team

By Anand Kumar, 30 January, 2021
For over a decade, I've strived to champion innovation in every team I've been a part of.  I currently serve as a Technology Solutions (TS) innovation leader at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) – a behavioral and social science research and evaluation not-for-profit.  I'm most fascinated by the unique ideas and culture change that arise from a successful innovation implementation, but establishing and nurturing such a program at a frugal organization in the midst of leadership shake-ups required a hefty dose of inventiveness itself.
By Anand Kumar, 21 December, 2020
When I joined the Technology Solutions (TS) group at the American Institutes for Research (AIR) in 2015, I found the team experiencing several pain points. Projects were unwieldly due to constantly changing requirements, project managers trained in Waterfall models had not embraced agile methodologies, defects were commonplace and increasing as more features and bugs were pushed into production environments without proper testing, the overall posture was reactive, and recurring feedback from the team was that they were constantly swimming upstream and struggling to stay afloat.  I set out to resolve the issues by focusing on training staff, creating efficient processes, automating redundancies, and incorporating industry best practices into daily tasks and workflows.