Digital products and services simplify our everyday lives. Technological developments are transforming us into an increasingly fast, dynamic and agile society. To keep up with the competition, companies are responding to these market needs and digitizing products, services and processes. For these projects, it means saying goodbye to classic process methods such as the waterfall model. The mindset for digital projects must be agile in order to continuously and quickly evolve to meet needs.

Before a company starts a digital project, it needs to have a suitable setup of a team and tools for agile methods. The team is crucial for success, because digital products and platforms stand and fall with the team. Agile Mindset requires a well-coordinated team that is experienced and competent in the applied methodologies.

The team must be able to control itself to a large extent and take joint responsibility for ambitious goals, as well as meet daily for status meetings (or video conferencing) in order to be able to continuously improve processes and solutions. In our experience, the simultaneous collaboration of team members is essential for success. This is the only way to ensure the focus of all parties involved and to resolve the classic conflict between different projects, regardless of whether someone is a team member at the service provider or sits on the customer side.

For the setup, every company has to ask itself whether it has the appropriate resources internally with the necessary agile mindset for digital projects. Most companies do not have fully specialized digital know-how and rely on experienced external resources to reduce risks and costs, but also to gain speed and flexibility.

1. There is no longer “internal” and “external”

In concrete terms, this means that regardless of whether you augment your team with freelancers, bring a service provider on board with dedicated teams, or even both – the core component of an agile approach is open and transparent communication. If the mindset of “customer” vs. “service provider” emerges in a meeting, you don’t have an agile setup.

2. The team consists of people with different levels of experience

A typical scenario for your setup could look like this: If necessary, you have brought two colleagues from another department into the team, plus two freelancers and a team of 7 from a larger service provider – these team members have different levels, from junior to senior, with little to a lot of digitization experience. Even if you bring resources into the team at a supposedly large and experienced service provider, there will be junior team members among them, although their mindset is definitely agile (or needs to be).

3. 50% of the team members are doing this for the first time

A digitization project rarely if ever has more than 50% of the team members who have done the same thing before. This means that half of all resources are confronted with such an issue for the first time and therefore need to be educated, coached and taken along. This expectation applies to “internal” resources just as it does to “external” resources (even though we no longer have that attitude).

4. Work contract and budget debates

Agile procedures, or basically product and project plans, are difficult to calculate, because at best you have a rough goal in mind at the beginning, or more precisely a kind of “project vision”. It can be as simple as “we need an online shop”. Which features it has, where the product data comes from and much more will gradually become clear during the realization. From this it must be concluded that a major challenge for many project promoters (or their purchasing departments) is that contracts for work and fixed prices do not work.