Agile Principles Can Help in Continuously Improving Bps Processes

By the word AGILE, our ears tend to listen to the methodology that has been steamed up quite high in the recent years in the world of software development. There have been colossal dialog and panels by experienced agile practitioners who keep pitching on how one can use the "Agile Manifesto" and the associated frameworks, terms and procedures when it comes to development and SDLC life-cycle and apply the same to service delivery.

All the discussions about AGILE add to the esoteric and often quasi-religious set of the audience who summarize Agile Service Delivery as a cookbook applied only to the software industry. But that doesn't hold true to fulfillment.

In real business, it's not just the software teams who can strictly adhere to the AGILE terminologies. In fact, many of the techniques of agile development have continuously been used in product markets for quite a long time now – stand-up discussions, reviews through visual management, prioritization of work, and division of projects into chunks. Having said that, it won't be indisputable to say that the use of Agile has been a buzz for quite a long time now in case of major product giants including Microsoft and Google for the product development & implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to understand - "Agile is a way of working. It just cannot be limited to the service delivery" and analyze the benefits of implementing Agile in the BPS industry.

What is Agile?

"What if we could create workplaces that drew on all the talents of those doing the work? What if those talents were totally focused on delivering extraordinary value to the customers for whom the work is being done? What if those receiving this unique value would be willing to offer generous recompense for it? How would these workplaces operate? How would they be reconciled with existing goals, principles and values?

With Agile, there came an answer to the above. Agile brought a striking convergence toward a family of goals, principles and values that was demonstrably more productive and responsive to the customer needs than traditional management.

Agile is an iterative and incremental delivery approach that helps teams to deliver "value" to customers & adapt to the change faster. Instead of betting everything on a "big bang" launch as generally followed in traditional approach, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable increments. With a maximum customer partnership and considering "Change is a part of life", deliverable are evaluated continuously and feedback implemented instantly to ensure "values" are getting delivered and customers are delighted.

Current business challenges faced by BPS industry

• Customer Expectations: New tools & technologies in the market have resulted in increasing customer demands. It's a challenge to push the teams to understand the changing customer needs & work effectively to accommodate customer demands.

• Limited Resources : Major challenge faced by the BPO industry is that they are forced to get the maximum output from a limited number of resources. Outsourcing companies are expected to produce the best results with same skill sets and minimal cost.

• Long Delivery cycles: Another challenge is the delay in customer satisfaction as customer is involved very late in the delivery life-cycle. This leads to late realization of the work done & ultimately increased chances of rework to accommodate the feedback, if any, in the end.

• Resistant to change: Agents are expected to provide results in timely manner with adequate initial training. They are accustomed with regular & stagnant working environment that any change in the policy & working environment becomes practically impossible for them to get used to.

• Communication Gap: At times, it is impossible to let the same information flow from top hierarchy till the bottom level agents without a common platform to connect with everyone. This leads to disconnection amongst the team as the same information is not imparted amongst all the team members.

• Improve and Improvise: It's difficult for the teams to improve without any regular feedback. With lack of insight & awareness, the team is unable to reflect on how they can improve further. This even mitigates the opportunity to bridge any gaps or progress via continuous improvement.

Standards enforce the AGILITY Model

Over and above, even the CMMI 2.0 model (an undeniable standard and a pre-requisite to run successful BPS industry) empowers to deliver on the promises of agile approaches. Organizations are progressively seeking guidance from the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) to both strengthen and scale their implementation of Agile.

Furthermore, ITIL4 enlists the seven guiding principles that guide any organization in all situations, irrespective of changes in its goals, strategies, type of work, or management structure.

These principles, too support Agile Manifesto:

Without further debate, it is indeed truly evident that the customer oriented BPS industry has always been open to embrace the Agile Manifesto and observe the practices in their system of working. After all, AGILE isn't a science fiction. It's an applied thinking that basically involves:

1. Frequent customer participation
2. Open and clear negotiations with every member in the team
3. Changeable scope of work
4. Ideology of welcoming the nascent results incrementally and at small, regular intervals

Acceptability to the agile model in the industry

Agile has not just been introduced to the working practices but it has been extensively welcomed by the BPS industries due to the fact that:

• Meet goals early: The scope of work is largely defined into cycles and deliverable timelines are short-timed. Hence, the achievable goals are met well within the timelines.
• Avoid Severe Backlash That Hit Profits: The value of the effort is realized much sooner. It has proven as a cost effective model as it reduces errors which in turn reduced rework, hence saving time and improving the productivity of the team and time for the company. It accelerates the delivery process and improves scope of profit for the business
• Self-Improvement Teams: It is indeed an opportunity that is laid down to track the teams' daily tasks and let the individuals take personal responsibility both for solving the customer issues and ongoing process improvement.
• Team building: Culture of working queues as a pull was introduced rather than traditional culture of awaiting allocation of work as a push. It means addressing client difficulties based on a personal understanding of criticality rather than slavish SLA driven responses.
• Risk management: Any unforeseen changes were incorporated much before the actual completion of the entire project. It made easy for the team to identify the dependencies as the stand-up calls were scheduled daily which deferred the practice of just communicating on emails.

