Positive Impact of Agile Transformation on Medical Device Product Development
A reflection on the 12 months following an Agile-Transformation.
Simbex had been moving in that direction for a while, but last year we took the plunge.
Our friends at Scrum Inc. spent a week with our team and the entire company, teaching us how Agile product development works. They also introduced us to an executive from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who also practices Agile, to provide their perspective and offer some confirmation that the application of Agile in a hardware and regulated environment could work, and more importantly, work well.
Twelve months in, each project team is:
- Executing 2 week sprints
- Having daily standups
- Performing sprint planning and estimations
- Maintaining backlogs of work to be performed
- Including acceptance criteria on every task
- And performing sprint retrospectives.
- Setting team level Kaizen (improvement initiatives)
- Including our clients in the Scrum events
As a company, we are:
- Meeting before each sprint to perform scaled resource planning.
- Sharing project-specific demos
- Performing scaled retrospectives
- Establishing company-level Kaizen’s
What an impact it has had!
We communicate within and across our teams more effectively, are more transparent with our customers, promote cross-team learning through shared demos, and have implemented and are executing a continuous learning and improvement process that is beginning to pay dividends. And that is not all…
At the end of the day, our team members are happier, our delivery to customers is always improving, and our business has done well. And we love sharing our experience with others, anytime.
I hope you will reach out, say hello and ask about our process. Maybe you’ll consider the transformation as well.
Sincerely,
Greg Lange, MS
Chief Operating Officer
