Weeks ago, dtac launched 8 agile teams operating under a new way of work.
“dtac is a big organization, packed with thousand of employees, numerous divisions and has been working in Silo system for so long. These factors sometimes cause a campaign to run slowly because the decisions have been made by far too many people. This tardiness has a bad effect on customers, causing them to wait longer for their problems to be solved .” said Chokchai Pattaramalai, agile coach of dtac.
Nowadays, the rapidly evolving technology cause customers’ behavior to change tremendously. Customers need a range of variety products and crave for the strong solution to their pain point.
“Consequently, dtac decided to experiment in various innovated way of work and Agile is among those practices. The most outstanding property of agile is it decrease the unnecessary and complicated processes while encouraging people to make products faster. Agile support people to change and adapt plan to correspond with the current situation.” said Chokchai Pattaramalai, agile coach of dtac.
Working like agile.
Agile was originated from a software developer some ten years ago. Back then, they faced the difficulty of being too slow at work and facing far too many problems. To step up their game, they came up with agile model to dictate the new strategy of creating software. The model is comprised of 4 principle points.
- Let employees communicate more instead of focusing at method all the time.
- The mark of success is a result , not a pile of documents or finished product.
- Let customers involve as much as possible. Their duty is not just only signing contract.
- Plan must be able to change at all times. Think of it as cooking. We can taste and add ingredients along the way.
“We can compare agile way of work as cooking a soup. In order to cook a soup, a chef must continually taste it. If the soup tastes too bland, the chef can pour a seasoning and can adjust the flavor as he wants. On the other hand, the traditional way of work can be compared to baking a cake, once you pour everything in, there is no way to fix once put it the oven. We cannot change nor know the end result.” Claims Chokchai Pattaramalai, agile coach of dtac.
Dtac deployed agile in attempt to response to customers faster. Agile in dtac is not only limited at technology department but can be applied in any designated divisions. Agile also created a seamless working experience and make us closer to the customers. Agile let us know customers’ satisfaction faster, we will know instantly and be grateful of our hardwork.
200 Frontrunners
To deploy agile in a big organization like dtac is indeed a complicated task .We started our mission with a handful of frontrunners and divide them into 8 teams
“Some of the Frontrunners are dtac’s original business like Prepaid and Postpaid while some of them are new business like electrical vehicle and smart farmer. The reason why frontrunners have 200 members because we still don’t want to put consequences to the big picture and we want to test a small impact first as a trial” Chokchai added.
8 teams of frontrunners will have a small meeting each week to let everyone in the team knows the process of each member’s task. After 6 weeks, each team will declare the result and the impact they made to customers.
Agile fixes our working structure
“It is normal for each frontrunners when they initially deploy agile, they will acknowledge problems buried deep in their previous traditional way of work. They often find that some process is unnecessary and without it, the products can be delivered much faster. Some solution can be made by a minor supervisor and does not need an approval from executive levels. It can be said that agile unearths the problem buried deep by the traditional way of work ”
Once each team faces the true problem, they want to abolish them instantly. This make everyone want to adopt agile and can adapt themselves faster even though they are still used to the traditional way of work.
If you want to learn more about the insight of each frontrunners, how they celebrate their step-by-step success and to learn about the future plan of agile in dtac. Please stay tune for next chapter.
