Big Agile
Bringing Business Agility through Agile Mindset

“We want to help our clients be agile and not just do agile. The difference between being agile and doing agile is similar to practicing religion and having faith,” begins Lance Dacy, CEO and President, Big Agile.

Today, almost every organization is striving to embrace the agile philosophy to quickly adapt to the rapidly evolving market and customer demands. However, most businesses perceive agile transformation simply just as a process change or a set of rules. They fail to realize that this initiative demands consistent, incremental changes over time and the transformation of mindset and culture. No wonder, instances are aplenty where the outcomes of agile transformation endeavors remain far from optimum. “Whenever human beings are forced for a change, they gravitate more toward comfortable zone due to the fear of the unknown,” says Dacy. “It is crucial to create an organizational culture that allows for agile values and principles to flourish. At Big Agile, we know that if agile transformation strategies are misaligned with an organization’s values, the mindset of continuous improvement will never be built. That is why we design transformation strategies in line with businesses existing culture that enable them to sustain transition organically,” says Dacy.

Being a Certified Scrum Trainer and an experienced management and technical professional, Dacy realizes that change should be led with a proper plan as it takes time to transform the decade’s old ‘lifestyle’ of a person and an organization. To this end, Big Agile helps organizations formulate a roadmap for the change and implements Scrum or Kanban framework as per clients’ needs. Acting as a catalyst between leaders and their team, Big Agile asks more questions to understand the perspective of both sides and then accordingly provides answers. This organized staff-directed control enables team members to learn how to correct and fix their own problems.

Big Agile takes a three-step approach—consulting, interactive learning workshops, professional coaching—to help clients go through a successful transition. Vouching to the fact that education is the basic component of agile transformation, the company designs highly interactive training workshops. These learning workshops are designed to make teams understand the necessary concepts of agile development practices and provide a hands-on learning environment that fosters team building during the entire session.

We design transformation strategies in line with businesses existing culture that enable them to sustain transition organically

“The education component ensures everybody is on the same page and moving in the same direction as well as collaborating toward the same goal,” says Dacy. Similarly, through coaching, the company helps organizations to undergo agile transition organically. This enables clients to grow out of their comfort zone and sustain themselves in the longer term. Lastly, Big Agile’s consulting services help businesses streamline their processes and drive the culture shift while making product development easier through continuous improvement. After conducting a cultural assessment and analyzing clients’ goals related to agility, the company builds transformation around the culture to align processes and structures with the cultural values. “We help businesses identify the reasons for their slow processes and ultimately solve them,” says Dacy.

To put things into perspective, Big Agile has helped a software development company rightly adopt the agile principles and eliminate all the bottlenecks. “They were fairly disorganized and we decided to introduce change following a stepby- step approach. The first part was about organizing teams and minimizing dependencies and bottlenecks,” adds Dacy. Big Agile then educated teams on the new processes and understood all the implementation problems through two or three sprints. After this, the company introduced changes in smaller parts of the organization steadily instead of implementing change across the entire organization at a time. In the end, the software development company was able to increase their releases from two or three per annum to multiple releases every month. More importantly, the change was not just on the development side. But Big Agile enabled the entire organization to be more efficient. “We empower businesses to continuously improve to move faster. Going forward, we have plans to spread wings across different international markets,” concludes Dacy.