How do we help big retailers be more responsive? Many of the retailers I spend time with want to be part of the pop-up culture. Their challenge is that they’ve spent 90 years building process and bureaucracy in hierarchical organisations that are very difficult to change.
But they have to change – a consumer revolution is happening and the organisations that are standing still or not adapting are going out of business. That's a fact that is seen almost every day.
If you look at some of the top retailers, they’re built for efficiency, not for speed. We’re helping them to introduce capabilities and skills in retail innovation, that is, how to be responsive and experimental – failing fast and behaving more like lean startups.
Agile development cycles mean businesses can decide which paths to pursue based on proven results rather than hunches. And this means they can bring in more revenue in much less time to get ahead of competitors.
For a deeper look at how agile project management is helping retailers, including details about an agile project run by client lastminute.com, watch a recent talk I gave as part of Insider Trends' 'Trendsetters: Future of Retail' event at the British Library Conference Centre in London on 25 March 2013. Or read a transcript here.
Learn how we helped lastminute.com build a lean and agile “Innovation Engine” that can take ideas for new features and products, optimise them with market-driven tests, and bring the best to market as rapidly as possible.