Agile at Arup
Adrian Wiggins is Australasia Experience Design Leader at Arup in Sydney.
What would it be like to bring agile frameworks to the design of cities, places and transport that people care about and love?
It’s a tricky thing to think about, but we reckon we’ve cracked the nut.
At Arup, in our Sydney office, we’ve been using agile to deliver planning, design, architecture and engineering of cities, places, precincts, infrastructure and transport networks for a while now. We’ve learned a lot.
To be clear — in this case we don’t just mean agile for teams who develop software or digital products, which our colleagues on Arup Digital News often talk about (ahoy Kevin Cressy).
Agile is an iterative design methodology that values human communication and feedback, adapting to change, and producing valuable results.
At Arup, we use Agile for projects in the planning, design and engineering of cities, places, precincts, infrastructure, and transport networks that people care about and love.
Our aim is to use agile for the design of streets, buildings, metro rail stations, for placemaking interventions, for transport strategy.
So, we mean agile for the teams of people who do this work for clients in government agencies and private developers.
For example, here’s a project working group standup call in one of our 2020 projects (for a public transport wayfinding design system), which was co-ordinated for delivery in a kanban board in Trello:
How do we go about it?
- Project definition for a shared understanding of outcomes, and for confirming the project approach
- Cycle-based working for a regular cadence, and sprints when needed
- Regular, iterative releases of work products for continuous delivery of value
- Team standups for co-ordination
- Jira (kanban) boards for awareness, Miro online whiteboards for collaboration
- Retrospectives for continual improvement and lessons learnt
While in software and digital these techniques are old news, in the built environment the approaches are still emerging.
It seems simple, and it is, but there are some changes in mindset involved. Fortunately they are all good ones, and widely agreed to add value: trusting the team to deliver, the power of conversational awareness, the usefulness of boards to first co-design the project (Miro), and then execute (Jira).
Let’s talk
What’s working where you are? What are the challenges? I’d love to hear — let’s have a yarn… You can contact me at adrian.wiggins@arup.com
In the UK connect with my colleague adrian.gould@arup.com.
And get in touch if you’ve worked with Arup before and you’d now like to run your next planning, design or engineering project using these techniques. We can do it together…
