At the time of writing (August 2019, a few weeks after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister) clearly the political and economic outlook for many businesses in the UK and across Europe is increasingly uncertain. Adapting to changes in the commercial and regulatory environment in a timely and effective way can be a real challenge – can we leverage Agile ways of working to help?
Whilst uncertainty about the future political and regulatory framework relevant to businesses is quite common, the impact of leaving the European Union potentially without agreed trade arrangements and crucially without a transition phase, is a very acute example.
How can your business position itself to be able to respond to a rapidly changing environment? Can project delivery methodology help? Surely projects move too slowly to be a good vehicle for managing this speed of change and level of uncertainty? Whilst traditionally this may seem to be true, modern Agile project delivery methods such as Scrum were specifically designed to adapt to changing circumstances and in fact welcome change, as this indicates that the project is delivering to the most relevant circumstances and requirements.
One Waterfall vs many Sprint iterations
To summarise the characteristics of Scrum that facilitate change adaptation:
- A dynamic scope list ‘Product Backlog’ that is designed to accommodate changes as they are identified by the customer, often driven by changing external factors and/or the internal company environment.
- To-the-point, time-bound and very regular (ideally daily) verbal communications ‘Scrum Meetings’ between the team members, including the key customer ‘Product Owner’, to identify and agree the relative importance of scope changes in real-time.
- An iterative delivery model that makes the progress of the project team transparent to the Product Owner, delivers value early and builds on this value as the work progresses.
- Regular team retrospective reviews of the work completed in the last phase ‘Sprint’ allowing the team to adapt to changing circumstances and incorporate lessons-learned in a timely manner, optimising their delivery capability.
Even without fully adopting the Scrum delivery model (a model I advocate seriously looking-at for any Business), using some of these Agile tools and techniques, steered by an suitably experienced Project Manager or ‘Scrum Master’, can provide organisations with the transparency and flexibility needed to affect organisational, business process and/or I.T. change in demanding circumstances.
If your business is facing uncertainty and would like to discuss how Agile techniques might be used to optimise the delivery of change in your organisation, Brexit related or otherwise, On Time On Budget is ready to help.
