops and we highlight the need for an excellent preparation, moderation and rework that we consider as indispensable for coming up with really beneficial results. Based on this, we also explain how the workshop results can be processed further in order to transfer initial ideas into concrete requirements. As we have already presented a first set of 12 success factors at CREARE 2010 [1], this paper will re-discuss these factors based on our additional experience we have made since then. Further, new, essential success factors will be presented in this paper. This is especially important as the creativity workshops we reported on in our CREARE paper were almost all in research project settings, while our recent creativity workshops have all taken place in the context of industry projects. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In section II, we describe the projects in which we did a creativity workshop during RE in the past and we summarize their contexts and goals. In this context, we elaborate the success factors of these workshops and also present a re-discussion of the factors presented in our previous publication [1]. In section III, related work in the area of creativity workshops is briefly considered while section IV concludes. 2 Success Factors Table 1 lists nine creativity workshops we performed over the last few years (i.e., since our CREARE paper from 2010) in RE processes including their goals, results, context characteristics and participants. In the following, we will share our insights from this series of creativity workshops from two perspectives: first, we present new success factors that we learned during these workshops. Second, we discuss the already existing lessons learned reported in our previous CREARE paper under the light of the new projects reported in Table 1 for showing which success factors were confirmed or which new insights we received. 55 Project P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Characteristics Domain ICT: Insurance: ICT: ICT: Agricultural Engineering: Business Intelligence Mobile Business Apps IT Product (HW & SW) IT Product (HW & SW) Product & Service Workshop Goal Interaction Concepts and Mobile Business App Ideas Product Ideas that can be Product Ideas that can be Product or Service Ideas for Feature Ideas for a given (B2E & B2C) developed in less than 3 Years developed in less than 3 Years the next 3-5 Years that utilize Product Idea the latest IT trends Desired Medium: For 3 given Product High: As many App Ideas as Low: Exactly 2 Product Ideas Low: Exactly 2 Product Ideas High: As many Product, or Workshop Feature Areas a small Number possible; Participants should Service Ideas as possible; Result Quantity of competing Ideas each mark their favorites Participants should mark their favorites esired Workshop Medium: The Results have to Low: The Results have to High: The Results have to High: The Results have to Medium: The Results have to Result Fidelity enable Product Design to enable Management to decide enable Product Management to enable Product Management to enable Management create a create a coherent Interaction which Idea clusters should be directly create a Business Plan directly create a Business Plan prioritized Development Design for the given Product investigated in more detail /Execution Plan for the Ideas Idea Desired Degree Medium: It should be possible Medium: It should be possible High & Low: 1 very High: It should be possible to Low-Medium: It should be of Innovation to implement the ideas in 1 to implement the ideas within innovative (“crazy”) Idea, 1 implement the Idea in 3 Years possible to implement some Year with a team of 7 1 Year with a Team of 7 low innovative (“normal”) with a Team of 100 Ideas directly and some over Idea; the next 1-5 Years It should be possible to implement the Idea in 3 Years with a Team of 100 Starting Basis / Intense Interviews with the Small List of potential App Intense Interviews of the Description of the Business Short Interviews to derive the Input Material Client about the given Product Ideas derived by the Client, current Roadmap of the Client, Domains of interest, Goals of the Workshop, 56 Idea, Goals of the Workshop, Short List of existing Documentation about the Description of the current Examples to illustrate current User Stories, Initial Insurance Apps, Goals of the current Roadmap, List of Roadmap ICT Trends Wireframes Workshop Areas of Improvement, Product Ideas derived by the Moderators’ company, Goals of the Workshop Duration 1,5 Days 1 Day 1,5 Day 2 Days 1,5 Day (Start 1st Day in the Morning) (Start in the Morning) (Start 1st Day in the Afternoon) (Start 1st Day in the Morning) (Start 1st Day in the Afternoon) Number of 9 14 9 10 15 Participants Background of Business Experts, End-Users, Business Experts, Product Business Experts, Product Business Experts, Product Business Experts, End-Users, Participants Product Managers, Developers Managers, Developers Managers, Top-Level CEO, Managers, Developers, Product Managers, CEO, Developers Usability Expert Developers Number of 3 2 2 2 2 Moderators Environment / Neutral Location Neutral Location Neutral