With consumers having multiple options to find the services and products they need, companies must stand out amongst their competitors, and products that drive value are key.
In light of the current circumstances around COVID-19, organizations have faced a tremendous shift to a remote workforce and the challenges that come with it. Yet, company initiatives that support a modern enterprise are still critical to them coming out the other side strong of their market. With consumers having multiple options to find the services and products they need, companies must stand out amongst their competitors, and products that drive value are key. By shifting to product-centric models and nimble Agile delivery practices, businesses are better equipped to compete
Delivering value through the shift to product-centric models
Traditionally, large organizations are broken up by departments (i.e., IT, Business Development, Operations, etc.), and within IT alone there can be even more silos such as Quality Assurance, Project Management Office, Applications, etc. These silos typically create complicated reporting structures, competing objectives, and many disconnected projects across the enterprise. The result is often competing views of what an organization’s core products and goals are. By shifting your company’s focus to a product-centric model (versus project-focused), with the goal of ensuring value to the end user and delivering an actual product with high quality, the company mindset shifts to the health and life of a product, which is much more predictable from a funding and resource needs perspective.
Alignment between IT and business is critical for adoption success
As we stated above, departments and their respective teams all have varying goals and ideas of what success looks like for their product. In order for a company to show that they can be a true partner to their client, IT teams need to understand the end goal of their customer’s business. This can take a company several years to implement and perfect, but the result is an alignment between your company and your customer.
Scaling Agile shows no sign of slowing down
In 2020’s digital landscape, large organizations should consider scaling Agile processes in order to effectively communicate across all levels of the organization and remain competitive. Recently, Apex has seen a 72% increase in implementation of both Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) models. These frameworks vary in many different ways, but both are still rooted in basic Scrum principles. The popularity of SAFe may be because of the many checks and balances created within the SAFe construct across the Portfolio, Program, and Team levels of the organization, which seem to bring a sense of security to former waterfall or “command and control” cultures not yet ready to embrace leaner practices.
