Trends

Being agile or appearing agile?

When I first heard about agility years ago, I first had the impression that processes and rules should be thrown overboard in order to miraculously realize volatile requirements in the twinkling of an eye. I couldn’t imagine how this would work: agility sounded to me like an unattainable wish concert.

Initially, when our software development team started to work with Scrum – with me as the product Owner and guided by an experienced Scrum Master – I seriously dealt with the topic.

I learned that agility does not mean chaos, but quite the opposite was true:

Lesson 1: Discipline

Agile approach has rules. We learned them in the previous Scrum training, but most of all our Scrum Master advised us to strictly adhere to the Scrum rules instead of interpreting them in the way that seemed most appropriate to us. What I learned: Agility is not a laissez-faire, but requires a very disciplined approach that only works if it is lived consistently and not bent as needed.

Lesson 2: The Sense

Fixed roles and rituals are useful. We had learned them for Scrum, but real understanding grew gradually through coaching and the questions of the Scrum Master. For example, when in the process of a sprint it turned out that several of the agreed user stories would not be reached. Of course, all team members tried to do their own job in the best possible way. This would have meant that the individual user stories would only be completed to 70%. The Scrum Master, however, put up for discussion the idea of discarding one or two user stories for the sprint instead and helping to complete the others. What we learned: Results orientation and focusing on a common goal make teamwork more productive and team members more satisfied.

Lesson 3: Team Spirit

The more we internalised the meaning of the rules, roles and rituals, the more efficient the projects became. The team grew more and more together and not only a common focus on achieving the goal developed, but real cohesion. Where previously colleagues had expressed a lack of understanding for each other’s work or had blamed each other, everyone in the team now knew what the others were doing and why. They helped each other to the best of their ability and trusted each other more and more. And because sustainable learning works above all through positive emotions, this was the point at which we developed a real understanding of agility.

In the end it became clear to me that agility only comes about through the interaction of rules, people and motivation. Understanding the agile values behind the rules is crucial. Otherwise there is the danger – by picking out or bending individual rules to one’s own needs – of failing with the agile approach.

This does not mean that the agile frameworks must not be adapted or selectively applied. But you have to understand them first.

IoT failures and trust in technology

At the beginning of April this year I attended the building IoT in Cologne. At the conference, which was organized by heise developer, iX and d.punkt publishing house, everything revolved around applications for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 in lectures and an exhibition. Together with my colleague Yang Zhong, I presented modern user experience concepts (UX) for IoT solutions in a lecture.

At the end of our presentation, which showed a user’s work processes, from the data acquisition of a real “Thing” to the visualization of live data in the dashboard using a Digital Twin, there was a very stimulating discussion. Two points were particularly interesting here:

In many application areas, the topic of customer journeys is high on the agenda – which confirms the current trend.
It is essential to develop software for users – which was also a consensus.

The evening was dedicated to Industrial IoT. As a moderator, I hosted a discussion with representatives from various enterprises and software companies, such as Miele, Dürr Dental, Codecentric or akquinet. An intensive discussion around the predominant topics of the industry 4.0 took place here. In addition to the choice of the control electronics or the wireless standard, this also includes questions as to whether an IoT solution should be operated in a cloud. The reasons for solutions in a cloud are of course the convenience and the relatively efficient and simple scalability with regard to the number of “things” to be managed. On the other hand, managing the software on your own servers (on-premise) means that confidential product or customer data really won’t leave your premises. The discussion has confirmed my assessment that both approaches have their advantages in practice and are applied accordingly.

One of my personal highlights at this year’s building IoT was a negative hit list of IoT products, so-called IoT failures: products that have massive security gaps, such as open data interfaces. Some “classic” vulnerabilities were already known, such as unaltered standard passwords that allow data misuse. Others gaps really surprised me: such as a smoke detector of a well-known brand, which is already equipped with a microphone (?!) as standard, which in turn allows unwanted monitoring in living rooms.

Why is there a microphone in a smoke detector? We can’t say that for sure, at least it’s not in the customer’s interest and causes a massive loss of trust in technology. And that is precisely the point: acceptance of new technologies requires trust. And this is becoming more and more important with increasing digitalization.

20 years of PLM: Why do many still doubt the benefits?

In the meantime, I can look back on several years of consulting for Product Life Cycle Management. A topic whose popularity has fluctuated considerably over the years and is currently on the rise again in the wake of digital transformation.

Despite the increasing attention for PLM again, I notice that the term continues to have a large, cumbersome, tedious, and uneconomical taste. Amazing, because the effort that many companies put into ERP projects, for example, was and is significantly higher in most cases. Nevertheless, the necessity and benefits of – expensive – ERP projects are discussed, but rarely questioned, see Haribo and Lidl.

How do these different perceptions come about? One explanation could be that the benefits of PLM for management and employees in companies have not been sufficiently exploited over the years. This was mainly due to the fact that the scope and visibility of PLM projects in companies was often very limited.

A closer look shows that many of the earlier PLM implementations were in fact PDM implementations. PDM, Product Data Management, focuses on product descriptive data, primarily CAD models and drawings. “PLM” was therefore limited to the core areas of product development, very often even to Mechanical Design. Although beeing avilable in some PLM solutions for years, Change Management, Document Management, Project Management, cross-departmental collaboration or communication with external parties have not been used. Instead, solutions based on Excel, Outlook, the file system or SharePoint were often created on their own. Tools that everyone in the company knows. And for those one can very easily find someone to “optimize” these tools by macro programming. In addition to that, the negative attitude towards PLM was certainly fuelled by the overloaded, highly compressed “engineering user interfaces” of the 1st and 2nd PLM product generations.

So it’s no surprise that PLM was seen in the company as an expensive, less useful and exotic application!

In the current PLM renaissance, companies now have every opportunity to learn from the deficits of the past and to take advantage of the impressive potential of Product Lifecycle Management. Many obsolete and discontinued PDM and PLM solutions are currently or soon to be replaced by modern 3rd generation PLM platforms, which also support the use cases around the Digital Twin and the Internet of Things. They breathe life into the PLM idea by effectively and efficiently supporting processes across phases, departments and company boundaries. New, web-based HTML-5 user interfaces significantly increase acceptance among all user groups in the company by making even complex relationships clearer and handling them more efficient.

Now there is a chance to realize “real” Product Lifecycle Management! Against the background of new, digital business models, which put the use phase of products much more in the foreground, this becomes all the more important. PLM solutions play a central role here, as they lay the foundation for data relating to the Digital Twin.

But in the end, hard facts also count when it comes to benefits and ROI: If PLM is actually used company-wide with all its possibilities, high economies of scale quickly result from the significant minimization of non-value-adding activities. This alone often enables a return on investment after just one year. Regardless of the additional revenue potential from new, data-driven business models that PLM will enable in the future.