This is a Doomsday seed vault in Norway. Agile companies scale faster. Don’t keep everything buried in a snowbank.
The way companies used to operate and function is now changing at a rising pace. As businesses grow and operations start to get more complicated and complex, managers need a proper infrastructure that balances off the change required in an organization while being more efficient and effective than ever before. If you are looking for inspiration or need some practical advice, check out one of the most successful agility examples known in the IT industry.
Before moving forward, let’s give a few seconds to the understanding of agile. Agile is referred to the ability to be more quick and vigilant along with changing environments. Agile is best utilized at places where a change is necessary and quick and effective measures are required. When it comes to software development, the purpose of transforming to agile is improved quality and continuous delivery.
In order to dig in deep inside the concept of agile, it is important to understand that agile is related to project management that supports and provides assistance in software development. There are several misleading statements and definitions about agile that do not provide correct information about agile. Scrum and Kanban framework displays the most accurate meaning of agile. Agile is actually in real terms a set of values and principles that are listed on the agile manifesto.
Cisco
Cisco is one of the most well-reputed American multinational companies. It specializes in providing innovative software networking and also deals in networking hardware and other high-tech products and services.
Cisco was initially designed with a waterfall method, its subscription billing platform project adopted a different approach earlier, which was based on separate designs, tests, and deployment teams with each team working. This approach resulted in slowing down the development process, which further resulted in missed delivery dates, quality issues, and overtime.
Cisco then adopted (SAFe) and presented three agile release defects and fixes capabilities and projects. The purpose was to test minor features within SaaS complement and then sending them to the system integration. As a result, defects were reduced by more than 35%.
LEGO digital solutions
The company provides support to the famous toy-brick maker that communicates with customers through wearables, apps, computers, and other channels. At its initial stage, there were five development teams but later on when complexities due to an increase in the number of teams to 20.
Teams were doing good with sprints and scrums but faced problems in cross-team alignment, client collaboration, and release planning. In order to resolve the issues, the group moved forward with the scale agile framework (SAFe) in order to include a program between the portfolio management and teams.
This new approach resulted in improved planning and execution, improved client trust, and a reduction in real dependency issues.
Panera Bread
Panera bread is an American-based company that runs bakery-cafes with more than 2000 restaurants all over the United States and Canada. The company was having issues with IT solutions, as the business was facing a rapid change. It started off with agile-training workshops. After that, the company took one step ahead and tested two crucial projects under the supervision of an agile coach.
After the testing, the company introduced the Disciplined Agile Delivery framework all over the business. This step resulted in a faster and frequent delivery system, better quality solutions, and enhanced relationships between IT and the company.
The digital sales of the company increased drastically after DAD implementation and the company recorded a 25% contribution of digital sales in overall sales. This success came into existence due to an improvement in the mobile ordering process.
PlayStation network
The fact that not many people are aware of, is that each product that belongs to PlayStation, needs more than a thousand engineering members from “Sony Interactive Entertainment” teams across seven to eight cities. The company was already using Agile scrum and waterfall, but it was not enough to achieve the desired results.
The next step that SIE took was to adopt (SAFe) in order to achieve better collaboration, within a month of coaching, the company introduced a release train.
As a result, now more than 600 team members belong to 60 scrum teams now working with (SAFe). SIE managed to reduce initial planning time by more than 25% with the help of the framework. Furthermore, the downtime was reduced which enabled the company to save more than $ 25 million a year.
