Transforming Privalia, is Agile fashionable enough?
A tale of an Agile transformation in a very successful 900 people e-commerce company. They tried to move to Agile previously, there was turnover in the CTO position during some years, too much legacy code, slow release process and part of the developers were external contractors. Those who contracted us have just changed companies. What would you do?
Context
Drive To Improve played a pivotal role in Privalia’s IT transformation. Our efforts were focused on accelerating time-to-market, instilling a culture of continuous improvement, and assisting Privalia’s transition from traditional commerce to e-commerce.
Process
- Introduce agile simultaneously in the 12 IT development teams.
- Regular meetings with the co-founders where we collaboratively shape the upcoming stages of Agile Adoption
- Weekly standup meeting involving both the development and business teams. All team members actively participate by sharing their results and discussing the upcoming steps.
- Incorporate team health indicators into the process and assess them every two months. These indicators encompass aspects such as fun, velocity, and collaboration, among others.
- Change agents at the organizational level work closely with executives, while Agile coaches collaborate with IT teams.
- Every time a release is put on production, a meeting is held to continuously improve.
Results
- Support for IT Transformation involving more than 100 people.
- Reduced the time to market to launch new e-commerce features, reducing it from a three-month timeline to just two weeks.
- Transition from having no automated tests to establishing a framework that encompasses an enough number of the required tests, spanning across multiple devices.
- Implement consistent communication channels between the business and development teams.
- Enhance the spirit of teamwork, fostering a unified collaboration between the business and IT, functioning as a single, cohesive team
- Incorporated a culture of continuous improvement by implementing practices such as team retrospectives and communities of practice
