Agile methodology refers to the methodologies used in software development to bring about interactive development, wherein various teams of the organization work together to identify the organizational requirements and solutions. The greatest benefit of Agile development is that the organization achieves faster, better results and most importantly, it ensures that all the departments of the organizations exhibit greater receptiveness towards change.
Scrum is one of the popular Agile methodologies. A scrum master ensures that the agile development team functions seamlessly. He acts as a facilitator to enable teams to organize and responds to changes to align with agile principles. A scrum master is not the project leader. His role is to manage the information exchange process within the organization. Scrum has three roles: product owner, scrum master, and the development team members.
With that said, let’s check the role of scrum and Agile in B2B organization:
Sets the ball rolling for leadership and the team
The primary role of agile is to ensure that the teams in the organization are well aligned with the company’s goals. It ensures simplicity, opinions, and decisions based on data, sets clear responsibility and accountability. It also ensures that there is continuous interaction within the concerned teams and that the decisions are implemented with speed.
If you are experienced in delivering the customer value then you could be a scrum development team member. A team is a very important factor in an agile organization as they deliver the customer value, the more you are senior the more you deliver the customer value. Actually, your seniority is determined by the customer value you deliver.
Helps in making informed decision
Targeted data analytics enables teams to identify lacunae, gaps, problems and opportunities in leads and customers. With the provision of daily updates and reports from team members, it would be easy to fix accountability on a daily basis.
If you are passionate about managing the customers and business domains then the product owner is the perfect role suited your desires. In most companies, the person needs to have the respect, and trust of the business so they can make the decisions.
Testing the ideas
Each of the opportunities identified can be further developed with the help of Agile. It helps teams in creating testing methods and define KPIs to measure the performance of the idea in the testing stage. Thus, an organization can accurately predict the outcome or the potential of a business opportunity before actually launching it in the market. Agile also allows prioritizing the ideas that are to be tested. As such, the best opportunity can be developed and tested instantly.
Validation
Agile methodology allows for validation of the ideas developed through test runs. Be it tweaking up of the sales process or doing away with one of the steps in loan processing, or charting out a new customer territory…all the ideas will need to be validated to ensure that the new idea is streamlined and aligned with the processes in place in the organization. This validation ultimately helps in improving conversions.
Tracking Mechanism
One of the biggest roles that agile and scrum has to offer is its efficient and seamless tracking mechanism which enables the teams to report test performance almost instantly. With the tracking mechanism, the scrum master will quickly be able to review the interactions with the teams and check the findings. Accordingly, the test that delivered promising results can be scaled while those that didn’t deliver as expected can be closed. Since everything is done within a very short time frame, it saves valuable time for the organization as well as the team members.
After each test run, the team incorporates the findings and the results are communicated to the key stakeholders. The scrum master then realigns the priorities based on the test outcome, before moving on to the next test and its findings.
Getting Agile through every department of the organization
The agile methodology should not be restricted to just the teams but must be scaled throughout the organization to operate and function in the most agile manner. This may call for more time and resources, but the results would be fabulous for sure…
If you are excited to help teams work effectively together and want to change the world with scrum and agile methodology then the scrum master role is perfect for you, for example, people are working in coaching, teaching, and facilitation.
Agile methodologies help build credibility. The results of agile methodologies tests will percolate across the marketing department. The teams can be guided with the results of the tests, which in turn will be provided to the marketing department along with a set of business rules which need to be established for incorporating the test results. For example, instead of just a couple of war rooms, the companies can have multiple war rooms to focus on each different area of activities such as customer acquisition, loyalty-building, upsell, cross-sell and more.
Agile methodologies can add huge value to any marketing company and help them steer ahead of the competition. For best results, it is recommended that the organizations create one war room at a time, focus on one key idea and ensure its seamless operation. Only once the effectiveness of the war room is established, should the company plan to add more rooms.
This systematic approach will help new teams gain massive support and the business leaders will be able to manage and monitor each team better. As such, the resources also will be well aligned. This will also help businesses to cut through red tape and garner team capabilities for generating better outcomes quickly, effectively and efficiently.
