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Agile working at data team Decathlon

Flexibility. Speed. Sprints. The link between Agile, Scrum and sports is easy to make. So is the link between the international sports store chain Decathlon and Scrum Academy; we both love sports! As trainers and coaches of Scrum Academy, we love visiting Decathlon stores; one for running shoes, another for cycling clothes and yet another for a new supboard. By the way, there is another similarity; data-driven work is in both parties’ sports DNA. So it feels very natural to work with Decathlon’s data team to optimize the Agile way of working.

Decathlon’s data team? Yes, you could see that data team as an internal service that ensures that the strategic choices of Decathlon and of its store managers are substantiated with rock-solid facts. All this in the most practical overview possible. This is where the smart minds work who deliver customer-focused value to the primary process to take Decathlon ever one step further.

How do you get the most out of Scrum?

Scrumming has been done by the data team for a while, but then comes that moment when the team wants to look for that real flywheel effect. Some key questions come up. How do we get even more out of the team? How do we manage the very large chunks of work? How do we keep room for the small requests that come in? Questions we answer in our collaboration during a sustained Agile training & coaching program.

Getting Started. In an interactive training session, we briefly refresh Agile and Scrum with each other. What quickly emerges is that Scrum is not the holy grail for all work within the team. While there are large projects that can be managed perfectly well with Scrum, there are also smaller requests from within the organization that a team member works on solo. And which do not necessarily contribute a the sprint goal. This requires a customized approach: Kanban for the small requests and Scrum for the large projects.

What does that mean for prioritizing? Prioritizing thus no longer becomes a full team responsibility, but rather a task of the Product Owner. Of course, based on input from the team. That way the work process gets more flow. It also allows us to involve the internal customer more deeply in larger projects, with interviews and with defining an MVP together.

Agile Tooling

There is a workflow. There is oversight. There is a system. Only all this time, the data team is putting it into several separate excel files. This can create confusion and slow down processes. How do you create unity in a clear overview that is accessible to all team members? By translating everything into a complete overview in the smart tool Jira. This tool is enormously strong in prioritizing work and distributing work with customizable workflows. That sounds good and attractive, of course, but translating the existing overviews into Jira still proved to be a big step. We took up the challenge together and managed to program the entire work process intelligently in Jira. From now on, the data team has one reality; the status in Jira.

Four successes in a row

The result of the training and coaching is that the Product Owner is now even more empowered. Having a clear work process and support from Jira is also definitely a clear win. As a third plus, the customers have become more involved in the major projects. Using a Value Proposition Canvas, customers are asked deeper questions and there is much more cooperation to achieve a top result together. Last but not least, the team has fresh energy to deliver even more value and work super together. So this is how you build on increasing impact and on happy team members. It almost sounds like (top)sport. Curious how this can contribute in your organization? Feel free to call us.