»Football is my passion.«
From a global perspective, there is no better time to experiment than in times of crisis, to prove all sorts of points or to scale different concepts that you have so far only tested theoretically. Ana Burica, head of product and digital platform development at A1 Croatia, responsible for development of core and non-core products as well as TV platforms & My A1 shares her “agile” experiences of the past months during the COVID 19 crisis with us.
Locally, here at A1 Croatia, we chose to bet on agile at scale. By that, I mean we used this unique situation to prove our scaling efforts have actually become our new standard within this, so called, new normal.
»Agility proves its point in the time of crisis and change.«
From experimenting to setting a new standard
Transformation towards agile at scale in A1 started well before COVID19 put it to test. Agile as means of transforming the organization into a more flexible, iterative, insights driven, collaborative, self-organizing environment has been present in A1 for years now and we have seen a long way from introducing it as an experiment to seeing it work in Business As Usual environment of our core business. There is, of course, nothing unusual or unexpected about this as shifting paradigms in a big company is never an easy task (or better call it a movement) due to long list of reasons. However, it is a very much necessary, never-ending journey of trying, failing, learning, adapting and scaling which you undergo in order to increase the organization’s drumbeat and consequently ensure your company remains relevant in delivering value to the market.
It takes a village to reach scale
We have been riding high on a steep learning curve since we introduced Scrum framework to the very core of our business. This journey has been anything but one-dimensional or straightforward, involving a majority of our company’s departments and requiring significant efforts towards certain shifts in mindset and culture in order to show results. We started scaling with a lot of question marks, insecurities, unknown outcomes and impediments on our way. Nevertheless, with a lot of support from our key stakeholders and an extraordinary will to succeed the teams demonstrated, significant milestones have been achieved within that set framework, both from end customers’ as well as organizational perspective, laying foundations for this new normal.
How we successfully tested 4 values of Agile through COVID19
We gained momentum, found our way and then ended up in the lockdown. Somehow, naturally, these same teams found themselves in the center of the so-called COVID19 marketing plan, carrying out development of products, new and adapted processes and benefit packages to our customers, fully agile and remotely throughout March, April and May period. What our teams, together with the rest of the organization, have been through can easily be illustrated and valued through the perspective of 4 values of Agile, with no exception:
Teams we have been building to scale have shown maturity, flexibility, efficiency in this heavily reduced time to market situation as well focus on interaction that adds value to the customer in these extraordinary times as well as efficiency when it comes to extreme changes and shifts from the initially set plan. This is how we know agile at scale works in A1.
Agile truly is a behavior no book can provide a recipe for.
If I were to stress out my main learnings so far, it would be:
• Agile transformation is not about adopting agile development methodologies. It interferes so much deeper and broader in the organizational culture and behaviors. I embraced that fact once we started infiltrating agility into the very core of our business/ organization. At that point, you start differentiating clearly between agile adoption and agile transformation. In A1, we started this journey many years ago by adopting agile within our digital teams that primarily focus on software development. We were given space and resources to observe, steer, iterate, educate ourselves and the organization along the way, and subsequently relied heavily on that learning curve once we decided to scale agile.
• Read the textbook but do not follow blindly because you will fail. There is absolutely no ‘one size fits all’ approach to transforming the way your organization handles development and customers, overcomes obstacles, and delivers the best possible product to the market. It is critical to allow the teams to explore and find what works. This is especially true when you work in a big, complex system, in a rather traditional industry.