Zhen Tao, CTO at Paycor

How do you scale IT projects for faster delivery?

“Agile, from a technology development perspective, is a process. We complement it with lean start-up principles. Having a hypothesis, then quickly thinking about how to experiment to test it. We don’t count on an intuition about being right all the time, that’s not going to be true, human beings will make some mistakes. But having the belief that it is okay to make some mistakes early really allows us to move rapidly. When we fail, we laugh about it, learn from it and pivot very quickly to what will succeed. Applying this method means we have the grand picture of being agile.

When I joined Paycor two and a half years ago, I introduced the book, “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and the executive leadership team decided to use it in a book club. At every executive committee meeting we had someone share the take-aways from a couple assigned chapters and we discussed how to apply it to the business. So we didn’t just introduce the lean agile idea from an IT development perspective; we have been implementing it from the executive leadership perspective. It really gets people to see the big picture and the purpose. We’re not doing agile for the sake of doing it. It gets linked to the business value, the customer value and to the shareholder value to a high degree as well.”