The need for agility in the development of digital processes

Development teams play a vital role in the digital age. They are expected to solve complex problems with vague and rapidly changing requirements in order to develop products with high innovation potential, since these are key to a company’s success. The adoption of agile methods in the way companies think and act supports an iterative, incremental, customer-centric approach by enabling greater transparency and flexibility in their operation system. To ensure that these methods add value for development teams, it is important to adapt them to their individual needs, circumstances and objectives. The Agile Systems Design (ASD) approach focuses on exactly these requirements in the planning and rollout of agile development processes. The deployment of agile process elements in the early development stages of innovation projects and the accompanying creation of agile development teams call for process-oriented support. This is provided by the ASD-Innovation Coaching framework developed as part of a cooperative doctorate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences. Patrick Brecht, a PhD student at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences, explained the principles of the ASD-Innovation Coaching framework to a team from SME Bürkert Fluid Control Systems at a series of workshops run by the Steinbeis Transfer Center Innovation Engineering & Entrepreneurship // i2e.

Bürkert is a family-owned company headquartered in Ingelfingen. The business revolves around precision measuring, control and regulating systems for fluids and gases in industrial applications. This global enterprise specializes in the development, production and sale of fluid technology components and systems. The aim of the project with Steinbeis was to demonstrate different innovation methods in order to drive the development of digital product and business model innovations based on Bürkert’s core competencies. The workshops were held at the company’s Bürkert Innovation Center in Karlsruhe, which employs around 40 people. They covered the following four themes:

• development of digital business models and services,
• product development methods and processes,
• agile techniques and creativity methods, and
• interactive application of agile project management with lego4scrum.

The workshops’ aim was to enable the participants to independently apply the methods they learned to the development of innovations.

The ASD-Innovation Coaching framework

Agile Systems Design (ASD) is an approach to the planning and implementation of agile development processes. The ASD-Innovation Coaching framework is based on this approach. It puts people at the center of product development and enables them to achieve an appropriate degree of agility in their working methods. It helps development teams solve complex problems and incorporate agile practices that add genuine value into the team’s working methods, individually adapting them to their specific needs, circumstances and objectives.