Agility at the heart of R&D!

Hesion has been marketing Easyspot, our bay-level vehicle identification solution, for several months, and continues to release new versions of our equipment monitoring software. All this has been made possible by profound changes within the company. In this article, we look at the transformation of our Research and Development (R&D) team.

Our vision of agility

Nearly two years ago, the team decided to radically change its working methods to improve efficiency and handle increasingly complex projects. We decided to use agile methods as the basis for rethinking our organisation.

As the team had no experience of these working methods, we took time to learn about them independently and understand the mindset behind them. It quickly became clear that Scrum should be our starting point. We used various books and websites as resources, including: – The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland; – Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg; – Scrum – 4th ed. – A practical guide to the most popular agile method by Claude Aubry.

All this helped us develop our own vision of agility, and of Scrum in particular.

For us, agility is based on three fundamental pillars: – Trust – Personal accountability – Continuous improvement

How does this work day to day?

Once we had established these foundations, we adapted the information gathered online to our own context. Our first sprint began on 29 May 2017.

Our day-to-day work is now much more consistent, with sprints setting the pace. We have clear visibility of the tasks ahead, as well as an overall direction that becomes more precise as the deadline approaches. Above all, we make every effort to add value to our products, rather than developing features that serve no purpose.

We have also started using a few more sticky notes…

At the time of writing, we are on sprint n°28 and our methodology has evolved considerably. We have transformed our backlog, added a story refinement stage, introduced seasons, changed our boards and updated our tickets… In short, many things have changed over these 28 sprints, and many more will change in the sprints ahead.

So, is it life-changing?

For our team, the answer is YES! We now have a self-organising team with a clear view of the work, products and projects. The sprint review is one of the moments most appreciated across the company. It allows everyone to see the progress of R&D work, but above all to discuss products and gather good ideas.

Our method is constantly evolving, allowing us to keep adapting the way we work to our context. In fact, our current working method is quite different from the one we used in our first sprint.

This implementation has been a success! The whole team has embraced the agile mindset, and the entire company has supported us through this transformation.

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