Is Agile only for Technology Teams ?

The Agile methodology serves as a beacon model that improves productivity and collaboration. While the software industry whole heartedly embraces Agile, businesses outside the technology domain are also using it to become nimble, competitive, and, well, agile!

?Let us discuss a few real-world examples of how the Agile methodology is helping non-technology businesses remain true to their core principles of continuous improvement and delivery.

?Before we list the examples, a brief introduction to Agile is essential. This short primer would help you as the reader to better grasp the impact of Agile in these companies.

An incremental, iterative approach forms the basis for Agile methodology. The Agile philosophy encourages constant feedback from the end-user and working with changing requirements is one of its core tenets. Cross-functional teams work on versions of a product over time. A Backlog prioritizes relevant tasks and ensures these are at the front of the task list. Business or customer value primarily dictates this priority. A time-boxed sprint defines the number of work items that will get done in each Sprint. At the end of each sprint a working version of the product is ready for user feedback.

?The Agile methodology encourages teamwork, individual ownership, open communication, and self-governance. Business owners and developers work collaboratively to bring customer and company goals to fruition.

?Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet is synonymous with travel. Founded in 1972, Lonely Planet is a publisher of travel books and has sold more than 150 million copies. Its popular travel app has more than 20 million downloads.

?The lonely planet legal team plays a vital role in the organization. Apart from everyday work such as managing contracts, they manage the overall organization risk and advise a business strategy for various legal entities in the group.

?Existing challenges

The legal team faced several challenges. These included exhaustive day-to-demands and constant rework leading to lower morale and rapidly declining job satisfaction. Added to this, internal clients failed to understand the nature of work and would often set unrealistic deadlines forcing constant reprioritization.

These challenges meant lawyers were unable to take on improvement projects that would help the company and the team be more productive and efficient. On the face of it, adopting Agile seemed counter-intuitive. The fast-paced nature of Agile does not sit well with the perfectionism needed in the legal profession. However, with the right combination of Agile, Kanban, and Scrum, lawyers at Lonely Planet have transformed from a crushing work-environment to ‘crushing it.’

?Intentionally Agile

The team has three core principles – delivering value, reducing waste, and continually improving. A whiteboard shows all the deliverables from team members. This whiteboard showed the diversity and intensity of the workload the team faced. Using unique printed cards internal and external team members track and monitor their work closely in the form of ‘stories’.

A points-based system evaluates the size of any work. Similar kinds of work act as a reference to calibrate this points system. A unique flavour of Kanban emerges on the whiteboard that now shows sections such as ‘to do,’ ‘doing,’ and ‘done.’ Members who own the cards continuously monitor blockers and track the work across its lifecycle. Teams requiring legal work now leave a placeholder card on the board. The team then picks these up based on their prioritization. Legal groups who act as trusted brokers prioritize the cards. Transparency of information and priorities on the whiteboard helps pick up requests impartially.

The whole team looks at the board end-to-end and continually fine-tunes and makes improvements in the way work is delivered. The team stays in touch with internal clients and measures their satisfaction using the Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Implementing this methodology took 100 days, and the team has improved its productivity by 25%.

The National Art Museum of Netherlands

The Rijksmuseum, National Art Museum of the Netherlands is the oldest museum in the Netherlands. It was completed in 1885 and was intended to serve as a cathedral to store and showcase the greatest Dutch works of art and history.

?Throughout the 20th century, the museum’s glory rapidly eroded and became cluttered with office spaces and dusty hallways. At the turn of the millennium, the Dutch government along with private donors restored the museum to its former glory, and the museum opened to the public in 2013.

In the old museum, all art pieces were arranged by specialization each having its own curator. E.g., Ceramics are grouped, while canvas arts are displayed separately. This grouping, however, did not give visitors a sense of historical narrative.

The National Art Museum of the Netherlands built public affinity using Agile methodology

?Creating a powerful narrative

At the time, the museum realized that organizing installations by timelines – starting from the Middle Ages to the 20th century – would be more impactful. This display logic meant that curators would have to be more collaborative.

Working groups for each timeline were established, with each group consisting of individuals with specialized knowledge about the century who could channelize the right interpretation for the visitors. These individuals were encouraged to push through their view of the timeline they specialized in. This behaviour avoided homogeneity and consensus which in this case could be detrimental to the interpretation of the timeline.

Over the next year and a half, through extensive research, each group proposed the artifacts that could be displayed in the gallery. However, each group needed to limit the number of artifacts such that they still gave the real sense of the timeline and gave other groups the same opportunity.

?At this point, the directors needed to cut down each groups’ artifacts to roughly one-third the number of artifacts. Since it is difficult to let go of artifacts that cannot be displayed, the existing groups were dissolved, and new ones came in its place. Each member here would give substantial reasons for why their artifacts should be displayed, how they would interact with the other artifacts, and why the visitors would be interested in them. This reasoning created a sense of ownership for not just their own artifacts but also for the entire timeline they were responsible for.

