Support and Innovation IT teams do not mix

One of the gravest mistakes IT managers  can make is to ask their internal support team to develop new products.

Support and innovation do not mix, you either are in one mode or another. You either have a support IT team or innovation IT team. They are water and oil.

It seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? It's all the same skills: development, QA, DevOps, etc. The difference is the incentives and the mindset.

Support teams are measured by the uptime of all informational systems, stability of operations, security of the network and availability of all outwardly facing applications. Support team's mindset is to keep the status quo.

Innovation team's incentive is the opposite: they want to experiment, break things, combine services, integrate into new interfaces. Security is not their first concern. Building something new means disrupting the status quo.

One of the biggest issues that will come up over and over is misalignment between business sponsors of the initiative and risk-averse nature of support work. Business wants to get a proof of concept as fast as possible to get it into the hands of potential users (internal or external), whereas the team is incentivised not to release anything that hasn't been stabilized, properly secured and thoroughly tested. These projects inadvertently fail.

What's the solution? First, it's important to leave the support team to work on what they are good at. Secondly, hire a product manager that will have the innovation mindset, urgency and bias towards action. From there, the manager will have to assess current state of technology and either hire an result-focused team internally or work with an expert firm.