Location Client Client Location Briefing of Very little; Very little; Very little; Verbal by the Extensive; Very little; Verbal by the Participants E-Mail by the Client E-Mail by the Client Client Verbal and E-Mail by the Client Client Table 1. Comparison of the different workshops Project P6 P7 P8 P9 Characteristics Domain Fashion: Fashion: Insurance: Finance: Big Data / Marketing Big Data / Marketing Mobile Business Apps Mobile Business Apps Workshop Goal Usage Scenarios in Product Usage Scenarios in Product Mobile Business App Ideas Mobile Business App Ideas Marketing that utilize Big Data Marketing that utilize Big Data with Focus on Context (B2E & B2C) Technology Technology Awareness Desired Low: 1-2 concrete Usage Low: 1-2 concrete Usage Medium: 6 App Ideas Low & High: As many App Workshop Scenarios Scenarios Ideas as possible; 3 App Result Quantity should be described in more Detail Desired High: The Results have to High: The Results have to Low: The Results have to Medium: The Results have to Workshop enable the IT Department to enable the IT Department to enable Management to decide enable Management create a Result Fidelity find and combine the required find and combine the required on Intensification of Effort in prioritized Development data sources and enable them data sources and enable them the Area of Mobile Business /Execution Plan for the Ideas to select appropriate Big Data to select appropriate Big Data Apps Technology Technology Desired Degree Low: It should be possible to Low: It should be possible to Medium-High: It should be Low-Medium: It should be of Innovation implement the Ideas directly in implement the Ideas directly in possible to implement some possible to implement some the next 6 Month the next 6 Month Ideas directly and some over Ideas directly and some over the next 1-5 Years the next 1-5 Years Starting Basis / Use Cases, several Interviews Use Cases, several Interviews Short Interviews to derive the Use Cases, several Interviews Input Material with Business Experts to elicit with Business Experts to elicit Goals of the Workshop, with Business Experts to elicit the As-IS-Situation as well as the As-IS-Situation as well as Examples to illustrate current the As-IS-Situation as well as 57 first Ideas, Goals of the first Ideas, Goals of the ICT Trends first Ideas, Goals of the Workshop Workshop Workshop, List of Areas of Improvement, Detailed Documentation of 2 main Use Cases, Examples to illustrate current ICT Trends Duration 0,5 Days 0,5 Days 0,5 Days 2 Days (Start 1st Day in the (Start in the Afternoon) (Start in the Morning) (Start after Lunch) Morning) Number of 7 7 12 13 Participants Background of Marketing Experts, Marketing Experts, Business Experts, Product Business Experts, Product Participants Developers, Big Data Experts, Developers, Big Data Experts, Managers, Mid-Level Managers, Top-Level IT Service Experts IT Service Experts Management, Sales Experts, Management, Sales Experts, IT Service Experts IT Service Experts Number of 2 2 2 2 Moderators Environment / Client Client Client Neutral Location Location Briefing of Very little; Verbal by the Very little; Verbal by the Very little; Verbal by the 2 Participants: Extensive; Participants Client Client Client Verbal and E-Mail as requested by the Client. Others: Very little; E-Mail by the Client Table 1 (continued). Comparison of the different workshops 2.1 New Success Factors As the first new success factor, we consider having six key ingredients (participants’ roles) in each creativity workshop. First, an idea generator with a domain (not technical) perspective is needed to generate unusual ideas in the workshop. As a kind of pendant, we need as second role an idea evaluator with a technical perspective in order to estimate feasibility and needed effort for the evaluation phase. Third, we need an idea generator with a technical perspective to produce innovative ideas based on technical innovation potential. As a pendant for this person, we need as fourth role the idea evaluator with a domain perspective that can judge whether a technology-driven idea would be accepted by the domain and what would be the impact. The fifth and sixth role are the moderators of the workshop. Both moderators should be skilled in creativity techniques and also moderation. We differentiate the moderators in the analytical moderator and the motivating moderator. The motivating moderator continuously guides the participants through the workshop and motivates them to contribute actively. By his behavior he encourages the participants to contribute continuously to reduce their shyness. The analytical moderator keeps a close eye on the meta-level on the one side and the results of the creativity techniques on the other side. In case he or she realizes a problem on the meta-level (like participants getting into too intense discussions) or on the result level (output completely different than expected), the analytical moderator interrupts the workshop and re-plans the workshop in a coffee break. A second new success factor we learned is starting with the collection of negative “ideas” at the beginning of a creativity