?Astounding results and continuous improvement

At the museum’s opening in 2013, it received 2.5 million visitors who grew by 250,000 the subsequent year. True to the Agile tenets of continuous improvement, the museum drew up plans to tackle essential questions of how to move from being keepers of history to shape it. They also hoped to expand the reach of the museum beyond the borders of Belgium. Above all else, they wanted to see how they can be a museum that people can call their own.

?The museum now engages in ongoing work with the common of improving visitors’ experience and knowledge about their history and art. At the same time, the team at Rijksmuseum focuses on staying current with improvements in technology to foster better collaboration and continuous improvement.

?HR is going “Agile Lite”

We could say HR is going “agile lite,” applying the general principles without adopting all the tools and protocols from the tech world. It’s a move away from a rules- and planning-based approach toward a simpler and faster model driven by feedback from participants. This new paradigm has really taken off in the area of performance management. (In a?2017 Deloitte survey, 79% of global executives rated agile performance management as a high organizational priority.) But other HR processes are starting to change too.

?Where We’re Seeing the Biggest Changes

Because HR touches every aspect—and every employee—of an organization, its agile transformation may be even more extensive (and more difficult) than the changes in other functions. Companies are redesigning their talent practices in the following areas:?

Performance appraisals

When businesses adopted agile methods in their core operations, they dropped the charade of trying to plan a year or more in advance how projects would go and when they would end. So in many cases the first traditional HR practice to go was the annual performance review, along with employee goals that “cascaded” down from business and unit objectives each year. As individuals worked on shorter-term projects of various lengths, often run by different leaders and organized around teams, the notion that performance feedback would come once a year, from one boss, made little sense. They needed more of it, more often, from more people.

?Since learning that hard lesson, many organizations have switched to frequent performance assessments, often conducted project by project. This change has spread to a number of industries, including retail (Gap), big pharma (Pfizer), insurance (Cigna), investing (OppenheimerFunds), consumer products (P&G), and accounting (all Big Four firms). It is most famous at GE, across the firm’s range of businesses, and at IBM. Overall, the focus is on delivering more-immediate feedback throughout the year so that teams can become nimbler, “course-correct” mistakes, improve performance, and learn through iteration—all key agile principles.

Recruiting

With the improvements in the economy since the Great Recession, recruiting and hiring have become more urgent—and more agile. To scale up quickly in 2015, GE’s new digital division pioneered some interesting recruiting experiments. For instance, a cross-functional team works together on all hiring requisitions. A “head count manager” represents the interests of internal stakeholders who want their positions filled quickly and appropriately. Hiring managers rotate on and off the team, depending on whether they’re currently hiring, and a scrum master oversees the process.

To keep things moving, the team focuses on vacancies that have cleared all the hurdles—no req’s get started if debate is still ongoing about the desired attributes of candidates. Openings are ranked, and the team concentrates on the top-priority hires until they are completed. It works on several hires at once so that members can share information about candidates who may fit better in other roles. The team keeps track of its cycle time for filling positions and monitors all open requisitions on a kanban board to identify bottlenecks and blocked processes. IBM now takes a similar approach to recruitment.

?Learning and development

Like hiring, L&D had to change to bring new skills into organizations more quickly. Most companies already have a suite of online learning modules that employees can access on demand. Although helpful for those who have clearly defined needs, this is a bit like giving a student the key to a library and telling her to figure out what she must know and then learn it. Newer approaches use data analysis to identify the skills required for particular jobs and for advancement and then suggest to individual employees what kinds of training and future jobs make sense for them, given their experience and interests.

IBM uses artificial intelligence to generate such advice, starting with employees’ profiles, which include prior and current roles, expected career trajectory, and training programs completed. The company has also created special training for agile environments—using, for example, animated simulations built around a series of “personas” to illustrate useful behaviours, such as offering constructive criticism.

Traditionally, L&D has included succession planning—the epitome of top-down, long-range thinking, whereby individuals are picked years in advance to take on the most crucial leadership roles, usually in the hope that they will develop certain capabilities on schedule. The world often fails to cooperate with those plans, though. Companies routinely find that by the time senior leadership positions open up, their needs have changed. The most common solution is to ignore the plan and start a search from scratch. But organizations often continue doing long-term succession planning anyway. (About half?of large companies have a plan to develop successors for the top job.) Pepsi is one company taking a simple step away from this model by shortening the time frame. It provides brief quarterly updates on the development of possible successors—in contrast to the usual annual updates—and delays appointments so that they happen closer to when successors are likely to step into their roles.

References:

Encora - 4-examples-of-agile-in-non-technology-businesses

HBR - hr-goes-agile