Chad Albrecht’s guiding philosophy would be like nails on a chalkboard to Karl Marx and ol’ Vlad Lenin. Then again, Henry Ford wouldn’t exactly be crazy about what the president of Centare, a Brookfield-based software development company, has to say.
To be sure, five-year economic plans and Model Ts available in any color “as long as it’s black” would not fly in Albrecht’s world, which is all about creating products rapidly and adapting to new business environments in real time.
| “I think a lot of organizations historically, as they’ve built software, have let processes and formality and all of these business practices get in the way of being pragmatic and of people talking to people and solving the real problem.” — Chad Albrecht, president, Centare |
No, Albrecht is no acolyte of Marx, and his thinking has evolved far beyond the grinding efficiency of the business world post-Industrial Revolution. You might think of him as something of a surfing instructor, teaching businesses how to ride the uncertain waves of markets, wherever they may take you.
To be more precise, Albrecht is an expert in Agile and Scrum, two of the biggest trends in business technology today, and his firm, which has a branch office in Madison, offers “total product strategy, world-class software development, and business agility coaching and training.”
In other words, he’s thrown out the old way of looking at the world in favor of a new paradigm.
“Agile is a synonym for flexibility, adaptability, agility,” said Albrecht, who will present a Lunch and Learn on being an agile company at 11:30 a.m. Feb. 21 at the Great Dane Pub in Fitchburg. “Specifically as it relates to developing a software product or a product in general, there’s a whole set of practices and techniques that are used to be able to build a little bit at a time and test and use that product in the market to make sure that it’s the right product, and if it’s not, to be able to flux the product in a way that meets the demand.
“Instead of developing a product over one to two years, which would be the technique of yesteryear, we maybe develop a product every two weeks, and we validate that what we’re building is going to meet our needs, whether that be our vision or the market’s need, and we change and adapt it as necessary.”
A new vision
Albrecht is guided in large part by the Agile Manifesto, a document penned by a small group of software developers in 2001 to signal a shift in developers’ approach to creating new products.
In short, the manifesto declared that the group valued:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
But while Albrecht and other Agile adherents see this as the cutting-edge approach to software development and best business practices in general, in a way it’s actually a pretty old-fashioned philosophy.
“It’s about being pragmatic, and I think a lot of organizations historically, as they’ve built software, have let processes and formality and all of these business practices get in the way of being pragmatic and of people talking to people and solving the real problem,” said Albrecht. “And the Agile Manifesto is all about getting back to that — to saying, ‘Let’s do what we really would if we never worked in business before and we set out to solve this problem. How might we attack it?’
“If I put you and five other people on an island and gave you a pile of wood and said, ‘Build a boat to get off the island,’ how might you attack that? You’re going to do that very pragmatically in a way that makes sense, and you work together and you talk about what you’re building. We’ve gotten away from that in this industry in the past, and the Agile Manifesto is about getting back to that.”
An example of using Agile development, says Albrecht, might be working on an online shopping site.
“So I decide I want to build something to compete with Amazon,” said Albrecht. “Over the first two weeks what I might do is build a mechanism to display a couple of products on the home page and the overall color scheme and stuff like that, and that’s it. So there’s no shopping cart, there’s no way for me to log in, there might not even be a way for me to buy a product initially. And what I can do with that is I can test it, put that in front of people, and make sure that we’re on the right path. But I don’t want to build it as a prototype. I don’t want to build it in terms of, ‘I’ll throw this away and I’ll build the real thing when I get there.’ I actually want to start building the real product.
“So it’s not really tweaking, per se, but it’s actually building out wholesale chunks of functionality with the product. So the next two weeks we may add a way for somebody to actually create an account, and in the next two weeks after that we add a shopping cart and a way for somebody to buy products. And we may stop there. We may actually test the product in the market, we may bring in a user group to validate that what we’re building makes sense and test our assumptions that we’re making about how we’re going to make money and what the product is going to do.”
Of course, the value of Agile — as well as Scrum, which Albrecht describes as a framework for building products in short time frames — is obvious when it comes to the fleet-footed world of software development. But are these tools equally useful to other businesses?
(Continued)
“They are extremely useful, especially the business concepts,” said Albrecht. “From an economic volatility standpoint … we find in general that the pace of change is ever-increasing, and we can’t do strategic planning on an annual basis. If I’m manufacturing widgets and I’m not even developing software, the likelihood that competition may enter the market and start stealing market share away from me is high — higher today than it’s ever been. So what do I do to be able to build my business around responding to that type of competition, speaking to it, and protecting my market share?
“If I’m executing a one-year plan, I probably have to call an emergency meeting of VPs and executives, and now we have to come up with an analysis, and there’s all of this exception handling that has to happen when there’s competitive pressure. These techniques will allow you to just bake it into part of your everyday business. So responding to market change is something that’s constantly talked about.”
Of course, few business leaders would say that they stand flat-footed and fail to respond quickly and gracefully to market pressures. But Albrecht insists that while Agile and Scrum have found their way into the lexicons of many CEOs, some companies still have plenty to learn about effectively applying the principles.
“The Scrum framework itself is about 20 years old,” said Albrecht. “The adoption was slow early on. In 2001, a bunch of thought leaders got together and signed the Agile Manifesto, which in many ways was the starting point of Scrum and Agile crossing the chasm to being the norm. Over the last couple of years, we’re at the point where 80% of organizations are actually saying that they use Scrum or a Scrum-like technique to build product. The challenge is that a lot of organizations, while they say they’re doing it, aren’t really doing it, and that’s where we come in.”
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