Meeting Ruptela Agile Coach Julija

Staying at the top in the competitive market and designing high quality software products is always a challenge. What does it take to go this path? What kind of improvements are needed to create a valuable service from start to finish?

These are topics we discussed with our Agile Coach Julija Tarvydė. Her daily workflow involves helping organizations and teams introduce ways of working in order to achieve better results. She started her Agile journey as a Scrum Master and continued it in different companies and contexts for around 6 years already.

Company itself is a separate community for her, where the success depends on the ability to focus on the right things and environment of learning, as well as teamwork, framed in the supporting structure.

Why organizations choose to become Agile

Agile term means the ability to move quickly and easily. The most common reason for organizations becoming Agile is to respond to market demand and customer expectations in a very fast-paced competition environment by accelerating product delivery and manage changing priorities.

Agile effectiveness is measured by general business success, so the most popular weights are on-time delivery, product quality and customer/ user satisfaction. If you are doing things right, expect those metrics to improve in the first place.

From Julija’s experience, the positive side effect of organization becoming Agile is higher employee engagement and lower retention rate. When organization become focused, goal-oriented and customer-centric, it naturally attracts people with a similar mindset.

Adopting process and why failure happens sometimes

Researches show that the most common reason for organizations to fail is lack of support in cultural transition and “unshakable” philosophy, that may have been around for many years. Top management support and knowledgeable people with right mindset are playing a crucial role here.

Agile is often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Sometimes organizations start adopting out of the context Scrum events, such as Daily Scrum or Planning meeting, without a deeper understanding of what is all about – customer centricity, culture of learning and courage.

Is Ruptela Agile?

Being Agile is not something absolute. Ruptela has its competitive advantages on the market of transport telematics, so the company does things right. In order to move forward, we should never fall into the trap of complacency. That’s why we have ambitious goals for upcoming future. In order to achieve those targets, it is important to improve continuously.

Agile + LEAN

Ruptela is a hardware and software development company, so both LEAN and Agile methodologies are used here. They both complement each other, but we still need to balance. LEAN is very helpful in flow management and waste reduction, and Agile is an evolutionary approach which helps to deal with uncertainty in software development and delivering products that satisfy our customers.

Talking about specific Agile frameworks, Ruptela software development teams are using both Scrum and Kanban, depending on team context. Scrum is a good framework to start with since there are prescribed roles, events and artifacts. Now we are establishing ways of working which will help to bring needed value for customers in our specific company context

Agile future in Ruptela

The purpose is to bring a more systematic approach to software development, help to identify ways of working and shape delivery framework which satisfies the need, as well as market demand. Julija believes, that Ruptela has needed prerequires and possibilities to succeed and become a great example of how Agile processes are a big part of a constantly changing company life.