There are two ways to develop digital skills and capabilities in your business.

  • Achieving large scale agile transformation: Implement a more nimble way of working that gets you closer to customer value and shortens time to market.
  • Building your technology platform: Use next-generation IT architectures to build digital-ready tech functions.

Achieving Large Scale Agile Transformation

Most enterprises are stuck in old ways of operating, and that can negatively affect a company’s speed and adaptability to change. To be competitive in the digital age, businesses need to achieve agility at scale. To succeed, companies embarking on an agile transformation must rethink the entire operating model and embrace radical change.

Many of the world’s biggest companies struggle to be nimble, efficient, and data-driven, which then makes them less productive than they should be. It’s not just their size that holds them back; much of the problem is created by a traditional business model that’s been created for scale and standardization, rather than for agility and innovation.

While many organizations have teams working in an agile way, very few businesses have been able to implement this model across their entire enterprise. As companies move from implementing agile on individual projects to portfolios and, ultimately, to an entire business, more and more core processes need to be adapted—a significant operational challenge in itself. 

How to Achieve Agile Transformation Across the Enterprise

Large-scale agile transformation isn’t just about technology. It’s about a new way of thinking. It’s more collaborative, more open, more creative, and much more efficient than other business models. And it’s something that can be implemented across a company, not just in one or two departments. 

Companies can achieve agile transformation at three levels: the project level, which is relatively easy to accomplish; the portfolio level, which is more complex; and the organization level, which requires a complete rethinking of a company’s operating model. Moving effectively from the first level to the last can be difficult for a large organization, but companies that move in progressive steps can succeed.

Ultimately, creating a more agile way of working takes about two to three years to complete, but meaningful results can be achieved in as little as three months depending on an organization’s starting point and level of internal support.

Empowered Product Ownership

A functional agile team starts with a product owner who can make decisions about scope, timing, and allocation of budget without having to consult a steering group or governance body. In more complex organizations, this role may be filled by two or three individuals, such as a product manager, a business analyst, and a product executive who is responsible for overseeing the project.

Cross-Functional, Dedicated Team

Agile teams need dedicated employees from every part of the business, including operations, product management, and IT. While larger projects can have more team members, every group should abide by two rules. First, everyone must be fully dedicated to the effort. Second, team members must be doing the actual work—they can’t delegate tasks to others.

Iterative, Empirical Approach

Work should be completed in fixed-length iterations, and a working prototype should be created after each iteration. Design and prioritization decisions are then informed by the feedback and results from the demonstrations of the product. During the early stages of an agile transformation, allow for longer iteration lengths—four to six weeks instead of the usual two weeks—and limit the depth of testing. Both can help build the case for investing in critical technical enablers.

Continuous Improvement

Agile is, by definition, not static. Teams are constantly identifying ways to become more productive by tweaking and tuning their environment and the way they work. We often see teams continue to significantly increase their productivity, even four to five years after going through the initial agile transformation.

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Building your technology platform

To serve your customers better, improve your offering, and boost your profits, your company—like most firms—might need to engage in a digital transformation. And that could entail re-imagining end-to-end digital journeys, revamping business with digital capabilities, and improving customer targeting with digital marketing and personalization, among other initiatives.

Such a digital transformation is a journey—and it is fundamental to start modernizing IT early in this journey. Yet that does not mean that you need to revamp all your IT architecture before implementing digital services or launching pilots for data and digital uses that may never scale up. Rather, a critical first step is implementing a data and digital platform, which can both scale up and deliver value fast.

Companies are feeling pressure to undergo digital transformation and re-evaluate their data and digital capabilities. But existing environments and legacy challenges constrain many companies in their attempts to enable digital capabilities. Vilsquare’s data and digital platform delivers the foundation required to successfully deploy digital transformations.

From Legacy Technology to Our Data & Digital Platform

Data is at the heart of all digital transformations, and to become data-driven, your company must modernize its IT legacy—such as ERP and mainframe systems. This will enable a massive ingestion of data and its usage across silos—as well as its accelerated processing.

Today’s latest technologies and new ways of working make it possible to break the compromise between building an industrial platform and achieving rapid results.

  • APIs and microservices increase the modularity of applications across channels.
  • Data lake technologies ensure that companies can ingest and store enormous amounts of structured and unstructured data and process it in real time, using an event-driven approach.
  • Cloud migration delivers ubiquitous access to data.

At Vilsquare, we believe that successful digital transformation requires companies to build an industrial platform for data and digital technology. Such a platform addresses the business use cases and starts small to move fast. It then scales up at an industrial level.

  • The platform decouples the data layer from legacy systems to facilitate data sharing and usage.
  • It provides an environment for developing an interface between digital services and digitized processes.

Vilsquare’s Expertise

Vilsquare brings unique capabilities and deep expertise to digital transformation for your business.

We count among our digital experts: IT architects, experts in data integration and migration, and technology and cloud specialists. We also address:

  • Digital design and engineering, including prototype implementation, platform build-out, architecture solution
  • UX/strategic design and project management for business use case
  • IT risk management, including PMI situations
  • Agile and DevOps approaches for process re-engineering
  • Client enablement, client visits, and demos
  • Clientele gifting & event planning
  • Corporate training and capacity development
  • Electronics product design and manufacture
  • Research and business analysis
  • Data aggregation and analysis
  • Digital media and storytelling through infographics & videos

Get no-cost expert guidance

We’re here to help you on your strategy and digitization journey as you transform & scale your ideas. Schedule a consultation and get the answers you need.

Schedule A Call

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How Do You Develop Digital Skills and Capabilities?

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