Uncovering New Ways of Doing Business with Technology

Emma Okonji writes on the recently concluded Agile Nigeria Conference (ANC 2022), which focused on how to use emerging technologies to discover new ways of doing profitable business across all sectors

The success of modern day business largely depends on the innovative technology that is driving the business, irrespective of personal experience and size of the business. 

Based in this analogy that has promoted several businesses across globe, the recently concluded Agile Nigeria Conference 2022, which held in Lagos, settled with the theme: Continuous Improvement Strategies, With Focus On Business and Technology.

Enterprise Technology and Performance Leader and TMT Industry Leader for Deloitte in West Africa, Mr. Oluwole Oyeniran, in his presentation, said: 

“Organisations are in a digital age where  customer engagement is expected, relationships are in real time, choice is infinite, delivery is on demand, change is constant and technology enables everything we do.”

While declaring the Agile Nigeria Conference 2022 open, the Founder/Chief Executive Officer, The Agile Advisor Africa/Chairman, Agile Practitioners Association of Nigeria, Mrs. Abiodun Osoba, said the conference would uncover better ways of working and doing business, using emerging technologies.

“Returning for its fifth year, Agile Nigeria Conference is a practical and hands on agile practitioners conference that allows participants to connect and learn from their peers and leaders in the industry. The conference has a strong practical focus and attracts industry practitioners and decision-makers who want to improve their success with agile and lean methods. The conference will answer burning questions about agile practices, leadership, transformation and approach in Nigeria and around the world,” Osoba said.

Improving Organisations’ Performance 

One of the speakers, who is the Head of Agile Transformation at HDI Global SE, Mrs. Juliane Pilster, who doubles as Industrial Engineer in the field of Electrical Engineering, with 10 years experience in leadership positions at different companies and industries, spoke on the need for continuous improvement and strategies for organisations. According to Pilster, companies must continue to improve, so that they could survive on the market. “It is hard work to focus on continuous improvement activities within a company on a daily basis, but it is necessary to embed awareness for continuous improvement throughout the entire corporation. Continuous improvement is one of the main pillars of successful and sustainable entrepreneurship. Flow of work is part of both concepts, Lean and Agility, but it is necessary to let people and teams get into a flow first. To achieve team flow, an atmosphere of psychological safety and open communication is necessary to create trust,” Pilster said.

According to her, “Trust is the basis of transparency, inspection and adaptation, which are the three pillars of empiricism.Using the transparency, inspection and adaptation approach enables the flow of work through removing impediments.”

Benefits of Continuous Improvement 

Eliana Philip-Amulum, who presented a paper on the benefits of continuous improvement in an Agile environment, quoted Lean Way, who said:”Continuous improvement is an organized approach to identifying opportunities for improvement that can help an organization meet its goals for increasing profits, reducing costs, and accelerating innovation.”

She listed four stages of psychological safety that could impact on organisational performance, while using the right technology as the driving force. The stages include: Inclusion Safety, Learners’ 

Safety, Contributor Safety, and Challenger Safety. 

Impediments to Business Growth 

Enterprise Technology and Performance Leader and TMT Industry Leader for Deloitte in West Africa, Mr. Oluwole Oyeniran, who is responsible for enterprise solutions with a focus on system implementation, with over 22 years consulting experience, assists clients understand and use technology solutions to solve business problems and transform ways of working. Wole who has managed several multi disciplinary projects across a wide range of sectors in Nigeria and West Africa, is a Certified Scrum Master and a TM Forum Digital Maturity Model Practitioner. 

In his presentation, he warned against pitfall of the traditional implementation of strategic objectives, adding that traditional approaches fall short on delivering and sustaining the full value of transformations, especially in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace

He said failure to identify value, would lead to lack of clarity on the strategic choices made for how an organisation will create, deliver, and capture value, and that failure to achieve value would result in a myopic focus on delivering a “solution” without a specific, concrete linkage to, and relentless focus on the value sought from that solution. He also said failure to innovate value would make changes fail to take root after an implementation, thereby missing initial value expectations and inhibiting the energy to continuously identify new opportunities.

He advised that the Agile culture should be about focusing on delivering value and pivoting from traditional silos to value streams.

Agile Testing 

Test Manager and Agile Coach, Jorge Luis, in his paper presentation, shared experiences that define strategy for agile testing ways of teamwork. He emphasised that people, not methodologies or tools, make projects successful.

He said little challenges in organisations could mean continuous team disintegration, continuous rollback, continuous retesting, lack of testing strategy, and manual tasks.

According to him, “Agile testing has to do with collaborative testing practices that occur continuously, from inception to delivery and beyond supporting frequent delivery of value for customers. Testing activities focus on building quality into the product, using fast feedback loops to validate understanding. The practices strengthen and support the idea of a whole team’s responsibility for quality. Continuous testing is an integral part of software development and fits at each and every point of the cycle.”

In another presentation, Mun-Wai Chung, who spoke about Agile transformation in organisations, stressed the need for organisations to always deal with the issues of mindset, system thinking and Agile values and principles. She added that transformation would be better driven through Human Resources (HR) and Finance.