Agile Practices in Non-Software Industries
Have you ever heard of the ‘Getir way of agile’?
The ‘Getir way of agile’ aims to collect best practice from all industries, even from ‘Non-Software’ companies, to create innovative products/increments within a short period of time (which is called a ‘sprint’ in Scrum framework). Below, I want to share a few great agile practices from emerging industries.
- Healthcare — Vaccine Development
After developing ingredients and batch preparation, vaccine testing phases ensure that the vaccine is safe and generating the desired immune response. The problem is, when it comes to genetics, there are different groups of people with different characteristics. So vaccine trials start with a small group and, with results / increments, the affect on bigger groups needs to be observed. Let’s look at the trials in 3 steps:
On the other hand, new methods tried to end Covid 19 pandemic based on an empirical approach. Governments, companies, doctors, engineers and volunteers came together to create the best solutions for the problem that people faced during the pandemic.
One of the best examples is Massachusetts General Hospital’s public health applications during the pandemic. While supporting vaccine trials, the hospital management decided to improve the IT structure in case of emergency and introduced virtual visits to prevent congestion.
2. Automotive — Mobility
In the post-pandemic world, transportation is not only a means of going from A to B with your car anymore. People’s habits were completely changed by fast grocery/shopping services. Also, the distribution of goods was massively important when everyone was stuck at home. So that romantic word ‘mobility’ became a real thing. According to Deloitte’s post pandemic mobility reports, autonomous cars and last mile delivery will be the next big things. So, using more customer-centric/agile approaches will be inevitable for this industry and in time, they will also become ‘tech’ companies.
3. Energy
Climate change affects everything; the economy, energy sources that we’re currently using and most importantly, geopolitics. Clean/green energy has been around for a decade and discussions are ongoing, but sustainability is still a relatively new term, especially for petroleum products. For example, the Vechain Foundation started a project called ‘Digital Carbon Ecosystem’ to help governments and companies to achieve their sustainability development goals and create a crossfunctional project team with people from different specialties. They noticed that it’s really important to create a transparent and trusted blockchain network to track down data and turn it into a reasonable action. This transparency provides traceable and public carbon footprint dashboards for customers and governments. To turn these dashboards into working products, agile approaches are needed, like creating value with cross functional teams. Regulators, designers (including UX designers), engineers and business leads should come together and create an increment in every sprint and get user feedbacks to build a holistic system.
4. Supply Chain
Have you heard that ‘supply chain will be the new currency’? When trying to trace back to the raw materials, products can be hard to track in this complex international supply chain market. Gathering/classifying/using the data inside the supply is even more difficult and hard to know if it has been manipulated or not. Automotive supply chains are highly complex and from time to time, a crisis can occur like the chip crisis during the pandemic. To solve these problems, the BMW Group started a pilot application called ‘PartChain’. With this project, BMW aims to optimize purchasing processes, linked production networks and create trusted verifiable data transactions in the supply chain. Thus, they needed to set incremental goals for every development and created an MVP in 2019. So they managed the pandemic very well and adapted without frustration. That’s agile.
In conclusion, it’s really important to respond to customer needs quickly, especially in this complex environment. To do that, we need different agile approaches from different sectors and to combine them within the cross functional teams to create more innovative and incremental products.
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