Skunkworks

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'A mysterious odorous place where complete focus on the task at hand" - an environment that insinuates a lack of niceties such as a balanced and hygienic lifestyle

This is derived from the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works - http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/aeronautics/skunkworks/origin.html

For OSE's purposes, Skunkworks simply means efficient development, where 100% of time is spent on actual development, as opposed to on overhead, red tape, or other distractions.

There are significant parallels between the Lockheed Martin 14 rules of skunkworks and OSE's development methodology. These should be studied for relevance:

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/aeronautics/skunkworks/14rules.html

Criticism

  • Forbes article criticizing skunkworks, in that skunkworks do not provide continuous innovation - [1]. From the OSE perspective, this is reconciled by minimizing paperwork while maintaining excellent documentation - such that continued innovation continues. A crowd process based on cloud collaborative, editable documents enables excellent documentation without requiring significant overhead. The main cultural shift required here is simply opening up edit privileges to a given document - to the whole world.