In VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) environments, it is virtually impossible to manage unknown variables effectively. For companies to thrive with complex environments they need to shift their focus towards modern leadership over a traditional approach. In plain language, VUCA can be effectively managed using Agile. Agility is not a fad, it is a norm. Spotify, Facebook, Amazon, Google are only few that have embraced the “Agile” mindset. It is this exact mindset that helped them manage their processes and help them establish themselves as market leaders in current climate.
A large multinational telco engaged Net Reply to migrate a legacy web application. Net Reply utilised Scrum to deliver the project, which was completed on-time, on-budget and it maximised the customer’s original scope.
Scrum is a framework that falls under the Agile umbrella, it has a user-centric perspective, promotes writing defect-free code and testing assumptions frequently. Scrum advocates a simple and counterintuitive way of work. To accelerate on delivery is to take less work in Sprint Planning (event in Scrum), finishing early during the timeboxed cycle (Sprint) and pulling more work as you go.
At the beginning of the project, we had to make sure that we had a clear and concise vision. It was paramount for us to ensure we fully understood our customer requirements and vision. This mindset helped us build a product backlog and effectively prioritise the work. Instead of having a pool of stakeholders, we proposed having one dedicated contact who would provide Net Reply with guidance and vision for our product on a regular basis, he was somewhat our mini-CEO.
Sprints are known as units of learning and delivery. Before we embarked on production, we “the team” made sure that we were in close negotiations with our “mini-CEO”, this resulted in team buy-ins, learning, and taking ownership. The team felt attached to the product they were building.
As a team, we strived to set ourselves a Sprint goal prior to every Agile Sprint cycle and this approach instilled urgency on the team to finish and meet the goal.
Net Reply assembled an end-to-end delivery team in advance, it was independent and cross-functional in the grand scheme of interaction with the other parts of delivery. As time went on, the team was evolving into a self-organised team which led to lean, fast delivery and was empowered to make decisions. With slicing stories vertically and ‘shifting to the left’ testing approach, we aimed to increase the speed and quality of work.
We agreed that immediate actions would be taken on identified bugs that could be resolved immediately as long as work undertaken would not exceed more than two hours. This approach kept bugs list low, developers were able to remedy their code while still fresh on their mind. To further aid our quality of work, we took pro-active approach. We did zoom in on each story in a form of defining and capturing the essence of story narrative of the delivery, each story also contained high level testing upfront defined and expected examples of behaviour.
At the end of our bi-weekly Sprints we held our demos. We used this forum to demonstrate delivered value and as a place to get feedback in order for the team could inspect and adapt. And finally, it was Kaizen, the term that implies incremental improvement.
The team utilised Kaizen to opportunistically remedy shortcomings. As much of Agile is based on taking small steps as in one step at the time, we did employ the framework fully and embraced the mindset, by constantly refining stories, daily replanning, delivering work in small increments to end user and finally listening to customer’s feedback at the end of the cycle by continuously adapting our approach.
To conclude, we succeeded in implementing Scrum and completing this migration because we regularly shared information and looked for new ways to address the inevitable challenges every project faces along the way. Teams will struggle to adopt the Scrum framework if they only try to implement the mechanics, without truly embracing the mindset!
To discuss how Net Reply can help you migrate from outdated web applications and adopt Scrum, please contact