“From an idea to reality… Let’s go!”

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“Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come” as elegantly noted by Victor Hugo, one of the greatest French poets, this is undoubtedly a motto that translates to IBM’s Extreme Blue program. Entering in its 5th week, the long road, which started from 40 unconventional ideas, has progressed to one final project being selected. That said, 20 passionate, future-minded, young IBMers are now starting a new journey – the journey of making that idea become a reality!

For the next 8 weeks, the teams will focus both their hearts and minds on developing a prototype and a business case. The respective clients and teams in collaboration chose the one “golden idea” for implementation. Just imagine that your brainchild could be a game-changer for a city or a region or a company… or a whole industry! How would you go about it? All of the 5 ideas selected are innovative and future-proof, ensuring that the bar set for the students is quite high. The very thought of this makes the process an even more thrilling experience!

However, roads leading to success rarely come in the form of easy, straightforward pathways. Early on, teams encountered obstacles and discovered the value of solid planning. To make sure everything runs on time and deadlines are met throughout the project, an agile software development framework is going to be used. Since SCRUM is a worldwide-recognized framework for managing software projects and product development, an experienced IBM consultant Roeland Nagel held workshops on this topic to Extreme Blue students. The insights gained were useful for planning, and so-called “sprints” were created within each team. These will distribute the teams ’ work that needs to be complete over the coming months. At the end of each sprint a number of goals the teams set for themselves are completed. Overall this framework is needed not only for the organization of project, but for the teams’ morale as well! Synergy of these will ultimately lead to the successful outcome of the project.

During the week, now almost a standard routine, students held presentations for their clients. At these they showcased the plan of activities for the implementation of the project.

As perfect wrap-up of an intense week (which is actually what a normal week looks like at Extreme blue), early Friday morning came with a surprise in form of a microphone and professional cameraman asking various “sneaky” questions, looking to catch us off guard and teaching us about media presence and more. But more on that in the next blog.

Stay tuned…

Written by Djordje Petrovic and Nidhi Singh