In 2018 Agile was voted ‘itch word of the year’ in The Netherlands. And that’s a shame. Because for the people who really work agile, it is an answer to many questions in a world where everything is constantly changing. What exactly is agile? You can read all about it in the cyan part of the LSD series. A summary on this web page.
Agility
Agility is the skill to flexibly, creatively and quickly generate customer value based on real customer needs while simultaneously controlling the risks in the complex (manufacturing) environment. That’s a mouthful. In essence, develop in small steps based on user input and feedback. The part on ‘risk management’ is tricky. It breathes the old Command & Control thinking. Correct application of the Agile mindset – for example by working with the Scrum framework – automatically creates control and risk management.
A big vaccine in small steps
At the end of 2020, several pharmaceutical companies will come up with market-ready vaccines for the Coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Within 9 months! That’s lightning fast for a vaccine. There are many reasons why these new vaccines are faster – and still safe -, but an important aspect is the so-called ‘rolling review’. Instead of a large batch approach, an incremental approach is chosen, where small pieces are ‘ready’ faster, the feedback loop is shortened through close collaboration and large rework after reviews is avoided. (Thanks to Scrum master Sjoerd Kranendonk for the observation).
Tip : make your product journey visible from first idea to customer experience with an Obeya. It can be done online (for example with iObeya) but based on ’thinking with your hands’ preferably in a live room. An interim solution is to put the facilitator in the live Obeya with a camera on his nose and a microphone above his head. You can read a lot of information about Obeya’s here .
Agile
– Agile coaching
– Agile scaling
– Agile podcasts
– Read about Agile working