Faster time-to-market in complex pilot projects with agile

The challenge

While the developers of other pilot projects are often breaking completely new ground in terms of technology and product goals, our pilot projects did not seem to be about mastering complexity at first glance. Rather, the aim was to find ways to significantly shorten the time to market. And yet, when discussing project suitability, it became clear that they all had good reasons to try an agile approach:

Some of the projects were aimed at battery-electric drives or the conversion of other components from electro-hydraulic to fully electric. In another case, the focus was seemingly only on dealing with obsolescence. And yet the clarification of the questions that arose was anything but trivial and simple. Changing responsibilities, scarce resources or market-specific authorisation requirements also made things more difficult.

Each pilot had its very own framework conditions and special features. What they all had in common, however, was that they had to achieve a drastic reduction in time-to-market, involve system suppliers or development service providers and deal with and react to unforeseen project changes, some of which were enormous in scale.

The procedure

After clarifying the suitability of the project, the composition of the Scrum team, including the distribution of roles, was discussed and determined. There were some significant differences between the individual pilots. In addition to different considerations regarding the distribution of roles, team size and composition as well as the involvement or connection of international colleagues, system suppliers, development service providers and partners in different constellations also played a role. While some started out as a pure engineering team, others set themselves up as interdisciplinary teams from the outset, for example to also have project purchasing on board. In the same way, there were teams where development partners had to be connected in the traditional way, through to teams where development service providers were an integral part of the Scrum teams, both on-site and remotely.

What all the pilots also had in common was that the underlying projects had already begun development or preparation in the traditional way. We therefore opted for a step-by-step approach with event-based training for the team members: after a kick-off with brief basic training, an event-based in-depth training session took place. This was followed by the definition of working agreements, creation of the initial product backlogs, stage planning and the start of the first sprint. Stage planning is one of the most important adaptations of the Scrum framework, which originates from software development, in order to effectively organise the development of mechatronic products. We supported and coached the Scrum teams throughout the subsequent sprints with sprint changes and dailies.

In addition to supporting a short time-to-market and a significantly improved handling of changing requirements and framework conditions, the main benefits of introducing Scrum were seen by those involved as an improvement in transparency, better collaboration between distributed teams, a better focus on important tasks and a reduction in project risks.

Im nächsten Schritt werden die Erfahrungen aus den Piloten reflektiert. Und es wird geklärt, wie man im Unternehmen hinsichtlich agiler Arbeitsweisen fortfahren möchte: Ergeben weitere Anwendungen und möglicherweise Skalierung von Scrum für das Unternehmen Sinn? Für welche Projekte ist es gegebenenfalls geeignet und in welchem Kontext? Auch die Rahmenbedingungen und Schritte zu einer möglichen Ausweitung gilt es zu klären.

The next step is to reflect on the experiences from the pilots. And it is clarified how the company would like to proceed with regard to agile working methods: Do further applications and possibly scaling of Scrum make sense for the company? For which projects might it be suitable and in what context? The framework conditions and steps for a possible expansion also need to be clarified.