Agile

Lean Startup and Design Thinking are two complementary principles that can be used in the process of creating and building new businesses, products or services. These principles are widely used in large and small organizations. But what is the difference, and when should you use each?
Before we dive into that, let me first explain both principles.

Recently, I have undertaken a number of roles as an Agile Engagement Lead, working with large corporates as they began the journey of migrating their operations and delivery to agile ways of working. In most cases, I was starting with entirely new teams who had absolutely no agile experience. It was challenging, but interesting as I had to develop a systematic approach to rolling out Scrum. There were a number of hurdles that kept on repeating themselves and along the way, I was lucky to be able to pilot a few new approaches

Have you ever had a boss who rejected your idea?  What can you do about it? Pretty much nothing.

Unhappy with the company direction?  What can you do about? Pretty much nothing.

You are assigned to work on something that you think is a waste and possibly detrimental to the company.  What can you do about? You get where I’m going with this.

In order to organise my own ideas, I realised it would be helpful to have a clear vision for what I wanted to achieve, together with measurable outcomes. I began with a mission statement:

“I want to design a tailored system of work that optimises the entire organisation, allowing Moonpig to innovate and move fast at scale, whilst still ensuring it is a place that people love to work.”

Introducing change is hard. Very hard. One way to make it slightly easier, is to take the time to communicate clearly why you need to change. At the time we began introducing business agility at Moonpig, most people outside of product engineering had little or no knowledge of lean or agile — and most would have believed them to be “tech things”.

I did an exercise recently with a group, and I felt like Sam I Am from the Dr. Seuss book, “Green Eggs and Ham”.  If you remember the book, the character “Sam I am” is trying to get someone to try green eggs and ham.  There’s a whole rigamarole of objections until he finally tries them and likes them.

For businesses today, the requirement to be able to change is integral. Continuous Improvement (CI) can be a means of ensuring your organisation is keeping up-to-date with the world around them. Although the challenges are numerous, CI can be successful if organisations consider the following 4 recommendations:

Many organisations embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation to agile working, struggle to sustain or scale the benefits they initially achieve. The journey towards agility is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires continued commitment, at all levels of the organisation, to ensure agile ways of working stick.

The first six to 12 months of introducing agile throughout an organisation will result in visible improvements in speed to market, productivity, efficiency and employee engagement.  

‘Well,' I said. ‘Eventually, the blob will get you. It’s important to run as fast as you can in the early days of your transformation, because organisations have an in-built protection mechanism; the ability to morph into a blob of slime that will eventually catch up with you, surround you in slime and kill you off’.

Large organisations are in danger of responding to new world changes and pace with old world traditional thinking, models and answers. This won’t work.