Balancing Innovation and Tangibility Using the Spiraled Agile Design Sprinting Approach

Abstract

Whether they seek to conduct scientific research or product development, practitioners of applied human factors and cognitive systems engineering must carefully consider how their resources shall be allocated to both yield innovation while ensuring tangibility to the outcomes of their work. For small businesses, academic teams, and consultants, these two objectives are oftentimes antithetic: Expanding resources towards one is done at the expense of the other. To solve this gap, we propose the Spiraled Agile Design Sprinting Approach (SPADES), an activity and schedule-based framework within which all stakeholders collaboratively optimize what they do and how, while ensuring that neither innovation nor tangibility is sacrificed for the other. We applied SPADES to research efforts in critical domains, ranging from aircraft maintenance and intelligence analysis to missile defense analytics and emergency management. We report here on the lessons learned over the course of these efforts.