Tag: Agile methodology

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Agile And Outsourcing Product Development. Get It? Else, Forget It!

October 14, 2019

In today’s world, Agile methodology and outsourcing product development are hot topics. The beginning of the 90s witnessed the starting of outsourcing product development. Companies jumped at the opportunity to save bucks by hiring top talents at reasonable rates. Agile methodology, when infused later in the 90s, became the cherry on the cake.  Agile is a well-known methodology and most development teams prefer it. It all started in Oregon in the spring of 2000. A group of seventeen software professionals got together to talk about how they might shorten development periods and get new products to market faster.  We have studied the scaling up of the Agile method at most companies, including small firms. Larger companies like Spotify and Netflix were born agile and have become more so as they’ve grown. Also, big shots like Amazon and USAA (the financial services company for the military community), are already in the transition from traditional hierarchies to more-agile enterprises. The CollabNet VersionOne 13th annual State of Agile Report shows a 71% increase in project cost reduction as a primary reason to adopt agile. There was also a 27% increase in “Project Cost Reduction” as a reported benefit of implementing agile.  Additionally, there was a 74% increase in accelerated software delivery from which we can easily conclude that the talent pool became smarter than ever. What is outsourcing software product development? Software product development outsourcing means assigning a third-party company for a particular or all operations linked to a product’s development and maintenance.  The outsourcing vendor provides necessary skills and resources for providing solutions during the product development lifecycle.  Is it possible to implement Agile in outsourcing product development? Many experts had a misconception that the Waterfall approach is the only feasible option in product development outsourcing. Customer satisfaction is a top priority for the Agile method, which aims to accomplish it by delivering software or solutions early and frequently.  Usually, Agile methodology uses practices like: DevOps Scrum Crystal Extreme Programming  However, while outsourcing, implementation of Agile methodology can be challenging. But it’s not impossible either! After all, overcoming challenges will help you achieve success.  Challenges in implementing Agile in product development outsourcing  As we discussed earlier, following Agile methodology can be challenging while outsourcing. So, here are a few challenges that you may face: Insufficient Agile Experience Does your outsourcing vendor follow Agile methodology? This is the first thing that you need to ensure. Due to its growing demand, many IT outsourcing companies are adopting Agile methodology. So, try to choose an outsourcing vendor that follows the Agile way.  The absence of a team structure Teamwork is an integral part of Agile methodology. It requires cross-functional teams to collaborate to provide outcomes to the end client. Assigning software development to individuals can obstruct the Agile way. Because a single person cannot collaborate in the same way as a team. So, make sure to assess the teams of outsourcing vendors. And find out whether they are compatible with Agile or not. Focusing on groups rather than individuals might assist you in developing a network that allows you to remain flexible. Not having clear communication The Agile method is largely reliant on open, continuous communication. So, managing an outsourcing team might be difficult. One of the most efficient methods to tackle this problem is through email or video conferencing. Besides, you can schedule a few team visits every year to better connect with your offshore development team. “We are trying to figure out how to transition from our regular, current cubicle kind of workspace to a more collaborative workspace,” Rajesh Gopinathan, CEO at TCS, tells ET Magazine. Source: Targetprocess blog Why might this be? What led to the rise of the agile manifesto is that people slowly started to realize that the waterfall approach they’ve used with their outsourcing vendors is not that great after all. Fixed price contracts stopped making sense as they do not guarantee real value. The more labor is outsourced to other countries, the higher are the costs. Hence, the main point for outsourcing which is cost-saving loses its foothold. There’re other even deeper-lying consequences. On one hand, the country which outsources – or businesses in this country, not the country itself – they save bucks but lose in the long run as they do not grow their own engineering minds, let alone all the problems that you have working with remote teams – yes, we have all this telecom and internet in place, yet face-to-face communication is irreplaceable. If you often go on business trips to the outsourced destination to talk to your team – again, it’s more costs. Well, the crux is not about how good or bad outsourcing is. The companies which outsource on the other hand – have legacy outsourcing teams. They need to get going as well, to stand up to all the funds they’ve already invested in their outsourcing partner. Agile adoption at INT. 80% of the projects of INT. in FY2020 are classified as Agile. The remaining 20% are the projects whose life cycles are highly predictable. In such cases, the client was clear of the feature set and scope. Eventually, it led to the outcome being divided into a known set of deliverables. These projects usually follow the traditional Waterfall model. Scrum framework adoption at INT. A major chunk of Agile projects at INT. use a Scrum framework. Those Agile projects that do not follow Scrum are typically small (<5 persons). In those teams, the Scrum framework can become a ‘heavy’ process load. In such cases, lighter processes surrounding agile processes are followed. Client Process Adoption at Indus Net Technologies (INT.). Process adoption before working with INT: 31% had a full process in place at the project start 25% had a partial process in place at the project start 46% had no process in place at project start Process adoption after working with INT: 75% had a full process in place 14% had a partial process in place 11% still do

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What You Must Know About Agile Marketing?

