LOCAL CASE/EXAMPLE
Alysis – Agile Software Development for Massive Customer Satisfaction
Alysis is a Vienna based software development company which is specialised agile development. The goal of the company is to create massive customer satisfaction through human-cantered development after ISO 9241-210. Human-cantered design is an approach to interactive systems that aims to make systems usable and useful by focusing on the users, their needs and requirements, and by applying human factors/ergonomics, and usability knowledge and techniques. This approach enhances effectiveness and efficiency, improves human well-being, user satisfaction, accessibility and sustainability; and counteracts possible adverse effects of use on human health, safety and performance.
Founded in 2011 the company has a multidisciplinary team and lives SCRUM and agile development on a daily basis with a strong focus on customer satisfaction.
The consequent use of human-cantered design and agile developments methods helps the company to create solutions for very complex challenges for private customers as well as for governmental institutions.
Source: www.alysis.at
Agile development in the construction industry
Often people think that agile development is suitable only for the software industry. This is not true. First “agile” had its roots in project management in the late 1980s and only then has been rapidly adapted in software development. Nowadays more and more companies are embracing (again) the benefits of such methods, especially as challenges are getting more complex and adaptability becomes more important, especially in areas where changes are part of the daily business.
The construction industry has been facing lots of changes over the last decades. 3D CAD and BIM (Building Information Modelling) are state of the art and significantly helped to create more transparency.
Changes on constructions sites are part of the daily business, but also have a strong impact on lots of companies involved – just think about the massive amount of different trades and persons on a big construction site and the different goals of stakeholder.
In the past often problems have been just seen close to the finishing of a project, leading to financial problems and unsatisfied customers.
Changes during the construction process leaded to problems, as the plans have not been up-to date and consequences of changes to other trades and elements have often been overseen.
Through the implementation of agile methods and a increasing focus on the planning phase combined with the use of modern tools like BIM, computer vision, augmented and virtual reality and collaboration tools it has been proved that problems can be significantly reduced and customer satisfaction increased.
Yes, it was difficult to increase the transparency in the beginning and persons and companies had to be convinced that also they can benefit from better transparency both on a financial, compliance and risk level. Trainings have been necessary, especially also for persons which usually have not been used to failure tolerance and a open culture – as both on a construction site are really difficult to live. But then they found out that when putting more time into the planning phase and creating a digital twin of the building the principle of “fail often and early, in order succeed at last” was easy to implement, as problems were evidenced in the digital model, before a single physical brick laid – and therefore also much easier to solve.