Sustainable continuous improvement in product development: organise change as improvement projects your people embrace and carry into daily work.
Plan your next improvement stepChange people carry, not change imposed
There are many reasons for change: better collaboration between projects, or a shorter product development time. Change still means leaving familiar paths, so it is often a source of anxiety. Essential for success is to win all affected people emotionally, so they embrace and drive the change with lasting effect. Organise your changes as improvement projects, embedded step by step, accompanied and sustainable, into the daily routine.
Where successful change starts
Engage your organisation: establish the business reasons, involve the key people and develop a compelling case for change with clear personal benefits. Refine the goals into measurable objectives, prioritise them into improvement steps and assign the resources to coordinate the change.
Start from a careful picture of the actual situation: what already works and can be kept and propagated between projects. Explore how each person can benefit from new work practices, and do not spend much time analysing dysfunctional practices; they disappear once improved practices are adopted.
Changing is not only about adding new techniques and tools. It is also about departing from old habits that are no longer useful. Process documentation that no one reads is waste.
Chronology of successful change management
Where do we want to go?
The change receives a direction through a vision with goals and a behavioural component. Get a balanced view from your team on what matters most, prioritise the topics and build a prioritised list of improvements.
How do we achieve these goals?
Involve both the most enthusiastic and the more sceptical team members in selecting and adapting practices; their caution turns them into your champions. Deploy only rough directives and guidelines, communicate openly, and make successes and milestones visible.
How does it become daily routine?
Involve the participants of the first pilot to deploy the improved practices to all projects. Let participants and structure vary as the number of projects grows, and communicate the new advantages to the complete organisation.
What have we learned?
A periodic retrospective is important to profit from experience. Feedback nourishes the next steps: the difference between where you are and where you want to be is the focus of your next improvement step.
What an improvement project can introduce
Cross-functional and self-organising teams, Scrum Master, scaling Scrum teams.
Product Owner, product backlog, user stories, story mapping.
Sprint backlog and board, daily stand-up, sprint planning, timeboxing, story points, planning poker, reviews and retrospectives, burn-down charts.
Evolutionary design, Model-Driven Development (MDD), Model-Driven Architecture (MDA).
Automatic code generation from models, model transformation, test-driven development, automated builds, continuous integration, code reviews, pair programming, refactoring.
Unit testing, test automation, requirements-driven testing, story and acceptance testing.
Experience and practical examples underline that external support is helpful for introducing sustainable changes.
The strengths of your development team are embraced and refined.
A participatory process raises motivation and engagement in your team.
Successful results appear in a short time frame.
Our experienced coaches gladly advise and support you in introducing sustainable and effective improvement concepts. Tell us about your context in a 15-minute call.