Small steps leading to bigger changes

Taking small incremental but significant steps of bringing a change in the traditional work-styles have ultimately led to exponential growth & have been revolutionizing for the BPS industries. In the last decade, the percentage of CMMI appraised organizations using Agile has grown to 80%, ultimately leading to a business propulsion .

According to the Communication value triangle, any major change begins with the small step(s). The implication of these steps rigorously pave a way to plethora of domains making business bound to reach the apex by leading an example and thus innovate the industry.

Prerequisites for Agile based Delivery process Readiness

•Customer on-boarding: Customer is responsible for the upkeep of the product backlog. He gives the "what" of the requirements with descriptions, & suggestions on how it will work.

•People awareness: Training to be conducted so that team is familiar with activities. Since Agile is a mindset change, people should understand the concept of working in a pull model rather being forced to take up the work

•Tools to be set-up to execute the agile process. In an Agile approach, team members have to log work hours to enable issue tracking.

•Definition of Done & Definition of Ready to be defined: The non-functional requirements & acceptance criteria should be clear before a team starts to work in a sprint.

•Clear Process– Before starting to work in an Agile model, the Process to be laid out for the team: (requirements as Product Backlog, Sprint Plan discussion, RACI matrix, Metrics & Control should be baselined)

Case study @ Wipro DOP (BPS)

The Wipro DOP team tried to encompass the traditional Agile methodologies outside the scope of software development projects and took into account a whole new domain with mixt stepladders unlike the defined phases of SDLC life-cycle. Wipro fettered the processes that deliver the maximum value in the process chain and successfully implemented it in an Agile Model - in the various transitions involved in the BPS industry.

A regular transition project typically involves end to end practices starting from the 'project launch & team on-boarding' till the final stage when 'set up is done and the client provides shadow support and extensive feedback' to run the project in Wipro environments.

1.   Transition Initiation and Planning

2.   Transition Execution - Knowledge Acquisition, Knowledge Transfer, Shadow Support, Primary Support

3.   Transition Closure

Instead of taking up the entire work in one go and delivering to the customer at the end of the transition, the deliverable were identified as User Stories. User Stories then evaluated to check the mutually exclusiveness and priority.

Team reviews the user stories and allocated them to different phases (Sprints). Sprints were generally of four weeks and after each sprint, the customer was involved and feedback from the customer were incorporated going forward

To not enforce too much change in the already ongoing project practices, MS teams integrated with Planner (an open office communicator) was setup to track the progress of tasks and bring to closure. It served as a platform to manage their work and view associated tasks visually with the other members of the team in a transparent manner. This paved a way for a self-organized team, enabling streamline collaboration within the team.

The above case study implicates that AGILE is a school of thought that has to deal with flexibility, swiftness & amendment, serving timely result in an organization enabling improvement in its delivery and assisting the stakeholders to achieve the business objective.

Conclusion

The lucidity of agile just being followed in the software is disagreeable enough owing to the fact that everyone has a basic notion of Agile in their bones - it's something to do with flexibility, speed, and pro-activity. It may come in different forms comes in different forms, but basically it's the ability to quickly adapt to or even anticipate and lead change.

External References

Ø Simon Conington, founder and MD of BPS World, advised, "Agile working should not be just seen as employee perk; we found that agile working benefits employers in some unexpected ways. Many employees regard agile working as a very attractive option and any organization offering it is likely to find it much easier to bring on board the skills and talent they need."

Ø Prakash Chembai, Managing Director & General Manager from Perficient shares his experience – "CMMI tagged with Agile enabled us

Øto achieve delivery excellence, returning higher ROI for customers. Our business propulsion was a direct by-product of that delivery excellence".

Ø ITIL4 expands on the ideas and concepts around creating value, automating processes and improving outcome delivery.

Ø Author of 'The Agile Revolution' book, Léon Benjamin, a change management consultant quotes: "Agile working is about the capacity to change before the case for change becomes desperately obvious. If you're not fast, you'll be last."

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Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agile-implementation-bps-industry-palak-gogia