workshop instead of starting with positive ones. The reason is that the human nature seems to be much more productive if we ask for negative aspects than if we ask for positive ones. One can use this simple mechanism in RE within creativity techniques. Thus, we made very positive experience using the so called FlipFlop technique if we want to get many ideas. This means that instead of gathering ideas for a question like “how can we make sure that our new feature will be successful in the market?” we ask for “how can we make sure that our new feature will be completely unsuccessful in the market?” In our experience, asking like this, will lead to more than double the answers compared to the first, positive version of the question. Of course, we then have to reverse the statements so that the contrary (being successful) can be used for further processing. 2.2 Re-Discussing Existing Success Factors In the following, we present new insights for seven out of the 12 success factors that we reported already at CREARE [1]. Regarding the success factor of “Prepare the convergence step carefully, plan breaks” and “Don’t oversimplify the prioritization and evaluation step” we would like to emphasize now also the explicit need for intermediate prioritization steps during a creativity workshop, and not only the need for a final evaluation at the end. Especially when time is rare to elaborate each intermediate idea in detail, divergence and 58 convergence need to be used alternately. However, as such intermediate prioritizations may quickly end up in time-consuming discussions (e.g., “all ideas are important!”), we made very positive experience with forcing the participants to “select the idea that you like most” in a “first come, first serve” setting. Regarding the success factor of “Plan enough time” and “Atmosphere” we emphasized that a good (and different) environment and enough time is indispensable for running these workshops. In particular, we experienced that approximately 1.5 days of concentrated work are usually needed for coming up with fruitful results. We also realized that it is extremely important that the participants participate continuously, and that they should not be distracted by emails or parallel meetings. Thus, in the meantime we even tend to postpone or even cancel creativity workshops, if the probability is high that participants have to leave, or if the organizational surrounding conditions are not good enough to work in a creative atmosphere (e.g., no willingness to move to a different location). In our previous CREARE paper, we also emphasized the need to use even not very well-known “Creativity techniques to enforce variations” even though people might be sceptic if we use something beyond the classic brainstorming. We can clearly confirm that we came to many settings where classical brainstorming style techniques have been used with no or very limited success, and that different techniques created much more innovative ideas. However, we learned in the meantime that there is no strong need for making use of too many different techniques and that it is not needed to always (re-) select from the over 200 existing creativity techniques that are out there. Rather, we recommend adhering to an individual set of techniques with which the moderators have made good experience and which work well in their individual context. In the different projects we conducted so far (cf. Table 1), we always used, similar set of techniques, always with very positive results. When we reported our lesson “Never start without prior analysis of the problem space in the domain”, we wanted to emphasize that we strongly recommend performing domain, market, problem and requirements analyses beforehand. However, we would like to extend this success factor with our observation that even for moderators that did many creativity workshops in the past, a thorough and detailed planning of each individual workshop is still indispensable. In particular, the creation of a dedicated, detailed script for the moderators explaining, for instance, how the results of one technique are processed by a subsequent technique, the anticipation of results of each techniques (sometimes with trial runs) and the intensive discussion of the analytic and motivating steps in the preparation of the event is needed. In addition, it is essential for the perception of success that the participants experience a logical connection between the results of each step of the creativity workshop. In CREARE, we also reported that one should “Choose participants carefully”, arguing that one should not invite the narrow minded fellows to the workshops for not letting them slow down the creative group process. As can be seen from the new success factor of “six key ingredients for successful creativity workshops”, we relativized our opinion on this. Of course, we still have to choose the participants carefully, but also with regard to the mix of persons. In addition, we want to emphasize how essential it is to use “evangelists”, i.e., persons that participated in 59 such events and can positively affect other people experiencing this the first