The Replanet Case

Since 2007, Replanet’s goal is not to sell a product, but to tailor energy-saving projects around customers’ needs. For this reason, his work processes are rarely standard, requiring as much a strong propensity to adapt as they do intense communication among team members. Precisely because sustainability in Replanet’s view should also permeate the way work is done, management has considered the agile approach as a useful tool to help manage processes and workloads.

Projects in general are relatively short, with the prevalent duration ranging from 1 to 3 months and a few cases reaching a year. This prompted us to consider the simplified agile or “Easy Agile” approach, already described in the second of the three examples given in Chapter 13.

Iterations are weekly, and people work only part time on a project, thus managing a multi-project load. This is all done with a simplified approach to handling Sprints, Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives.

Within the organization, Carmela Guarascio, with prior experience in process facilitation and innovation, has stepped in as a change agent, totally available to the teams.

We have been experimenting with this approach, which also includes agile site management with Flash Meeting boards, for several months now. This is all enabled by a web-based planning system that makes multi-project management sustainable.

The results are very encouraging, in the words of administrator Kevin Pratticò:
Already in Replanet there is a widespread approach to projects in which everyone contributes in a shared way to decisions and the progress of activities. This agility has always been a strength of the company, although pursued in a not so organized way. As soon as we met Claudio, we immediately thought that the Easy Agile approach he had developed in his previous experiences might be right for us. And so it was.

According to Kevin, the main strengths offered by the agile approach are as follows:

1. First, it allows for a sharing of the entire project within the team, which in turn allows for better accounting for the risks of any delays, as well as holding the group accountable to key milestones.
2. Second, it facilitates the process of delegating business planning and programming activities that, starting with the administrator, are shared across teams. In this way it becomes clear to everyone that the driving force behind the activities is in the hands of the people who make up the company and not in those of the administrator himself. Making this concept perceptible through digital tools strongly impacts the awareness and satisfaction of those involved.
3. Third, it makes explicit and reinforces the horizontal sharing in which Replanet already plays a leading role; Agile will be able to operationalize it and make it even more effective. For at Replanet we firmly believe that everyone’s creativity constitutes the invaluable value of the company, and that it needs appropriate spaces to express itself.

For the success of the initiative, it is crucial to work on the motivation of the people involved, making it clearly and consistently explicit how sharing the workload makes it easier to manage daily activities and especially long-term planning. Both relied until now on the use of multiple management files simultaneously shared on the Cloud, which had to be moved and updated as needed. Such action did not reward the sharing of the work process in its entirety, and might not have best rewarded each person’s contribution to the whole.

The agile methodology, especially in a small business where different roles and skills overlap, can therefore help with business governance and communication. Integrated workload planning and accounting is not only useful but also necessary, because the risk of overload is very recurrent.