Retail leaders need to adopt agile practices to drive innovation, experiment with new business models, and optimize store and online operations to compete with digital-first companies. There are seven key ways for retail organizations to overcome barriers to agile adoption: having strong leadership commitment, creating a transformation blueprint, establishing communities of practice, adopting value-driven scoping and budgeting, adopting intelligent automation, managing organizational change, and measuring progress. Successful agile implementation requires efforts from top management to enable adoption across all departments and prioritize the transformation.

1. How Retail CEOs Can Drive
Agile to Grow Their Business
Pratik Pal
President and Global Head, Retail, CPG, Travel, Transportation &
Hospitality
Rajashree R
Global Head, Retail Solutions Group
August 2018

2. Agile in Retail is Necessary
Retail leaders are facing stiff competition from digital-first enterprises and mobile-first
consumers. To compete, they need to:
Undertake digital
transformations for
innovation in their processes,
products, services, and
marketing campaigns
Experiment with new
business models
Optimize their store and
online operations
Understand that technology
problems translate into
customer issues

3. Overcome Barriers to Agile
Create a transformation
blueprint
Replace traditional ways of
scoping projects
Manage organizational change
Espouse strong leadership
commitment
Establish communities of
practice (CoPs)
Adopt intelligent automation
Measure the progress
There are seven ways in which retail organizations can overcome the most common
barriers to agile adoption:

4. Espouse Strong Leadership Commitment
Engage coaches to teach agile principles and conduct exercises. All top-level executives
should:
Display commitment
Imbibe the essence of agile
Internalize the need for
change
Assume product ownership
and responsibility to defining
the product roadmap
Enable short feedback loops
to learn from and act on end-
user feedback

5. Create a Transformation Blueprint
Identify how to serve
customers better
To create maximum value for all stakeholders, the CEO must recruit executives to work
with technologists to:
Prioritize initiatives that
provide maximum value for
all stakeholders
Create a blueprint that will
help leaders visualize what
the company will look like
after agile adoption

6. Establish Communities of Practice (CoPs)
To achieve improved customer satisfaction and faster time to market, organizations
must set up CoPs to:
Drive agile adoption
Accelerate agile
transformation with
governance
Motivate cultural change
Produce evidence of benefits
via metrics

7. Adopt Value-driven Scoping and Budgeting
Replace traditional ways of organizing, staffing, budgeting, and planning projects with
value stream-based funding:
Delegate scoping and
budgeting to agile delivery
teams
Launch high-value, low-cost
initiatives first
Follow quarterly cycle for
portfolio demand planning,
discovery, prioritization, and
funding
Enable delivery based on
business value

8. Adopt Intelligent Automation
Adopt a machine-first
delivery model
To successfully use agile approaches for delivering new services, embrace automation of
IT systems:
Build capabilities for AI-
driven automation of
engineering processes
Automate engineering and
operations with DevOps
Enable fast and frequent
delivery of customer
products and services
Reduce development
overheads
Use AI to improve estimates
on decisions ridden with
complexity of variables and
voluminous data

9. Manage Organizational Change
Explain to the teams the
current state, competitive
position, need for change,
and how to be successful
Change at organizational level demands multi-pronged initiatives:
Maintain ongoing
communications and
coaching
Reduce fear of change
towards future uncertainties
Use mobile app to share
information
Set up mechanisms for
experience gathering and
knowledge management
Engage a learning academy
via experiential support

10. Measure the Progress
Measure the agile transformation journey effectively:
Develop a framework to
assess the impact of changes
Establish a change agent
network for each business
area by function and
geography
Choose the right
communication strategy to
measure progress and
deliver feedback
Provide a dashboard view for
the organization
Evangelize success stories
and discuss lessons learned

11. Enjoy Benefits of Agile
Becoming digital-first and agile has helped several retailers to:
Create unique and
differentiated customer
proposition
Increase resilience in the
rapidly evolving retail
environment
Make intelligent decisions
and quick adjustments
empowered by customer
feedback
Adopt new business
capabilities quickly
Provide harmonized online
and in-store customer
experience

12. Implement Agile at the Top
Successful agile implementation calls for efforts from the top management to:
Enable all the departments
and support teams to
espouse a ‘by default agile’
mindset
Create an organization-level
ecosystem that embraces
and supports agile
Cultivate strong commitment
in the leadership to make
transformation to agile a top
priority Build a team of business and
technology managers who
are highly productive in
driving on-demand
capabilities

13. How Retail CEOs Can Drive
Agile to Grow Their Business
Download the Article
Contact Us