By Stéphane Abiven , Project Director, Kurmi Software
Agility, a must in transformation
The profound transformation of the business world is impacting every company, regardless of their size or line of business. Companies need to be efficient, adaptable, and decisive in these emerging areas:
Digital technology, including its new business models
Connecting the digital and physical world, due to the decreasing -cost of technology
Reduced time to market
Capacity for innovation
Environmental Changes caused by New Competitors, Business Models, or Solutions.
To meet these transformation challenges, companies must bring Agility into every stage of their projects’ life cycle.
This cross-cutting approach, from sales to operations, is not easy to implement. In fact, because there are so many Agile models, deciding how best to introduce Agility can be a challenge on its own. Additionally, none of the standard Agile models can match all of a company’s needs and specific features.
The experience of pioneering Agile companies shows us that using the most adopted models, like SCRUM, might not meet every need, and can involve constraints that companies find hard to control such as: geographical scatter; employees and customer behavior, partners who don’t know their way around those models; usage of contractors; full portfolio management; IT-centric models; and more.
To overcome these limitations, the emerging solution must rely on the mixed use of traditional methods and the techniques and principles of the other Agile methods. In other words, hybridization.
Agility at Kurmi
To meet its transformation and growth challenges, Kurmi has chosen this Hybrid approach for its project management. Kurmi Hybridization targets three areas:
- Governance
- Methodologies
- Skills
a. Governance
Governance consists of; setting up processes and tools to align business priorities with the company’s overall strategy, properly allocating human and financial resources, and protecting the company’s business based on an initial risk assessment. For governance, Kurmi has chosen to set up a portfolio management method based on a three-level ranking of opportunities and projects. This ranking ensures that the most strategic and sensitive opportunities and projects are visible to the Management Committee while others are visible to department heads.
Prioritizing projects in this way means that teams are mobilized appropriately. By highlighting strategic and sensitive projects, the Management Committee is always informed and can quickly allocate additional resources.
b. Methodologies and skills
Several methodology experiments are under way, using a combination of traditional techniques and principles associated with the Agile SCRUM and Kanban methods. These experiments are deployed in internal projects, with a twofold objective: to deliver value as quickly as possible, and to adapt Kurmi’s resources to these Hybrid techniques and principles.
c. To sum up!
The two key areas for successful transformation are:
1. ‘Doing the Right Things’ – focusing the company’s efforts and resources on initiatives that serve its transformation
2. ‘Doing the Things Right’ – making sure chosen initiatives are effective
d. And in concrete terms for Kurmi?
In summary, while the aim of Kurmi’s governance is “Doing the Right Thing”, the focus of the methodology and skills development is “Doing the Things Right.”
The direction Kurmi has taken by introducing hybrid techniques, practices and processes into its project life cycle is a strategic decision by Kurmi’s management to support its double-digit annual growth, globalization, expansion of its customer base, and number and size of its projects. In short, to keep its leadership position in Unified Communications management software as new challenges emerge.
Through this transformation, Kurmi will deliver increasingly complex projects more quickly while leveraging activity flows and priorities to allocate human and financial resources more effectively.
All these developments have a single aim: strong lasting customer satisfaction.
With this transformation, Kurmi will deliver more complex projects more quickly.
