Summa’s roots began almost 20 years ago as a small team of big swinging geeks focused on the architecture and development of large-scale custom software applications. I would love to be able to say that the adoption of Agile and Design on top of this base at Summa was a top-down strategic decision to transform how our teams deliver software, but I would be lying. This is both a story about how great teams brought methods together and how we and our clients benefit from combining Agile and Design methods on top of our technical expertise to accomplish great results in transformational projects of many types. To help you benefit from our experience, I will share a bit about our journey, lessons learned, shared principles and values.
Agile’s history at Summa started around 2005 with a couple of small teams working inside of a large client on projects where they were required to comply with onerous waterfall software requirements, design and development processes. For the type of project that we were delivering, it wasn’t working. Agile’s use started as a grassroots movement under-the-radar in that environment, experimenting with new agile methods for day-to-day project management while still maintaining the required RUP and waterfall facade to keep the client comfortable and to comply with policies. A key success factor for this project: Summa developers were committed to positive change and witnessed first-hand the value of agile methods in how they enabled better communication and collaboration between us and our client. Our client sponsor was open to experimenting and participated in the project. Based on results, the engagement of the team, the velocity of development and more, agile caught on like wildfire in project after project. Getting client buy-in to adopting agile took some time. We will come back to gaining Agile buy-in in organizations in a future blog post.
Around the same time that the early Agile projects were ramping up and spreading within Summa, we began more frequently partnering with and later adding a full Design and Strategy practice team to Summa. The team was initially focused on the front-end projects and teamed with senior technical architects to paint the vision for new projects. We quickly found that both Summa and our clients found huge benefits in the combination of Design-led approaches and our technology strategy roots. The value came through effective collaboration across interdisciplinary teams of client business leaders, IT architects, process experts, product experts and more that I outline below. “Design Thinking” and design methods helped us balance our understanding of business drivers and users’ needs to make, and more importantly, effectively communicate decisions about people and their connections. People should be at the center of decisions about vision, requirements, technologies and project plans. We were able to provide a much better foundation for projects that business and technical teams—from Summa and our clients—bought into and better supported.
We now see that the combination of Design Thinking and Agile are essential for the success of any substantial or transformative technology project. Why, you ask? I will outline what we have learned along the way that hopefully can be applied in your organization too.
Agile and Design practices are both focused on better communication, working visually, heavy team-oriented collaboration, transparency, clearer decision making processes, working iteratively, learning and often even having some fun.
A bit more about the value that we see in each of the shared principles of Agile and Design practices when done well and values that you can find in your organization as well:
Communication, transparency and working visually - Over the years, one of the biggest reasons for failure in software development that I’ve experienced is communication breakdown. Establishing design and agile methods and tools helps to create easier paths and predictable patterns for how people exchange information and perspective. Workshops and standups pave the way. Both make heavy use of simple visual tools (whiteboards, markers, post-its). Visual design and agile lifecycle management tools provide the support. Friction and wasted time spent on non-productive tasks is reduced. Overcoming cultural resistance to more transparent communication is often the biggest challenge. Leadership and experience makes the difference.
Continuous learning - And I don’t mean learning new skills, but learning about the business requirements, user needs, competition, available tools and techniques, integrated systems, data and much more. Many times, what is being built is being done in an organization for the very first time. Decision processes, plans and architectures that accommodate learning and change are essential. Old-school waterfall processes made and locked in decisions at the beginning of the project when everyone knew the least. Design and Agile approaches allow learning and making decisions about many aspects of the project at more responsible points in time and getting feedback from users.
Working iteratively and incrementally - Defined iterations like sprints and design phases provide many benefits. We are always learning and need to incorporate learnings into what we plan and do. We may decide to do different things, more or less, reorder/reprioritize, stop completely or do things differently based on what is learned about all aspects of a project. But often it is not one team working alone. Different streams of related work happening in parallel can work on stable understood pieces and more clearly checkpoint on progress and adapt as changes occur. Stepping back to again combine separate streams of work and show them to actual users provides the necessary feedback loop to ensure we are going in the right direction.
Having fun - Fun matters in good teamwork. High performing, collaborative teams like working together and solving problems together. It’s why employee engagement and employee morale are some of the key success criteria we look at when introducing new ways of working. It’s also why Summa is one of our region’s best places to work.
Through these shared principles, we see the following end benefits that you can experience as well:
Better decision making processes - Based on the principles above and at the foundation of both Design and Agile methods, we make better informed tradeoff decisions about scope, technology, time, staffing, dependencies and more together. Business and IT teams understand the “why” and can work toward a common vision with less effort and less waste. Design methods and tools help the most at the start of our engagement with clients, while Agile guides teams throughout the entire lifecycle supported with what we have learned from the Design efforts. Meshing the two together as we do now feels essential to success for all transformative efforts for this reason alone.
Lower Risk, Lower Cost Results - What we are all after in the end is results. Through the application of a combination of Design and Agile Practices and the shared principles above, we can reduce risks and eliminate waste from the development effort, while getting earlier and higher return on investment.
In summary, compared to where we started our journey nearly 20 years ago, we now have a much bigger and more highly visible positive impact on our clients’ business versus just focusing on the technology. At its core, our Agile and Design transformation has lead us to drastically evolve how we engage with and deliver projects for our clients . I believe that many organizations can benefit from the combination as well and recommend looking at what we have learned as a starting point. I now can’t imagine doing any substantive project without applying both together and hope that others can see the benefits as well. There is also a lot more to do to make things work at a larger scale and our teams are focused there next. The team will also be providing more insights in future blog posts about how to make Agile and Design practices, that are often treated separately by other experts and practitioners, work well together.
