How Agile Training in Toronto Drives Faster Time to Market

Introduction

We have learned a lot from our Toronto Agile customers. They have achieved great success after attending our Agile Training. This blog article will cover some of the outcomes they have achieved.

While Scrum provides a good simple framework, there are five things any group of people can do that will help accelerate time to market and reduce frustration.

1. Show the primary Stakeholder who wants whatever you are creating your progress, get as much actionable feedback as possible, and have them prioritize work often.
2. Create a cross-functional team to create a flow system with limited handoffs and wait times.
3. Break down work into small pieces so that anyone on the team can do the work. There is no point if having a cross-functional team if you still do your primary role. You need to share work items and learn how to do other team members’ work.
4. Make work visible so the entire team can easily see progress and pick work items.
5. Have one team member manage dependencies and blocking times so the team is not distracted.

If you do those five things, you will be better than 80% of most organizations in Toronto.

You can find a complete summary of our training on this page called ‘Agile Training Toronto“.

Faster Time to Market

Our firm has done many agile team assessments, and the same goals have come up repeatedly. The number one goal people are looking to achieve is fast time to market. This goal is always number one with management.

Interestingly, when we asked the team to prioritize, they believed reducing costs would be the top priority.

The second priority is to ‘get everyone on the same page.’ We hear this almost as much as faster time to market.

Our training is designed to help with both of these goals.

Toronto Agile Customer Results

Manufacturing Company

One of our first clients was a manufacturing company that sold products to distributors worldwide. They had a custom build complex online store doing approximately $4B in revenue.

The problem was that from the time an idea came into a senior stakeholders head and it was in the hands of a paying customer took over a year. So finally, this time lag was unacceptable, and a change was needed.

They had some challenges. There was no extensive training or coaching budget, they were a matrix organization, and decisions were distributed. The delivery team was dispersed in three regions, Canada, the United States and India.

The company made two shifts. First, everyone took the scrum agile team training, and second, they used the Agile Manifesto as their North Star when making decisions.  

The results after 12 months were impressive. Changes to the website went from taking over one year to six weeks. Email us if you want more details on this case study, and we can discuss it further.

Ontario Government Agencies

We recently provided agile team training to two Ontario Government Agencies in Toronto.

Both agencies had attempted Agile before reaching out to Scrum Masters. They were having difficulty getting their teams on board and organized. Their goals were faster time to market and higher agie team engagement. Both agencies had also hired new staff, and the agile knowledge level varied greatly between and within the teams.

First, we provided a brief Agile Team Assessment, then got to work designing a training program.

The outcome achieved was team members who had a common understanding of the artifacts of agile, how to communicate and coordinate between them and management who had a better understanding of what ‘servant leadership was about and how to implement it.

These new skills resulted in an increase in product feature delivery by 25%.

Banking Client

We have completed several agile team training for banks in Toronto, it’s great to see larger organizations moving to collaborative work styles.

Of all the banks we have worked with, one stands out. In this case, they had an innovative team responsible for online banking products. The problem was they needed to figure out what their customers wanted and, importantly, what products they could launch to recruit their competitors.

This bank’s goal was faster time to market but also to innovate and find the best products they could create to wow their customers.

The agile team training got them on their way, but their attention to focusing on the Agile Manifesto propelled them to one of the best banks in North America.

Conclusion

Overall, you will deliver quality products faster if you do the five practices listed in the introduction. Of course, we are not saying the change will be easy or happen quickly, but if these actions are implemented, you can achieve the same results as our other customers.

You can find a complete summary of our training on this page called “Agile Training Toronto“.