Digital transformations usually kick off with organizational-wide aspirations and excitement— but can just as quickly fracture into a fierce tug of war between seemingly opposing forces.
One end of the rope is clasped by a company’s reliance on specific timelines and budgets. The other side is wrangled by a development team that excels in iterative, agile delivery sprints with flexible outcomes. This struggle contributes to the failure of 70% of digital transformations. This tends to be even more detrimental in regulated industries with restrictive documentation and scope rules like FinTech and MedTech. Ultimately, it’s the end product that pays the price.
So, what’s the solution? I often work with clients to reconcile this divide using a two-pronged strategy. By merging together a lean business planning approach with agile delivery practices, companies can meet restrictive expectations while also making space for flexible, adaptable implementation. Ultimately, this ends the push-pull and leads to a single software solution that works for everyone.
Implementing Lean Business Strategies
The first step of this two-pronged strategy is to start with a lean business approach to planning.
This breaks down a software project’s features into their most granular forms, and then determines how much capacity is needed to deliver each and within what timeframe. To do this for your own project, here are some steps to consider:
- Get a Grip on Your MVP: Define high-level features based on what matters most to the product, identify your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and estimate against these two goalposts.
- Warm Up: Make educated predictions about your team’s capacity and timeline by leveraging historical delivery data.
- Rope In the Right KPIs: Understand and establish realistic ROI outcomes, and set up KPIs to make these a reality.
A lean business approach to planning allows you to set projects off to a strong start. It accounts for the needs of different teams, fosters stronger organizational alignment, and sets realistic expectations throughout a project’s entire life cycle.
Aligning an Agile Development Framework
Once a project has been defined through a lean business lens, it’s time for agile implementation to shine.
An agile approach to software development is similar in some ways to a lean business approach because it breaks a larger project into smaller deliverables, one element at a time. But it also differs in some significant ways, including the need to:
- Anchor in an Agile Sprint Structure: Deliver in two-week sprint cycles, followed by a close examination of what was estimated versus what was achieved, and then discuss and make decisions about what’s feasible for the next sprint.
- Give Some Slack: Give Product Owners the autonomy to iterate and adapt within the agile structure.
- Stay Balanced: As you move through sprint cycles, keep an open mind and be flexible on which features and testing methods are meeting your objectives in the long run.
- Fall Down Three Times, Get Up Four: Measure your objectives, embrace failure, and when an outcome falls flat, get up again quickly, intelligently, and with your lean business plan in mind.
Agile delivery creates an environment for innovation, sets the stage for high-speed development, and increases efficiency, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and operational performance by up to 30%. It also offers an avenue to avoid investing in large-scale software initiatives without knowing whether the spending is justified or the product will solve the challenge at hand.
Benefits Across Any Digital Transformation
The best work happens at the intersection of lean business and agile.
When bringing together lean business planning and agile delivery practices, you benefit by:
- Player Predictability: Conducting the right level of upfront thinking that aligns a company’s need for reliable budgets and timelines.
- Built-in Referees: Agile sprints are designed to foster iteration, allowing the right level of inspection, evaluation, and inter-team communication along the way.
- Flexible Gameplay: Every stakeholder is given space to express their needs, and tune and refine these based on what’s working, instead of being beholden to an original plan.
Accurate timeline projections, realistic and clearly communicated stakeholder expectations, and scope and budget creep-resistant projects are additional reasons why this two-pronged approach works. It leads to predictable outcomes, improved productivity, and cross-functional team collaboration. Most importantly, it results in better software products and stronger customer and user relationships.
Case Study: An Argument for Merging Lean Business Planning with an Agile Framework
A client in the hospitality sector had worked for 18 months to build an authorization system that acted as a sort of ‘gatekeeper’ between databases, determining what info could flow and what info needed to remain contained.
After developing this solution in a typical waterfall style, the team ran system tests of their software to come to a disappointing realization. The overall ecosystem was overwrought and slow to function, bogged down by backups and round-trip data fetching. These issues hadn’t been flagged during earlier testing, which only validated one system at a time.
With more than a million dollars already invested, this business had to ask themselves an alarming question: does this solution fit our needs? In the end, the answer was no, and the project was shelved.
A two-pronged strategy blending lean business planning and agile development could have avoided this situation in a few ways:
- Early Whistle: Smaller increments would have flagged performance issues early.
- Halftime Check-In: Regular reviews could have revealed unnecessary complexity.
- Scope Shuffle: Agile adjustments would have led to simpler solutions.
- Trial Runs: Lean planning would have validated assumptions efficiently.
Agile development could have avoided this situation by setting up regular evaluative check-points to ensure all systems were aligned and communicating well. An iterative approach could have helped determine whether features were earning their keep during development. Lastly, a proper testing strategy would ensure the right outcomes were measured and allow for adjustment of different use cases.
Next Steps
Whether your organization is launching a new software solution or digital product, or looking to tame a tug of war already in progress, consider applying this two-pronged strategy of a lean business approach to planning coupled with an agile development process. It will align differing interests into one united push towards a product that serves your business’ spending and time projections, and the needs of your customers and users.
If you have any questions, contact us to learn more about how Ascendle provides software solutions designed for driving business results.
