Luxembourg, 15/11/2018

Design Thinking, Lean Start-up and Agile Delivery - a mix of these three popular development approaches introduced by three experienced practitioners generated a lot of excitement and debate at the PMI Luxembourg Chapter and Deloitte Luxembourg joint event that gathered over 120 diverse participants, from devote followers of Agile Manifesto to budding project managers.

The meeting point

From marketing, through product innovation to software development, Design Thinking, Lean Start-up and Agile Delivery bring are currently transforming product development across industries and organization types and generating significant interest, even more so Luxembourg with its high aspirations in the area of finance, technology and innovation. Unsurprisingly, when PMI Luxembourg Chapter and Deloitte Luxembourg had invited experts on the topic, it attracted a significant number of professionals from several Luxembourg organizations. Energizing presentations where followed by a panel discussing do’s and don’ts for agile implementations. The lively discussion continued during a networking cocktail when at the tables experiences were shared and connections created. You could hear about corporate incubators, startup ideas, as well as various ways in which mature corporations are taking design thinking and agile beyond the traditional software or product development domain into strategic innovation and streamlining of operations in functional departments, often impacting the long established, more traditional project management approach.

Empathy, testing and creating value

The event under the title Customer Problems to Customer Solutions was yet another outcome of the partnership between PMI Lux chapter and Deloitte bringing together experts and professionals to learn, share and connect. Dr Marc SNIUKAS, a global expert on strategic innovation and corporate entrepreneurship, author of The Art of Opportunity (Wiley, 2016), in a captivating presentation explained the principles and tools of Design Thinking, advocating breaking away from the traditional approaches with their linear analyze-plan-implement steps towards iterative steps of acting, learning and design. Mirav VYAS, a Strategy Consultant at Deloitte UK showed ways to shorten product development cycles with the Lean Start-Up approach. Based on a compelling personal story of his own startup, he explained what it takes to become an innovation scientist and apply a scientific method to new product development based on continuous testing and real-world validation. Joachim SAMMER, Architect and Technology Manager at Deloitte Lux brought the topic to the next level with a SAFe framework for agile delivery intended to scale up the approach for incremental value creation from the backrooms of IT department to the whole organization.

With all the positive vibes it was easy to forget that the change rarely comes easy. “Working with companies, I see that people are still afraid of sharing and showing half-cooked things to their clients” said VYAS. There was a common understanding that one should choose wisely where to apply the new methods. No need to go big immediately. As SNIUKAS pointed out: “start by asking different questions”!