The Challenge:

The organization I work in as a lower level manager is focused on laboratory-based research and  development, with a diverse pool of individual contributors. One of the main challenges to our business  is to increase our speed of delivery while maintaining high quality standards for reports and outcomes.  As a solution, we would like to implement an Agile framework of project management to achieve this  increase in speed to delivery. In our current work, projects are planned without input from the  individual contributors and tasks are assigned to one or two people each, with little collaboration. When  collaboration or additional resources are required, is can slow down the project while priorities are  rearranged and work is scheduled. All our contributors have more than one project, and managers are  burdened with balancing each person’s time and tracking projects to determine if priorities need to be  shifted. Agile Scrum was identified as a new system that would speed up the work process, allow  everyone to have input into project planning and thereby improve outcomes, and enable managers to  establish clear priorities. Therefore, in this case, the product being designed is our project management  system.

The Learning Launch Tool and Its Application:

We first used a ‘Learning Launch’ of Agile Scrum, in a very simplified way, to help the team learn the  new project system and to get feedback from them about how this framework might be an effective  solution. We chose this design tool because we needed the results of an experiment to know whether  the team members could work quickly with Scrum tools. A team of individuals was chosen for an  internal 3-week project that had very well-defined, straightforward goals, that would be the highest  priority for each person. I identified several key assumptions: the team would embrace the project  visualization tools, work would go faster due to clarity around task assignments and priorities,  communication would be better through daily meetings and Scrum Master facilitation. During the  project and after it was finished, we used weekly retrospectives to get feedback about how the team felt  about this new project framework. The work had been done rapidly and the team members were able  to improve their work quality by collaborating. Generally, Learning Launch was considered a success and  the team was overall happy to continue working with that framework.

Learning Launch 2:

Next, based on insights from the first Learning Launch, we used the new project system in a second  round with the same group of individuals, on a longer (3-month) project. This second experiment  involved interaction with a customer, and less concrete goals. The work required a broader set of  research skills and techniques, and more responsibility for project planning was placed on team  members. The improvements made from the first round were modifications to task visualization  techniques and identification of new Scrum Masters. Although the project was somewhat successful,  the feedback from the team was less positive this time. For example, some team members did not like  having responsibility for determining project goals and some thought the project could have moved  faster. Overall, the team felt that having one project leader to define goals instead of team-defined  goals would have been more efficient.

Learning Launch 3:

As a result, the next test of our new project framework with this group was a project in which the  customer provided very well-defined goals. The timeline of the project was longer, but more predictable  due to the type of work being done. In this experiment, the roles of product owner and Scrum Master  were assigned to different team members. Unfortunately, the third experiment was considered a  failure, because of personality conflicts caused by this change in roles. Competitiveness and lack of trust  in each other led to low team energy and poor communication. Due to the group tensions, the third  experiment with the Scrum framework had to be aborted in favor of traditional individual project work  assignments. It was clear that, despite the defined goals provided in this iteration and experience in the  project system, the team had failed to adopt the Agile philosophy.

Insight and Approach:

The use of Learning Launches was very effective for understanding how the Agile framework could be  used in our organization. We took feedback from all the team members during and after the ‘project  framework’ experiments and executed a plan to develop the implementation of Scrum with that team.  Unfortunately, in successive Learning Launches, the solution seemed to be less and less successful. In  retrospect, there was an unidentified assumption that was not addressed in successive development  steps. It was assumed that individual contributors would understand and accept the Agile philosophy  immediately after learning and practicing the mechanics of the Scrum framework. The design of the  second Learning Launch did not take into account that such an assumption was not validated by  feedback. However, when that assumption proved again to be false in the third Learning Launch, more  effort was placed on training our team members and integrating the Agile philosophy into their jobs.  Considering this experience in the context of Design Thinking, it showed the importance of listening very  carefully to customer feedback from the test launches. It showed that, in general, Design Thinking  requires maintaining an open mind to identify all assumptions. An alternative development approach  would have been to implement additional training and education before starting a new Learning Launch.  I believe it would also have been more useful to implement a Learning Launch with a different group of  people, to have data from a more diverse group.

