Towards agile digital development step by step

Initially, the goal of the two-month mini-project was to produce a game book to support development. However, the overall understanding of the current state of digital development was still unclear and, on the other hand, the guidelines were being updated. So, instead of additional guidelines, it was decided to focus on gathering a common understanding of the practices of the current state of digital development.

Challenges identified in advance were e.g.

• There are guidelines for digital development, but the practical implementation is described precisely only with regard to IT processes.
• Service development is carried out in different parts of the organisation and a need was seen to gather an overall understanding.
• The use of many digital services is lower than expected and it is good to understand the reasons for this.

Arto Karilahti from the City of Turku, who led the “Clarification of digital development” project, describes the project as follows:

– In the municipal organisation, it is typical that the end result is defined in advance. Now we started from the fact that we have a vision, and a more precise understanding was gathered with the help of agile experiments. We learned that everything can be clarified, and a lot can be done with a small amount of work. It’s worth starting with concrete actions, visualisations, and creating a common understanding.

It is possible to get the best understanding of the current state through doing things in practice. The project focused on describing current processes while helping to solve current challenges related to them.

Challenges suitable for the project were found when the project manager of the City of Turku, Arto Karilahti, had a discussion with his colleagues and they tried to identify challenging situations that needed a new approach.

– Development projects are easily perceived as extra work that does not lead to anything concrete. In this project, we helped to solve current problems, Karilahti says.

We started by describing practical processes, and first the goal was to form a common understanding of the problem and what we are aiming for. After this, progress was agreed on step by step, with assessments in between.

Each sub-project included short (usually 30-60 min) meetings during which

1. A topic was discussed and documented at the same time
2. Either an internal or external customer (entrepreneur or citizen) was interviewed and the customer’s experience and customer path were documented together in a visual format
3. Participants reflected on what was done and agreed on further measures based on what was learned

Alongside the actual project work, Gofore organised an agile development training for employees of the City of Turku. The training provided an opportunity to get to know the agile development mindset and to practice the agile way of working in practice to solve the challenges of one’s own work.

In relation to digitalisation, Turku’s city strategy describes the goal of a smooth everyday life in the 2030’s: “Customers feel that the services are the most accessible in Finland and available at the right time. The services are modern, smart and most of them available digitally.”

The management of the organisation naturally plays a significant role in managing digital development, and therefore a digital transformation maturity level analysis was conducted with the city’s management team as a discussion workshop. The analysis provides a reference framework for evaluating the current status of organisational renewal and digitalisation and for planning development targets. The analysis also enables comparison with situations in other municipalities.

The management team members who actively participated in the workshops developed a common understanding of the role of digitisation in different industries. In the discussion, it was sometimes agreed and sometimes boldly disagreed completely. A constructive way of taking everyone’s views into account and forming a common understanding based on them is a message of internal respect and creates a strong foundation for future development measures.

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