Blogs

(Original creator: JorgeNunez)

Good luck Max Verstappen (twitter:@Max33Verstappen) on getting podium places at USA and Mexico after the great achievements of Malaysia and Japan! As said before, the pit stops improved. By incorporating all developments in technology as well as fine-tuning the roles within the team the pit stops were made as efficient as possible “difficult to beat 1.9 seconds”.  All in all, pit stops contributed the most when used strategically to win races; that means that based on the efficiency level attained on a perfectly synchronized process with flawless collaboration of the team, the squads gained an advantage of 26 seconds over the opponents.  Without going into the overall strategy, rest assured that making the team work efficiently is not a mere milestone, it is constant practice and sharp focus from all involved members including the crucial factor of trust. As Michael Schumacher said - “When you start out in a team, you have to get the teamwork going and then you get something back.” In that sense, at Uniface our teams have reached the level of efficiency which allows us to release our software on many platforms and for two different versions of the product every scrum sprint (every 2 weeks). We can still improve and we keep on doing that as KAIZEN are part of our DNA nowadays. And the biggest achievement we see is, as in F1, being able to apply that predictable process to the overall strategy.

Let me go back to what happened at the F1 with the pit stop, once the team had mastered the level of efficiency, the squad decided to think out of the box and not concentrate only on the pit stop but on the overall performance of the race. At Uniface, we are aligning the business with IT to look at the overall strategy, although we still improve our SCRUM ceremonies. We think that the areas where we will gain the most are vision, strategy, roadmap, backlog management and overall in open two-way communication. I’ll keep you updated with the progress on this fascinating project. Remember, undercutting is the art of knowing when the competitor will stop or come back to the race so that you can intentionally beat him or her by planning your own pit stop accordingly. In my opinion, we need to make the most out of the

well-performed process of delivering software to use the ever-changing priorities and hit the market with the software our customers/prospects need on time. We come from an 18-month cycle (~78 weeks) to a 2-week cycle to release software, now we need to use that to strategically deliver what helps our customers the most… in a changing world.


Food for thought

The following table is an attempt to compare pit stops and scrum sprints, I know it is not perfect but its intention is to spark thoughts. Let me know what your think about it. Enjoy!