Our Work

Agile Coaching for the Real World

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Agile Product Development in Biomanufacturing

When a national biomanufacturing company needed to develop a quality control product that had never been done before, they turned to Agile Product Development methods, conducting research and experiments iteratively to test their concepts. The work was scaled across several teams and each sprint they shared their results and mechanical prototypes across teams. Using OKR's and quarterly planning they adjusted and coordinated with each other driving to an incremental product release map.

The cross section of teams included mechanical engineering, data science and bench laboratory research. This process brought new challenges to the teams in aligning the Scientific Method with many Scrum practices resulting in a way that allowed them all to develop together and reduced time driven dependencies.

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Agile Team Alignment in SFO and India

Communication and collaboration are critical even when teams are collocated, but when a Dot Com company in San Francisco grew to two locations a world apart from each other, they knew that they needed help in scaling the Scrum process across continents.

The challenge was in managing a shared code base and prioritizing feature enhancements without driving repeated testing or introducing code changes that affect all feature areas. The organizational design needed smaller teams and dedicated Product Owners so that the developers could focus on the key value areas without the 40 Product managers all requesting individually. Communicating using Scrum ceremonies reduced the interruptions and missed messaging that can happen with remoted teams in different time zones.

Small or Large, Multiple Scrum Teams Need Standardization

Scrum teams are all unique. Yet, there is a need to provide structure that allows them to work together effectively without losing their agency and character. Leadership needs to be able to consume the data across all teams and easily see the big picture. And the more teams there are, the more of a need for tracking metrics that are meaningful to the teams and leadership.

The challenge is avoiding a "scaled" approach that is so rigid that it does not allow for the innovation and dynamic results from self-organizing teams. But also, one that is not so flexible that teams are not aligned with each other and creating impact from dependencies and hand offs.

It is a fine balance that exists in large companies with many, many teams as well as smaller companies with 10 or less teams.