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Agile Practices in Commercial Saas Teams SAMINT-MILI 2036 Master’s Thesis 30 credits May 2020 Agile Practices in Commercial SaaS Teams A case study on the adoption of agile practices in non-software teams Bruno Petersen Master’s Programme in Industrial Management and Innovation Masterprogram i industriell ledning och innovation Abstract Agile Practices in Commercial SaaS Teams Bruno Petersen Faculty of Science and Technology Agile software development methods have seen great success in software Visiting address: Ångströmlaboratoriet teams. Research on the topic of adopting agile methods in development teams Lägerhyddsvägen 1 is extensive. In the literature key enabling factors are identified and numerous House 4, Level 0 benefits of agile ways of working are named. Less attention has been payed to Postal address: the non-software functions in software development organizations, though. Box 536 Moreover, little is known about how well the enabling factors and benefits for 751 21 Uppsala software teams translate to other teams in the organization. The goal of this Telephone: study is to evaluate what benefits agile methods provide to non-software teams, +46 (0)18 – 471 30 03 whether the enabling factors are similar and what the challenges and drawbacks Telefax: for adopting agile methods in commercial teams are. Using the case of the +46 (0)18 – 471 30 00 Swedish Software-as -a-Service company Funnel, which introduced agile Web page: practices into their commercial teams, these questions are tackled. The study http://www.teknik.uu.se/student-en/ finds that knowledge transfer and governance are core areas that need to be engaged in during the adoption process. With decisions being made more autonomously ensuring the exchange of relevant information is crucial. The autonomy creates new demands for the governance structure, making a guiding vision and clear strategic direction crucial for individuals to remain capable of acting. An additional focus is laid on the interplay of organizational values and agile methods. The study concludes that the introduction of agile methods to commercial teams is beneficial for the organization and helps teams solve more complex problems. It further argues that the distinction drawn between agile practices and agile enablers is misleading because of the reciprocal dependence. Finally, it is argued, that the distinction of benefits and drawbacks arising from agile methods favors agile adoption as an end in itself. The actual benefit of adopting agile practices may lie with how it makes an organization practice change, engage proactively with organizational challenges and, as a consequence, develop a greater exaptive potential. Keywords: Agile in non-software development, agile enablers, agile methods, case study Supervisor: Ville Svärd Subject reader: David Sköld Examiner: Åse Linné SAMINT-MILI 2036 Printed by: Uppsala Universitet ii Popular Science Summary Writing and developing a new software programs is a very difficult problem. As the problems that software can solve grow day by day, so does the difficulty of writing it. The first computer programs were written by individuals. But as computers became more powerful more things could be done with them and writing a new software program was getting so difficult, that it often required the collaboration of multiple people. In response to these difficult challenges software companies and programming teams started planning out how to develop software. They made lists of all the features they wanted to include in the new program (e.g. it has a search function, the buttons have change colors etc.). They then planned the time it would take to build the features and in what order they would need to be built. Only then did they go ahead and write the software. What became clear, though, was that this was not working very well. Customers changed their mind or did not like the features they had asked for initially. The approach of planning out the development of a piece of software from start to finish did not deliver the results expected, for both the programmers and customers. A new kind of method emerged to better deliver the expected results. Instead of planning long into the future, the software-program would be created in small pieces and every piece was double checked with the customer, to see if things were going in the right direction. This new approach is called agile software development and became hugely successful. There are now many different variations of agile, but the core values remain the same. What agile software development made possible was for teams of people to solve very difficult, complex problems, that the normal methods could not solve. Seeing how successful these new agile methods were for software development, other people began to take notice. Many of the agile software development methods did not have anything to do with software. They were principles on how to communicate, or how to plan work in small chunks and then talk to the customer. Slowly these agile methods are being used in other areas outside of software teams and changes are made so that they fit better. This study looks at one example where agile methods are being used in teams that do not develop software. Specifically, this study looks at the people and teams that are working in customer support, sales and marketing in a Swedish company called Funnel. This company also produces software, and the software teams in the company use agile methods. The other teams in that company are only getting started in using these methods though. Because agile ways of working are such a new thing for non-programming teams this is a very interesting case. The study asks three questions: 1. What are the things that a team or company need to have in order to make it possible for them to use agile methods? (How do the enabling factors make agile methods possible?) 2. How does this make the non-software teams (sales, marketing etc.) work better (or worse)? 3. What are the biggest difficulties do teams have when trying to us agile methods? The study looks at one company, Funnel, in great detail. In this study 19 people from different jobs in the company were interviewed and the results were analyzed carefully. iii There are a couple of changes that happened at Funnel with the introduction of agile methods. Teams divided themselves up into new groups and many people are also paid in a different way. It might be surprising that pay has something to do with working agile. The reason behind it is as follows. Just as the software programming teams needed to work together to write very complicated programs, many people in the commercial department (i.e. the salespeople, marketers and customer support employees) at Funnel need to work together to solve difficult problems. It is very common, though, that salespeople for example are payed based on their individual performance. That means the more you concentrate on your own work, the better your results are, meaning you get paid better. This makes it difficult if you want to work together. At Funnel this system was changed to encourage working together. With that out of the way people formed new, small teams. Another big part of ‘agile’ working is that people can make their own decisions and do not need to wait for their boss on every small thing. With all these teams it was suddenly very difficult to know what everyone was up to. And being able to make your own decisions it can sometimes be hard to know what to work on. What the study showed was that the teams have to find new ways of sharing information. In addition, now that people make more and bigger decisions it has become even more important for people to know the general direction everyone is moving in. This can be imagined like pulling on a rope. If everyone is pulling in different directions, nobody will move. But if everyone pulls in the same direction you move very quickly. For that to work, people in the company need to know what that shared direction is, it is often called a shared vision. There are many more things and nuances that came out of this study and that are explained in the study itself. Overall, using agile methods in the commercial teams at Funnel was successful in improving how people work together. Answering the first of the three questions on the enabling factors, the result was that the idea of specific conditions or enabling factors that a company needs to have to adopt agile methods is misleading. For a company or a team, what matters is that they improve in solving difficult problems. Agile methods are just as much a part of that as the ‘enabling factors’ are. The distinction made in the research literature does not add much to the practical work of the teams. The second question on the advantages and drawbacks of agile methods shows that there are definite advantages to starting to work agile. The plus of working with agile methods, though, may not actually come from the new way of working. Instead, it seems, that part of the benefit for the teams comes from them thinking about how they work and want to work. It is almost like the company is doing exercise in how to change. And when the world changes they are better prepared to deal with changes, just like someone who works out regularly is better prepared to go for a run when they suddenly need to. The last question on the difficulties shows that many new problems still come up. There needs to be a shared vision for example. Another difficulty is that it is very difficult to set expectations with people.
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