We are leaders in Agile methodology in Spain

Last week we had the honour of being presented as a SmartWay success story at CAS 2023, the largest Agility conference in Spain.

WHAT IS AGILE?

Agile is the ability to adapt to change; it’s a mindset, it’s about creation. Agile enables organisations to face the VUCA environments we live in. It emerged in the 2000s as a more flexible and collaborative approach to project management.

Its popularisation is attributed to the Agile Manifesto, a set of principles established by a group of software developers in 2001. Individuals such as Jeff Sutherland, Ken Schwaber, Kent Beck and others advocated a shift to more agile methods that value direct communication, adaptability and the continuous delivery of operational software releases.

HOW DOES ‘AGILITY’ HELP BUSINESSES?

In today’s market, where the ability to adapt quickly to market changes is critical to business resilience, the adoption of agility is the difference between success and failure. 

Leading organisations need to adopt innovative methodologies that enable them to continue to differentiate themselves from the competition and deliver modern solutions.

While the agile culture has been established abroad for some time, Spain still has a long way to go. According to the latest BACometer from the Business Agility Corporation, only 20% of Spanish companies default to using this methodology.

“Only 20% of Spanish companies use this methodology by default”.

Companies that decide to adopt this methodology must undergo a complete transformation:

• Culturally, by encouraging collaboration and autonomy.
• Organisationally, with flatter and more horizontal structures.
• Business-wise, aligning business and technology (OKRs).
• Developmentally, increasing the speed and frequency of product/service improvements.
• In terms of customer relations, customers are directly involved in development.
• Product management, creating minimum viable products (MVPs) for early feedback.
• Technologically, by implementing collaborative and agile work management tools.
• And in terms of measurement and metrics, choosing new KPIs to measure value delivery and customer satisfaction.

WHY ARE WE AN AGILE LEADER?

Alejandro Vega, our Scrum Master, and Alberto Arroyo, Agile Consultant at SmartWay, have been driving cultural and digital transformation in our Barcelona offices for many years.

In recognition of their work, last week Alberto had the opportunity to share our success story with CAS 2023 attendees and provide guidance for organisations looking to align technology and business within an agile framework.

His presentation focused on how companies can improve cross-functional communication and deliver the best product to users by unifying requirements and visualising workflows.

By focusing on teamwork, we have been able to incorporate our customers’ needs into our solutions. The result? We can now predict what our users need and deliver a higher quality service.

In line with our way of working in Holacracy, the ultimate horizontal organisational structure, SmartWay has helped us to align Agile methodologies with the organisation to further empower self-management and autonomy in teams.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people at SmartWay, and Alberto in particular, for the support they have given us over the years and for the achievements we could not have made without them.