Discovering new ways of working

An innovative product concept, a rapidly changing market, a highly competitive environment and only a few months’ turnaround. These were the parameters of the hello project, which kicked off in October 2017. For Hager Group, the project demonstrated just how quickly the organisation is able to adapt to new ideas and approaches; how we are able to try new things, deal with setbacks, produce unexpected findings and open up new horizons for the company. In other words, hello was essentially a high-speed test lab for us.

hello is an innovative alert system solution integrated into the electrical distribution board.

Customers are alerted via a smartphone application in the event of a problem with their electrical installation.

Some background information: hello is a new app-based alert system that instantly informs users about faults in their electrical installation system. This brings significant digital added value for the distribution board, one of Hager’s core products. The product concept was developed by Hager Group employees and presented at Tech Days 2017, an internal event.

As Olivier Pradoura, the Program Manager Director at Hager Group responsible, explains that “…neither we, nor our competitors had anything similar in our portfolios, so we made the decision to transform hello into a finished product as quickly as possible.” In fact, the project team managed to bring the product to market in just eight months, less than half the time typically required. hello was essentially a pilot project for the company to evaluate how it might deliver new solutions in a more flexible and customer-focused way going forward.

The only question was, how? The project managers decided on agile project methods relatively quickly, which had already been used in various forms by the IT and design teams at Hager Group.

To recap: agility is a concept that became famous about 20 years ago with the Agile Manifesto, a paper written by a small team of programmers. Frustrated by the inflexible goals and the long and laborious processes of traditional project work, they called for a new, more agile way of working that was initially practised predominantly by software companies, start-ups and young tech giants such as Facebook and Spotify. Instead of working in departmental and organisational silos, employees work in small, cross-functional teams – otherwise known as squads – which are held fully accountable for their projects, achievements and failures. Short-term project cycles called ‘sprints’ replace traditional project schedules, which were often found to be out of date before implementation had even started. In contrast, with an agile approach, projects are continuously revised and adapted, in order to take on board new findings and requirements.

This explains why agility is particularly popular in areas where there is fast, continuous development, where new things are being tried out, and where it is important to respond swiftly to changing customer requirements. In other words, precisely the environment in which Hager Group operates.

With Program Manager Hamid El Khantour at the helm, a team consisting of around a dozen colleagues distributed over the sites of Saverne, Obernai, Crolles, Blieskastel, Paris and Aubervilliers set to work. Regular meetings took place between the experts from Engineering, Hager Services and the French market organisation. The minimum viable products that were swiftly developed by Engineering were tested with end customers soon after. These fast iteration loops meant that the product was quickly aligned to the needs of both the customers and the market.

The teams appropriated agile methods and used them throughout the entire project.

Product features are tested with installer and end-user customers.

And it’s precisely because not everything went to plan that the hello project can be hailed a resounding success. “Fail fast, fail cheap” is the famous motto and recipe for success of the Silicon Valley start-up scene. What it means is that success comes to those who boldly explore new terrain, keep learning from their mistakes and draw the right conclusions. And that’s exactly what happened in the hello project. One factor that emerged as a problem for the cross- functional hello team, for example, was the fact that its members were spread across different sites. Because of this, it was impossible for the project team to coordinate and progress as effectively as a team working together from the same location.

This was the reason why the team completed the project one month later than originally planned, despite still having finished the project in record time. For Olivier Pradoura, this provides a valuable insight. “There is not one single perfect development process or one ideal way of working,” he says. Instead, it is important to choose the most suitable approach for each project. In this particular case, Hager Group tried out agile methodologies. “In other words, we have added new working methods to our toolbox.” And that should enable the company to be significantly more manoeuvrable in future development processes.

“hello must be seen as part of a much larger project,” adds Achim Jungfleisch, Senior Director of Solution Marketing at Hager Group. “Besides being part of our digital initiative for our products and solutions, it has also helped us to better understand how we might speed up our product development. hello delivered some very useful insights in this regard.”

‘hello’ is therefore the perfect name for the project. It also expresses the friendly, inquisitive approach that Hager Group is taking towards its future.