Building better digital services through small steps

Digital projects often follow the traditional "waterfall" approach - planning everything upfront, building it all, then launching at once. While familiar, this method frequently leads to delays, budget overruns, and outdated solutions. The following excerpt from our ebook offers a more effective alternative: making small, incremental improvements that add up to significant positive change.

Instead of planning one massive change that takes months and carries significant risks, there's a better way to improve digital services. It's called the agile approach, and it's all about making smaller, regular improvements that add up to big changes. Let's explore how this works in practice and why it's often more successful.

Rather than waiting months to show users anything new, you can plan, design, build, test and release individual improvements in just a few days. This approach helps you learn what works and what doesn't, making each improvement better than the last.

Let's look at a practical example: sending welcome emails to new customers. With an agile approach, you might start very simply – perhaps having a team member manually send welcome emails when someone signs up. This might sound basic, but it has several advantages:

First, it gets the service running quickly. Your customers start receiving welcome emails right away, rather than waiting months for a perfect automated system. Second, your team learns valuable insights about what information customers need and what questions they ask. You can use this knowledge to improve the emails as you go along.

The next step might be setting up a simple automated response using existing tools like Gmail. Again, this is a small, practical step that you can implement quickly and improve based on what you learn.

Compare this to the traditional approach: spending three months building a complex system with hundreds of features, only to find out that the welcome email itself isn't quite right. By taking smaller steps, you stay focused on what really matters – getting helpful information to your customers quickly and effectively.

Some systems are specifically designed to help teams work this way. For example, Contensis has developed a feature called Blocks – essentially self-contained pieces of code that run different parts of your website or application.

As Contensis CEO Richard Chivers explains: "Because each Block works almost independently, you can update one part of your website without affecting everything else. This gives organisations the ability to develop their digital services the same way companies like Spotify and Netflix do, without needing a huge team or lots of different tools."

Rob Turner, a scrum master at Zengenti, offers practical advice for helping teams embrace this approach. The key, he explains, is having a strong product owner – someone from the organisation who can make decisions and guide the project.

Here's what Rob recommends for getting started:

• Choose your product owner carefully – they need to be available and empowered to make decisions
• Be clear about your budget and how team time will be used
• Decide what features are absolutely essential for your first version (what's called a Minimum Viable Product or MVP)
• Plan how you'll gather feedback and make improvements after launch

"People who are used to traditional project management might find this new approach challenging at first," Rob acknowledges. "But with regular encouragement and by highlighting the benefits as they happen, teams usually come to prefer this way of working."

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is like a first draft that's good enough to use. Instead of trying to make everything perfect before launch, you include just the essential features that let people start using your service. Then you can improve it based on real feedback, rather than assumptions about what people might want.

This approach reduces risk and helps you deliver value to users more quickly. Instead of waiting months or years for a perfect solution, you can start helping users right away and make your service better over time based on their actual needs and feedback.

Remember, the goal isn't to launch something and leave it – it's to create a foundation that you can build upon, guided by real user experiences and changing needs. This way, your digital services can keep evolving and improving, rather than becoming outdated and needing another complete overhaul in a few years' time.

The agile approach offers a practical alternative to traditional digital project management. By embracing small, incremental improvements, your organisation can reduce risk, respond more effectively to user needs, and create digital services that evolve naturally over time.

This methodology not only produces better results but also creates a more positive environment for your team, encouraging innovation and continuous improvement.

Consider how you might apply these principles to your next digital project. Even a small step toward more agile practices can yield significant benefits for your organisation and the people you serve.