Agile – it’s for more than just Product and Technology teams

Agile technology development is nothing new these days. We’ve been using it for years with scrum masters, product managers and tech teams huddling around user stories and deciding what would be built in the next sprint or given build cycle.

The genius of this approach was that it embraced a more user centric design, where the customers’ needs were driving what would be built. The other massive improvement was that you could release a “product” after any given sprint. Gone were the days of the waterfall, where it might take nine months to a year or even longer to see any glimpse of your product. Many times, at that point the marketplace or environment may have changed enough that the intended product missed the mark, and in many cases badly.

Agile is designed to address that issue. It’s meant to be incremental. You can adjust as you go between your two to four-week sprint build cycles. You may not gain a big bang, but you will begin to see benefit as soon as the product releases and can then adjust and adapt the product based on what you see as it is “out in the wild.”

We were discussing in our organization how we might create a nimbler overall organization and how agile could play a part in it. My boss and I decided to take the innovators equivalent of a trip to Disney World to see how another organization had made this a reality. We went to ING in the Netherlands and saw first-hand how a financial service firm had transitioned all but a few functional groups – i.e. finance, HR – to a completely agile organization. Gone were cubes or offices, everywhere there were open collaboration spaces. Teams were made up of diverse functional expertise and called squads. Multiple squads were combined on a specific customer journey to make up Tribes who focused on user experiences like customer acquisition, customer retention, and service experiences. This was an entirely customer and process centric organization – there were no fights between ops and digital, as they sat in the same squads and tribes.

We came away from the experience inspired, but also didn’t believe our Fortune 50 company was ready to make this large of change in its approach. We decided to pilot an approach for one of our user journeys that would create a more all-inclusive agile team, bringing business partners into the fold.  

As with any change, we had our fair share of detractors. For product managers, they felt they had yet another set of inputs and decision makers in the build process. The irony was that these same decision makers were impacting their process at the time, just later in the process where a pre-release was reviewed, and rework had to occur to gain approval from the business for launch. This extended cycle times and created frustration from all parties involved.

For the business partners, they were leery of a process with the name agile. What they heard was move fast, break rules, and remove process. Ironically, this couldn’t be further from the truth, as the approach is process heavy, customer focused and incremental in nature. There was a good deal of education necessary to gain comfort from key business stakeholders from whom we wanted a resource commitment.

Once we got them over this hurdle, we looked to kick off our pilot program that took the typical core kernel of participants in the Agile process building out digital experiences and added business stakeholders into the mix. We had a ramp up process with education to train on the terminology and process approach of agile. We found pretty quickly the teams wanted to just dig in and make things happen. The scrum master can guide the team and help pull what’s needed from key stakeholders. The learning was to let the teams get their hands dirty early on with the process.

As with any team, it took time to go through the forming, storming, and norming process. It took us a good six to nine months before the team really started hitting its stride and we started to make real headway.

During the norming phase of the team, we learned that the entire team didn’t need to attend every standup. We could have more business-oriented stand ups versus more tech oriented stands ups to respect everyone’s time. People were made to clearly understand at which meetings they’d be needed and their deliverables accordingly. Once we tightened this piece was when we started to see the teams really start to perform.

The improvements we found were significant. Amongst them were early insights into the use cases to focus informed by data the group wouldn’t have normally seen. Their business partners were bringing valuable insights to the table. This had a secondary effect of the business team’s recommendations driving what was built, ensuring a deeper level of their buy in and ownership.  

Even more importantly, large organizations are known for their bureaucratic processes meant to protect processes and “off the rails” outcomes. When we hit these steps of a process, the “gate keepers” were shocked when asking if we’d gained buy in from key stakeholders only to find all the right owners had been consulted and were a go. The business stake holders had already covered all the necessary bases.

We also found that our cycle times compressed substantially. Gone were the days of getting inputs early on, then coming back a few months later with a “tadda” to the frustration and disdain of key stakeholders who felt they weren’t heard. They had been part of the process all along, so they felt invested and knew exactly what would be released. Quality went up substantially with rework falling to next to nothing.

In the end, the process demonstrated an ability to bring cohorts together with all of the right skills and stakeholders to drive a faster, more inclusive process. Agile is more than just a tech and product team tool, it can be a more inclusive approach leading to strong outcomes for your organization. You should be thinking of how to break down the silos in your own organization to untap value more quickly for your customers.  

Agile – it’s not just for your product and tech teams.