Scott Herrmann, VP of Information Systems & Technology at Sheakley

How do you scale IT projects for faster delivery?

"Getting the business to understand the agile method and adopt an agile mindset is very important. We have entered a kind of beta environment here where it’s as if nothing goes into production and everything stays in beta development. It is because changes will happen so frequently in business. So instead of spending three years building one monolithic app, for instance, we are breaking it down into more sizeable components and shorter term projects to lay on another feature every month, more like updates. In this way, IT and business are very closely aligned, making decisions together, minimizing the impact of changes and working smarter with much less rework along the way.

It is a process of continual development. I took over the development team earlier this year and I can say that we have gotten more done in the last few months using this method than we had over the last two years. The business is a lot happier. They are there every week and have a say in what the priorities are; there is visibility into where we are on projects, they can see and test products, and it’s easy for us to be transparent and accountable to them."