ARCA develops cash automations technology for retail and financial customers. We make an incredibly complex system that is subject to great deal of customer changes due to new currencies, new technologies, and the demand for customers to be on the cutting edge of cash and coin management solutions. As we continue to expand globally and enter new markets, our product development has to be fast and flexible in order to stay competitive. I started at ARCA last year just as the Agile R&D Program office was launching our hardware product development teams as scrum teams in order to embrace agility and deliver better solutions for our customers. I began as the agile coach for a cross-functional solution platform (program) developing the next generation of self-service bank branch transformation solutions. Two hardware scrum teams and one software scrum team comprised the team of teams, and I served as the agile coach for the agile program. The program had developed a beta-level prototype for a customer in the U.S. and under my guidance and coaching, implemented scrum as the framework for product development. The team quickly settled on two-week sprints, and during the sprint review demonstrated the features and functionality that the teams were able to develop and integrate into the system.
As this was a beta-level technical customer pilot, the team was highly engaged with the customer through the product owner. The team welcomed changing requirements, even late in development. They were fielding frequent requests for modifications to not only the hardware peripherals on the kiosk and the user interface on the display from the customer, but also engineering changes during testing and new feature requests from product management. Business people and developers began to work daily throughout the project. I coached the product owner through maintaining all of these requests and modifications in the product backlog. The product owner learned to use feedback from customers and other stakeholders during the sprint review to adjust the priority of development work during backlog grooming in preparation for sprint planning.
I coached the entire scrum team on the importance of face-to-face communication. As the agile coach, I facilitated daily standups, sprint planning, and other scrum events, design, and brainstorming sessions for the team. The team created a shared understanding and thrived in a highly collaborative, cross-functional, motivated and supportive team environment.
The team focused on delivery of working product frequently by developing a cohesive sprint goal tied to demonstrable functionality each sprint, and a working system during a release. As the coach, I facilitated retrospectives for the team at the end of every sprint to reflect on the agile mindset, practices and roles, relationships and culture, and environment and how the team could improve. Additionally, I coached the team to focus continuously on technical excellence and good design in order to enhance agility and provide valuable, useable, and feasible products for our customers.
Through focus on collaboration, delivery, reflection and improvement and agile practices and principles, the team produced faster, higher quality product development flow.
Until the next Iteration . . .
Jason