Pearson’s SuccessMaker: Putting the Customer First in Transforming Product Development Processes — Case Analysis
Challenges in developing 5-year product road map
Greg first has to keep in mind that the firm’s primary growth strategy is transforming Pearson education products and services to digital channels. Greg has two main decisions to make while developing the road map; first is whether to switch from Scrum to Kanban and second whether to focus solely on the SuccessMaker product or concentrate his effort on a company wide agile initiative. There are several challenges associated with these decisions, like:
· Dealing with communication problems that might occur between groups that are not in agile mode and those that have converted to agile.
· Preventing teams from reverting to waterfall approaches.
· Avoiding role ambiguity and accountability issues that might occur due to the change.
· Training the teams on how to estimate their velocity using story points and improving their ability to commit to release dates.
· Preventing context switching through increased awareness of mapping between features and system components.
· Reducing monotony and keeping the teams inspired and motivated through incorporation of cross team deployment of team members.
In addition, Greg has to also put effort towards improving the content road map of SuccesMaker and making it less expensive to maintain and explore options like hosting and subscription based services and enabling portability of data across products.
Benefits and drawbacks caused by the shift to Agile
Benefits: The agile methodology allowed for a more customer driven approach by assigning primary importance in the product development process to meeting customer requirements. Its short development cycles and short stories enabled flexibility in the scope of the project and reduced documentation. In addition, assigning product managers as the owners of the product led to good relations with the customers and sales team. regrouping teams into more diverse sectors eliminated communication barriers between departments like product management, QA and developers. The number of features produced was increased by 75% and development team sizes where reduced by half.
Drawbacks: Due to the change to agile few members at Pearson quit. Not all groups converted to agile mode so there were some communication issues. The QA team was having a hard time adjusting to the changes, as they where accustomed to intense documentation while agile had no requirements documents. In the new methodology both QA and developers where responsible for delivering working code which resulted in role ambiguity and lack of accountability. In addition, managers where struggling with the concept of allowing the team to self manage their daily plans. Overall teams exhibited constant regression to previous waterfall processes, which resulted in performance degradation. Another major problem was inability to estimate number of story points they can develop in a period which in turn made committing to release dates difficult.
When to use agile and when to use waterfall:
Waterfall is appropriate when working for a big client and they enforce very formal approach on vendors or when there is fixed-scope, fixed-price contracts and client doesn’t expect rapid change in the scope. Agile approach should be considered when working on in-house projects and projects where scope is changing rapidly.
Impact of software development methodologies on firms
Product and software development methodologies like agile have great impact on the firm’s ability to meet market demand. A good example for this is Primavera systems, as the company evolved and its customer base grew they where having problems with keeping up with the constant change in requirements, their releases were not meeting the ever-changing market needs and the time frames between releases were unacceptable to their customers. Primavera adopted Scrum first to improve the way it managed product development, then adopted XP practices to upgrade its product quality. Adapting agile methodology resulted in a highly satisfied customer base, and a highly motivated, energetic development environment (R. Martin, 2004). Another example worth mentioning is Spotify which leverages agile software development to stay ahead of their competition, Jeff Sutherland the co founder of scrum says “Google, Amazon, and Apple could crush Spotify in a nanosecond if the company wasn’t perpetually striving to be faster, better, and cheaper. To survive, Spotify has to be Agile. They have to keep on running out ahead” (Jeff Sutherland, 2014). Google, Apple, and Amazon use Agile in some way too but Spotify has managed to turn it into an advantage. The company is broken up into Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds. Squads are completely cross-functional teams, which are grouped together in Tribes. Squads operate as a ‘mini-startup’ and Tribes can be viewed as ‘incubators’ for these startups. Knowledge across Tribes is shared through Chapters and Guilds (Ricky Yim, 2015). The Spotify model allows them to unite their strengths and produce products and features faster and keep up with changing user requirements and market demands.
Developing a company wide agile initiative
Greg should focus on bringing about a company wide agile initiative rather than putting his efforts only into developing the SuccessMaker product. Currently at Pearson only the software development team transitioned to agile while other teams such as the content team still follow the waterfall approach. As Jeff Gothelf, Managing Director at Neo and author of Lean UX, rightly points out, most of the agile initiatives start and end with the product development teams — specifically software engineering. There is rarely a mention of “agile in the HR group” or continuous improvement in finance (HBR 2014). Agile shouldn’t be just about software development, it should apply to everything an organization produces. As the software development team adapts agile mode and shift towards continuous delivery, decisions are made quickly, they deploy products and optimize in hours not months. To support this rapid optimization, the internal organization needs to exhibit that same level of agility. For instance, SalesForce modified twelve agile principles listed in the Agile Manifesto and used them for recruitment (Greg Wasowski, 2014). When adoption of Agile is limited to the team level, it risks being incomplete and dysfunctional, producing little if any improvement for the organization. Hence moving forward with the company wide agile initiative, Greg should make sure that all the management layers adopt the philosophy of “customer-value first”. Implementing Agile across the entire organization usually amounts to changing the corporate culture. Steve Denning director of the Scrum Alliance, an Amazon Affiliate and a fellow of the Lean Software Society suggests the use of organization tools for changing minds like story telling, role definitions etc. (Steve Denning, 2015). Figure 1 illustrates all the tools that could be used to bring about such a large scale change, the general strategy is to start with leadership tools and move to power tools as the last resort.
Scrum vs Kanban
Greg should resist the calls from his software development team to move to Kanban from Scrum methodology. Greg has spent considerable amount of time and resources in the previous year to educate the team about agile and scrum methodologies and the results show for themselves. Changing to Kanban would reset the entire SuccessMaker teams including QA, Product Owners and developers. Moreover, Greg is not as familiar with Kanban as Scrum and it would be difficult for him to measure the success metrics. With Scrum methodology, he was able to have informal hallway conversations with QA and developers and engineering managers and correct them whenever they were deviating from the prescribed methodology. Greg should tout the successes of his scrum implementation within SuccessMaker and extend it to content and curriculum teams at Pearson. Currently those teams are following a waterfall methodology, which is becoming a challenge for fast moving development teams. Greg can evaluate his decision by looking at the key performance metrics of his teams. Since the introduction of agile in SuccessMaker, development teams size reduced, developers were producing better code at faster rate, number of features increased by 75 per cent and the customers were appreciating the product. Greg’s decision to persist with Scrum and introduce it across the broader organization can be made easy since, even David Anderson, founder of the Kanban methodology, himself has said that “Kanban is NOT a software development life cycle or project management methodology! It is not a way of making software or running projects that make software!” David Anderson has also said that, “It is actually not possible to develop with only Kanban. The Kanban Method by itself does not contain practices sufficient to do product development but you apply a Kanban system to an existing software development process.” (David Anderson, 2010)
figure 1: organizational tools
REFERENCES
Robert C. Martin (July 2004). Agile/XP Object Mentor Success Stories-Primavera. Retrieved from http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/Primavera.pdf
Ricky Yim (June 2015). Spotify: An Agile model built to withstand the competition. Retrieved from http://dius.com.au/2015/06/22/spotify-agile-model/
Jeff Sutherland (January 2014). Spotify secret for competing with apple amazon and google.Retrieved from http://labs.openviewpartners.com/spotify-great-agile-example-scrum-done-right/
Steve Denning (July 2015). How to Make the Whole Organization Agile. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/07/22/how-to-make-the-whole-organization-agile/
David Anderson (October 2015). Is there a Kanban Process? Retrieved from https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/kanbandev/conversations/messages/9260
