How to Successfully Scale Agile

Agile has proved its value to businesses across industries and geographies. In fact, the pandemic elevated it to an absolute necessity for organizations’ success and survival. Business leaders around the world invested aggressively in Agile transformation as they scrambled to meet changing customer demands through newly hybrid and remote workforces. Not surprisingly, the faster they adopted Agile methodologies at scale, the higher the value it delivered for them. Research indicates that the value Agile delivers can be a chance to grow ahead of peers as high as 63%.

What enterprises in the U.S. now need is to move the right Agile levers to maximize business outcomes. The same research prescribes an agenda to make that happen:

Mapping Customer Journeys

This involves assessing what purpose the company’s offering serves and how value flows through the systems that surround it to the customer. By identifying the critical path of value flow and prioritizing Agile investments at the nodes of value, both volume and velocity of value to customers can be impacted. For example, at Marcus by Goldman Sachs, every team, no matter which department they belong to, responds to the question about what they do with an answer that has clear customer focus: Enabling customer onboarding, improving the customer service experience or helping with the customer password journey.

Using Customer Insights

This can be achieved through A-B testing techniques and analytics platforms to unearth the attitudes and motivations that cause customer churn, build loyalty and convert emotions to action. This involves gathering customer feedback through surveys, discussions, and, in the case of digital channels, insight from the channel itself. Additionally, this lever enables diverse perspectives as customers are onboarded, with inputs all the way from design to operations. Kraft Heinz, as an example, leverages Snowflake’s platform to leverage data to drive new digital experiences for consumers. Snowflake gives them real-time ability to sense, respond and evolve, with insights resulting in more meaningful interactions with customers.

Organizing Teams Around Offerings Rather Than Functions

This involves bringing together skills and capabilities to launch disruptive products in the market and win back market share. Product-centric agile value delivery is especially helpful in scenarios that involve multiple handovers between internal teams that could lead to delays and siloed developments. For instance, Daimler draws on the principles of swarm to pull in expertise from various departments and create cross-functional teams to collaborate when developing new products.

Upskilling the Workforce

It’s imperative for organizations to upskill their workforce for continuous delivery, strategic vision and skill alignment within autonomous, cross-functional teams. The rapid pace of development required to meet changing customer needs often creates a skills gap that needs to be bridged. Siemens is a great example. They accelerated their digital transformation journey in 2020 and realized how vital it is for every employee to easily access upskilling and reskilling opportunities. To stay ahead of the curve, they deployed an agile digital learning platform for their employees while leveraging and simplifying their existing learning ecosystem.

Taking the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Approach

This lever assesses real value delivery, validates hypotheses and enables quick course correction as required. Budgets are always limited, and an agile MVP approach also maximizes investment value with faster delivery, optimized processes and increased flexibility. A recent case in point is the approach bp took when started work on an integrated energy-as-a-service (EaaS) offering that will provide end-to-end management of a customers’ energy assets and services. Their first step was to pilot the plan in an innovation center/work campus before exploring opportunities to manage energy more broadly at industrial and business parks.

Expanding the Agile Workplace

Companies need to extend and adapt the agile workplace concept for a hybrid reality by creating remote analogs for meetings, sales execution and IT support along with advanced collaboration tools. A great example is GE Appliances; at the very start of the pandemic they accelerated their workplace with automation-driven agile services support across their global command centers and service desks.

Amplify Agile with Cloud

Scaling Agile without sound cloud infrastructure is a good job half done, especially when firms want to buttress speed and utility with business resilience. In fact, the very best firms stand to take a good share of the $414 billion in profits cloud generates across industries and regions every year.