July 17, 2017

If you have found it difficult to understand why certain marketing campaigns, despite great analytics and data, don’t actually fare very well in reality, it is probably because these campaigns are not in touch with ground realities. Customers or our target audiences aren’t monolithic forces, and they are not homogeneous, though our data might like us to believe. Each customer or client is an individual, and they are motivated by various internal and external factors to make the purchase decisions that they do. To stay abreast of these disparate individual clients and customers, marketers and decisions makers should abandon the idea of cliched marketing campaigns that run for months, based on data and analytics that a CRM might provide. Agile marketing strategy addresses this issue, and puts individual customers and clients to the forefront. It also reduces the duration of campaign cycles, and ensures that micro-campaigns and hyper-collaborative team efforts bring the flexibility and change required to dynamically evolve our marketing efforts. A little about agile marketing With a focus on end-customer, agile marketing helps teams to work in a highly functional and effective manner, by being iterative, flexible and self-organizing. We must remember that Agile Marketing is not related to Agile Development, and though there may be a bit of inspiration from the way user experience design, agile marketing is an entity that stands on its own. If you wish to bring agile marketing strategies to your team, it is probably better not to use terminologies related to agile software development, as marketing strategies are quite different form software development. Most importantly, developers often follow agile as if it were the New Testament, but marketing teams and CFOs or CMOs need not, and instead, keep evolving their strategies based on changing customer needs and trends. If we look at things in a realistic way, agile marketing is all about suiting marketing strategies to changing trends, technologies, bi-directional conversations, and the unending production of Big Data. In other words, there will soon be a day when we stop calling agile marketing “agile marketing”, and instead, call it just “marketing”.   Here is how agile marketing is usually structured: Agile marketing strategy is often inspired by the Scrum framework, which involves creating lists of priorities. These priorities are taken up by team members or teams in “sprints”. The team or the team member has a very short period of time to complete that marketing exercise, probably 2-4 weeks, instead of 4-6 months in regular marketing campaigns. Teams and members meet each day for short stand-up meetings with the team leader (or the scrum master, if you will), and the various building blocks of the projects (different sprints), are managed to ensure they are right on track, by whoever is overseeing it. At the end of each sprint, a marketing goal or exercise should be completed. At the end of the completion, one reviews the results. Soon after, the next chunk of a marketing strategy is distributed among team members, as different sprints.   Instead of taking it all up as a single and unitary marketing campaign, the agile methodology allows for breaking up of a marketing strategy into sprints, and completing them, discarding them, or altering them based on the results of each sprint. Important values of agile marketing, in simple words Being open to changes in marketing plans As you may have already observed, your customers are not unitary, and belong to diverse demographics and psycho-graphics. It would be foolhardy to reduce an individual to a statistic, and club them under broad categories. Instead, use agile marketing strategy to keep changing your marketing campaigns, as and when your customers’ tastes change. With the proliferation of social media, customers’ tastes, values and needs change almost every other day. Testing and monitoring campaigns rapidly Do not stop at tracking and monitoring customers’ changing needs and trends. Track every sprint that your team undertakes and monitor its success. Each sprint has to teach you something, and should help you move along with your customers. As customers’ trends change every day, you should change your strategy too, just as quickly. Testing opinions and matching them with data Market research and opinion analyses can be taken up as regular sprints, you can match these sprints with the data you have accumulated on your CRM. CRM is quite agile itself, but we tend to look at it as a constant. Using sprints helps you to make sense of your CRM analytics in a more agile manner. Conduct micro-experiments to test larger marketing ideas If you are running a marketing campaign, it has to evolve with your customers. The best way to understand what your customer wants, or how each of one of them is changing every day, is to conduct micro-experiments. These micro-experiments can be tested against your larger marketing ideas, and evolve as you get the results. In fact, these smaller experiments can consist of sprints too. Focusing on individual aspirations, instead of on large markets Agile marketing puts the customer or the client in the center. Marketing strategy itself takes a backseat, and gives more importance to the changing needs and desires of customers. When individual aspirations are given more importance than a monolithic market segment, your marketing strategy is likely to get super-efficient. A radical approach to collaboration Often, collaboration involves various hurdles that exist within hierarchies. An agile marketing framework allows you to collaborate with anybody in your team. Even your most-junior team member will probably be able to communicate with your senior marketing professionals, and your marketing manager may be able to communicate with sales guy better. Of course, as this is a customer-centric model, there will always be collaborations with customers both on social media, and offline, all along the sprints that you undertake. Bringing agile marketing to your work floor To bring agile marketing to your teams, you probably do not have to work too hard. You must remember that this model exists to make things easier, more

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