time. Second, we always experienced having interdisciplinary in such sessions as a key success factor. In particular, involving a real customer in the process of product innovation is always a win for both sites. We experienced that customers felt a higher loyalty when they are invited to participating in product development. Of course, this involves the risk of disappointing the customers, if no ideas are implemented. Finally, we also want to comment briefly on the other five success factors that we reported in our former CREARE paper [1]. The factors “Don’t start too late in a project” and “Contact people personally beforehand and clarify expectations and goals” are of course still valid, even though we achieved very good results also when not always contacting the people personally before. When we reported the success factor “Have fun, but not too much” we argued for finding the right balance between enjoyable time and making clear to the participants that everybody must work hard on the ideas to make the workshop a success. We made good experience with keeping this always in mind. Also “Include good Incubation” is very valid. We often experience in the new projects that the incubation phase can have significant impact on the generated ideas. In the new projects, we did not stick much to the factor “Don´t rotate participants unless there is enough time”. We also made good experience with mixing teams, even though one needs to keep in mind that a group of people needs some time to find together to become effective. In this regard, we made good experience with “force fit” in which persons with different backgrounds have to combine different ideas. 3 Related Work Several further authors reported also their experiences on creativity workshops. Geschka [2] reports on several benefits of creativity in RE in comparison to individual problem solving, especially an increased effectiveness with higher amounts of new ideas at lower costs. Maiden et al. [3] report their lessons learned, for instance, that one-day workshops are too short, restricting the time to develop trust and collaboration among employees as well as the time to incubate and illuminate ideas too much. Furthermore, they report the necessity to define clear input and output models for each half-day session. Gryskiewicz et al. [4] describe lessons learned from the participants of the creative RE project, mainly concerned with group dynamics. Additionally, they recommend discussing problems in a group of people with different backgrounds, not only with experts of the domain. Rhodes and Thame [5] give recommendations for the performance of workshops to speed up the process of innovation in organizations. The type of workshop they present is claimed to be suitable for the identification of market chances of the organization and the creation of new product / market concepts. Anderson [6] describes experiences from the perspective of a workshop participant as well as of a workshop leader. He presents some suggestions to improve the performance of creativity workshops: For example he recommends the participants to arrive in the workshop already with prepared ideas. 60 Schlosser et al. [7] contains an extensive description of the workshop and a collection of “creativity triggers” with specific explanations and examples they defined for the context of the project to enable creative thinking during the workshop. Because of the usage of a creativity workshop, they authors experienced an increased efficiency of the requirements elicitation. Mahaux et al. [8] report in general on what creativity can mean to different persons in RE and, therefore, give a good foundation for creativity in RE. 4 Conclusion We argued that in today’s economy, innovation is the key factor to remain competitive. Therefore, including innovation into the RE activities by means of creativity workshops is key to success. This paper extends a previous report on success factors when performing creativity workshops [1]. We report on experience from conducting creativity workshops in new, purely industrial projects and discuss and extend success factors that were reported previously [1]. As part of this, we present the six key ingredients for performing creativity workshops successfully. We hope that sharing these experiences enables other researchers and practitioners to perform creativity workshops more successfully and motivates people to extend research on creativity in RE, respectively. References 1. Kerkow, D., Adam, S., Riegel, N., Uenalan, O.: A creative method for business information systems. In: 1st Workshop on Creativity in RE (CREARE) at REFSQ 2010, pp. 8-21, ICB-Research Report 40 (2010) 2. H. Geschka, "Creativity Workshops in Product Innovation," Journal of Product Innovation Management, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 48-56, 1986. 3. N. Maiden, S. Manning, S. Robertson and J. Greenwood, "Integrating creativity workshops into structured requirements processes," in DIS '04 Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, 2004. 4. S. S. Gryskiewicz, K. D. Holt, A. M. Faber and S. 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