By Tammie
Harvey, CUNA Mutual Group, Director, Continuous Improvement & Agile
Execution
In an era of rapid change and marketplace
disruption, we’re all challenged to help our customers/members identify and
address a host of evolving needs. Realizing traditional methods – known
as a waterfall approach – were not helping us reach our goals at a necessary
pace, we shifted our thinking to an agile approach.
Now, a waterfall approach consists of building requirements, designing
solutions, releasing to the marketing and then getting feedback from customers.
In a nutshell, you focus on figuring out exactly what you want in the beginning
and you don’t tell anyone about it or use the solution until it’s done and
ready for implementation. By that time, you might be headed in the wrong
direction, and because it’s a waterfall, there’s no way to go back up to one of
the previous steps in the process, without adding time, cost or risk.
Agile on the other hand is about gathering customer insights, building
solutions and verifying with customers along the way. Then, releasing the
minimum amount necessary to serve your customers’ needs. You build upon the
minimum viable solution over time to get to your end state – consistently
co-creating with your customers along the way. Through continuous learning, you
mitigate your risk of building something your customers don’t want or need.
To illustrate, think about someone who opens a coffee shop. On day one,
they sell coffee. When customers go through the drive-thru, the owner asks them
what else they want. The next day the owner adds muffins to the menu. Over
time, the coffeeshop becomes a restaurant that serves a variety of beverages,
food items and gifts – all that the customers said they wanted while giving you
feedback along the way.
Agile can be intimidating at first. It requires change. Change in how
you think, behave and execute your work. Let’s face it, that can be hard. Agile
also comes with a whole set of its own terms. There are several methods that
can be adopted, depending upon the business problem you are trying to solve. And,
because it is a relatively new concept to the financial services industry, education
is key – for employees and customers. The learning never stops.
The results; however, speak for themselves. An iterative, co-creation
process leads to efficient development, aligned work teams, positive customer
experience, quality solutions, and a better ability to manage and change priorities.
Our results have been both transformational and incremental. For
example, product development now takes months instead of years, and when we
determine through testing that something isn’t adding value for our customers,
we stop working on it. In addition, employees feel empowered to identify
improvements and adopt new ways of working so they can deliver value faster for
our customers.
Not only are credit unions excited about the products and services we’re
building, and how they’re part of it, they’re excited about how they can start
embracing this thing called “agile” and reap its benefits.
