This lecture was given at Ignite event: Agile In Action Berlin. Agile in Action is a series of events conducted by Ignite, visiting various cities in Israel, Germany and Ukraine. This time, we visited the startup scene in Berlin. The lecture describes how one can take the agile or scrum methodology to the business level to leverage agile benefits at corporate level, weather small or large
3. Going Agile - Outbound
• You want to be fast to market
• You have limited visibility to market needs
• You need to quickly respond to customers feedback
• Time to market is key…competition is a step behind
4. Going Agile - Inbound
• R&D isn’t working on the most important features for
the business
• Key feature development estimations are beyond what
the business can handle
• Release priorities are dictated by R&D design
consideration
5. Going Agile - Performance
• Repeatedly missing product release dates
• Release frequency is slower than required by market
conditions
• Product quality is not adequate
6. Going Agile - Now
• If you acknowledge 2 out of 3 symptoms in your
company – Go agile immediately
7. Business Agility 101
• Four key principles
– Business Model
– Innovation
– Organizational structure
– Efficiency
8. Business Model
• Company’s priorities are derived by customers
priorities
– Listen to customers and work with those who are open for a
dialog
– Know your customers individually
• Constantly focus on activities that creates an ROI with
customers
• Technology serves the business and not vise versa
• Release dates and quality are always before scope
9. Organizational Structure
• Flatten Hierarchy
• Build real cross functional teams. Business and product
development working together creating a collaboration
approach
• Empowering autonomy to teams and people increases
increases accountability
10. Innovation
• Continuous innovation
– Iterative and trial and error approaches create innovation
thinking
– Immediate market feedback brings insight and drives out-of-
the-box solutions
• Teams innovation
– The smallest unit is a team. Team members work together,
increase the chances for innovation
– Everyone on the team has the information. Everyone can
express their opinion
– Autonomy to make decisions. Just go ahead and do it
11. Efficiency
• Work on the most important features first. Reduce
waist of unneeded features
• Lean processes, fast decision making. Keep it simple
• Just enough operation. Agreements, documentation,
designs, etc. Focus on business model and maximizing
ROI