If you want to ace digital, you need to ace agility. We’ve made the whole journey from using waterfall models to agile methodologies and today proudly profess to being ‘Digital First, Digital Now’. We leverage agile methodologies in our software development lifecycle (SDLC), making it easy for us to deliver value faster, with greater quality and predictability.
Here are six ways agile methodologies help our software teams drive business value:
1. Delivery focus:
The agile framework enables our team to be more efficient, saying goodbye to the army of “frequent follow-ups with spreadsheets.” They also don’t have to spend as much time on documentation and other tasks that don’t directly contribute to development and delivery. Instead, they can put their energy into creating and delivering the best possible solution.
2. Predictability:
The methodology has helped our developers give more accurate estimates of how long tasks will take, and as a result, outcomes are better predicted. Previously, the person with the loudest voice could get their work done faster (agree?). Now, with visibility taken to the extreme, decisions are based on fact-based processes.
3. Collaboration:
The scrum process framework has been hugely beneficial for effective collaborations among our teams working on complex products. This is especially true during our ‘sprint’ events, which play a big role in enabling transparency on project progress to all those involved.
4. Improved quality:
Using an iterative approach to manage projects, we keep working on them in intervals, making improvements each time we repeat the process. This consistent focus on improvement and quality control has helped us create some of the best solutions for our clients delivering top-quality results.
5. Seamless deployment:
Leveraging “CI/CD pipelines”, a path of building, testing, and deploying code, with “DevOps” has helped the development team to streamline and deploy flawlessly. The release management of applications is now controlled and tracked end-to-end.
6. Agile metrics:
KPI’s such as ‘burn down/burn up’ at product and sprint level, agile velocity, cumulative flow diagram (CFD), throughput and much more helps track our progress right from the product development to the implementation stage. These tools have been super helpful in making sure we’re delivering what we need to on time and making the best use of our resources. Plus, they help us give the business the maximum benefits by delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) with each iteration.
Real-world examples
A key agile delivery management success story using scrum is when we developed a unified workforce management & productivity tracking platform over 18 months. Just like a rugby team (scrum is named after the sport!) training for a big game, scrum encouraged our team members to learn by doing, self-organize while tackling a problem, and reflect on their successes and failures to keep getting better. This helped us deliver the product on time and with top-notch quality. Plus, our team was motivated and happy to be working in a self-organized way, which helped deliver continuous value to the business.
We recently leveraged agile/devops best practices to migrate a legacy 20-year-old platform used by over 600 users into a modern web and mobile-compatible solution. We had complete control over the development and were able to predict and deliver the final product on time. Our agile delivery metrics saw significant improvements. Velocity improved by 30% & delivered/committed ratios improved to 98%.
Looking Ahead: Empowering the organization
We’re really excited about the future here at Firstsource! One of our big goals is to get many of our teams on board with the agile delivery best practices. By doing this, we think we can make our product delivery more efficient and ultimately gain more business impact.
Another thing we’re focusing on is governance based on metrics. We want to make sure we’re staying productive and predictable as a company, and using data to guide our decision-making can help with that.
Some of our projects have evolved from scrum to self-contained product-oriented delivery (POD) teams that will help us to achieve higher efficiencies. Overall, we’re really excited about the potential that all these changes will make Firstsource an even better place to work!
Follow our hashtag #FirstsourceTech to stay updated on all that’s happening in the tech space at Firstsource.
