About five years ago, Aarons Inc. a lease-to-own retailer
that focuses on leases and retail sales of furniture, electronics,
appliances and computers, was growing faster than anyone projected. So, the
company decided to go through an agile transformation.
Ultimately, the company was missing the critical business
and IT alignment in their project management. It was missing an agreement on
priorities, a common understanding, the culture change taking place and even the
adoption of agile.
“We had to find those core missing requirements and fill the
miss holes,” explained Robert Woods, IT Project Manager, Agile Coach/Trainer,
Aaron’s Inc., at PW&WCBA 2013 this afternoon in the Agile Summit.
Woods and his team sat down explained the agile
transformation process, the ROI, the team engagement, stakeholder management,
etc. According to Woods, these were all key things that management at Aarons
Inc. didn’t know they actually had to be involved in.
“The agile transformation world: a world where every team is
thrilled to be working with each other. I’ve never seen this place before, but
I hear it exists and we want to get as close as we can,” he commented.
The idea of an agile transformation world is an idea that
project managers and business analysts try hard to aspire to, but it
unfortunately doesn’t always work out that way.
“So, we have to take steps to find the core items that we
are missing from a project stand point,” said Woods.
As it turns out, he and his team found that Aarons Inc. needed
a team facilitator, a more servant leadership which is different from the
people coming from a project management history.
“It was a hard change for some of them,” Woods added. The
team facilitator must be a conflict resolution specialist because a lot of
different types of people are working together trying to “make magic happen,”
so there is bound to be conflict.
Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist at IIR USA in New
York City, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety
of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. She previously
worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered
breaking news and feature stories in the tech industry. She can be
reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.
No comments:
Post a Comment