Mercedes F1 breed extreme success through Agile

As I watched the Belgium Formula 1 Grand Prix over the weekend I reflected on the complete dominance of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport team. They have won both the Drivers and Constructors' Championships for the the past 5 years along with a myriad of other records and performance benchmarks. And baring alien invasion they will make it a sixth in 2019.

How has this team overcome a very strict compliance regime, frequently changing rules, technical evolution, different tyre rubber each year, race to race variance through track, altitude etc and in-race strategy variations due to temperature, tyre wear, on-track incidence' and the strategy decisions of other teams? How can a team overcome all that month to month, year to year and stay on top. And not just on top but complete dominance of the sport?

So with this in mind I started to wonder what set the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport team apart from all the other teams vying for the ultimate prize. No doubt cash investment makes a big difference in a sport such as F1 but there are many examples over the annals of sporting history where cash has failed to deliver the ultimate prize let alone deliver it 6 years running.

I wondered if the German team had adopted some practices more commonly associated with successful software development and increasingly organisation wide delivery success, in Agile.

My research quickly confirmed that this was in fact the case. Mercedes F1 have adopted Agile to facilitate innovation and foster a culture of high-performance.

There’s a lot to it but some of the elements of the Mercedes team strategy include:

1. A clear and shared goal - In the case of F1 this is fairly straight forward and simple to articulate. They must get faster. However with the constantly changing rules this is an immense challenge.
2. Collaboration - The Mercedes team is one of the largest on the Grid with over 1,200 staff. All of these staff are in their own sub-teams with different areas of responsibility. The Mercedes factory also produce the engines that the Mercedes F1 Factory team then modify as they require. And they produce engines for other teams on the grid, not just Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport. Every one of these elements must be working harmoniously to ensure the highest levels of innovation and performance.
3. Constant Review and Continuous Delivery - The F1 team delivers in cycles (sprints) and cycles within cycles. So the varying sub-teams will focus on continuous improvement and delivery across the year. But then once they are at a circuit with the cars on track going through the process of Practice, Qualifying and Race they will still seek to continuously improve during each of these stages. And still with all teams members contributing. For example millions of data points are sent back from tracks as geographically spread as Australia and Russia to the Mercedes team factory for deeper analysis who then provide improvement recommendations for the track day team to try.

So next time you watch Mercedes hold aloft the winners trophy or spray the crowd with Champagne you might think differently about what it took to get them there.