Agile Success stories from non-IT businesses

Agile is the buzz word of the 21st century in the tech industry. Since its conception in 2001, it grew into a mammoth development methodology, encompassing 40+ agile frameworks: from enterprise to startup to management frameworks.

Nowadays, we tend to associate the “agile” concept either with early frameworks, like Scrum or XP, or with software development and specific ways of working, like incremental development, frequent deliveries, or cross functional and flexible teams.

Agile looks and feels like it was specifically designed for coders and testers. It seems unimaginable that a museum or the military could work in sprints, adapt to fast changes, or deliver incrementally. And yet, some of the most surprising Agile success stories come from outside of the tech industry.

The Agile Legal team from Lonely Planet

When you are the legal counselors for one of the largest book publishers on the planet, you are bound to be constantly busy. From managing contracts to business strategy advisory, the legal team at Lonely Planet faced exhaustive day-to-demands and constant rework. All progress was slow, work kept piling up and any improvement ideas had long been put on the back burner.

At this point, it might seem counter intuitive to force the fast-paced nature of Agile onto the perfectionism of the legal profession. But the team did just that: started being and working Agile. They adopted lean-agile concepts - delivering value, reducing waste, and continually improving. After designing a points-based measurement of work size, they designed their own version of a Kanban board and started monitoring and expediting the workflow and blockers.

This entire change and adoption of methodology took roughly to 100 days, and the outcome was compelling: the productivity of the team had improved by 25% in just a bit over 3 months.

Agile makeover for art history

In the early 2010s, Netherland’s oldest museum - Rijksmuseum, National Art Museum, was in dire need of a ‘facelift’. Up to that point, all art pieces were arranged by specialization, each having its own curator: ceramics were displayed together, regardless of historical period, same was true for canvas arts and so on.

Museum curators realized that organizing installations by timeline (from Middle Ages to present times) would provide a more coherent experience to the visitors.  But that meant an enormous amount of work, for which key was the collaboration between curators, each an expert in their historical period and type of art objects. One more constraint was the limited number of items that could be displayed, in order to give a real sense of the timeline while providing other curator groups enough space for their own installations.

Over the next 1,5 years, interdisciplinary teams of art history specialists negotiated, constructed, improved and delivered dozens of art installations. The art history of the past thousand years had been reimagined and restaged by teams of curators, each with their own expertise, working together, changing, adapting and delivering one art installation at a time.

The outcome was well worth the effort: in 2013, the year of the museum’s reopening, the total number of visitors exceeded 2,5 million.

A very Agile plane

Development of military systems is one of the most expensive industries in the world, with costs measuring into billions of dollars, in US alone. Consequently, companies are struggling to balance high costs against delivering high quality, while also meeting a long list of norms and regulations.

As one of the major players in the military aircraft industry, Saab Aeronautics was facing similar problems when they decided to introduce Agile methodologies, back in the mid-2000s. At first, small independent software development teams were introduced to Scrum, becoming the first Agile incubators at Saab. With the arrival of the Gripen fighter program, more Agile frameworks were adopted and put to work at every level and in every discipline: software, hardware and fuselage design.

When your backlog holds the building of a fighter plane, and the people delivering that backlog are 1000 engineers divided into 100 teams, Scrum alone is just not enough. So, more Agile frameworks were brought in, from Lean, to Kanban, to XP and others.

All 100 teams worked in synchronized, 3-week sprints for a little under 5 years. In the end, they delivered what is, probably, one of the most expensive Agile-made products in the world: the Gripen E fighter jet.

The example list of Agile being successfully implemented in non-IT environments can go on further, with cases such as Mission Bell Winery in California, or the National Public Radio in the US. But what all these stories go to show is that Agile is not only for the tech-savvy. The very simple (and highly human) values of Agile, coupled with a clear goal and the determination to change things for the better, can improve the results and environment of any business, regardless of their industry or field.