Use Agile and Lean practices to deliver incremental business value in automation project execution, ensuring on-time delivery, quality, and cost savings.

Overview

Adapting to change has never been more important, and for businesses, this often means embracing and fully leveraging the potential of automation. Enterprise automation helps organizations respond effectively and efficiently to ever-changing business needs. This has allowed organizations to create tremendous customer value while raising the performance bar higher than ever. However, the expectations for increased use of automation and their resulting benefits are often coupled with downward pressure on delivery timelines and budgets.

Successful organizations understand that better planning for automation initiatives is required. They also need a strategy for how they implement automation projects. An appropriate project execution approach ensures quality, cost-savings, and maximum value.

Most organizations use project management approaches to embed best practices in their processes. There are various project management methodologies. Some of them are more widely used than others. The traditional approach is the waterfall methodology, which emphasizes completing a set of tasks sequentially. Or it could be a variation of the waterfall method using multiple phases to execute more complex initiatives. However, each phase still implements different automation projects in a step-by-step manner. It leads to longer delivery times and higher implementation costs, making it challenging to absorb changing requirements.

In contrast to waterfall development, agile uses an iterative approach to project execution. Instead of documenting lengthy project requirements at the onset, an agile team divides the project into specific features, managing each under a particular time constraint. More organizations have started adopting the agile approaches for implementing automation projects. Agile has gained popularity because of its success rate and thorough attention to detail.

Creating business value is central to both agile and lean principles. Lean principles focus on efficiency, while agile enables continuous delivery and a feedback loop. When applied with purpose, lean and agile project execution principles generate desired outcomes through sustainable enterprise automation. A structured approach that uses Lean Thinking as a foundation for developing agile governance for executing automation projects results in the organization becoming more responsive to business, efficiently delivering changes faster with reduced costs.

By implementing the principles of both Agile and Lean for automation project execution, organizations can achieve benefits like:

• Increase in customer value creation
• Reduced risks in project execution
• Improved process transparency and visibility
• Focus on data to drive continuous improvement
• Better responsiveness to changing requirements
• Stronger team collaboration