Usually Agile starts in the development team, at the core of IT, as a logical evolution of the development practices. But my opinion is that it can only fully work if the whole company progressively gets Agile…and this is where it gets real hard.
Scaling Agile at a company level can be very complex, especially in companies that are not technology-driven. It is the case for Betclic. Even though it is web pure-player, it is not technology-driven. IT is an essential and core part of our business, yet this is still considered as a necessary burden to achieve greater goals.
So how do we do it? Well, we use the “wildfire” method: first we try and have a nice and steady Agile fire in the development teams, then everywhere we can, we ignite other smaller fires. In the long run, we hope that they will spread to the whole company.
The first Agile fire in the development teams is going well. We are fueling it with Scrum practices, XP initiatives, and our own personal ways of working at it. There is obviously still a lot to be done, but we are moving.
Then we changed part of the IT organization to create Product Owners (we will try and share more about this in the future). Now our Product Owners are on-board the Agile train with the development teams, trying to make their own contribution.
We are then evangelizing as much as possible across the whole Betclic organization. As part of this educational approach, I had the opportunity to discuss Agile with our CEO, who has a financial background and no knowledge of IT practices as such.
And here are a few slides I used to support our discussion:
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