Building Agile Workforce for Facing Digital Industry

Nidya Dudija

Faculty of Economics and Business Telkom University, Indonesia

Keywords: Agile, Scrum Method, Learning Agility, Dynamic Environment.

Abstract: Changes in technology have encouraged the organization to make changes to survive in a dynamic

environment. By utilizing digital innovation, the business industry begins to develop itself and play in the

digital market. Competition in this digital business can certainly be won if human resources and ways of

working within the organization make changes. Changes from the manual work to digital work put forward

the principle of agility. Many methods developed to create agile workforce include Lean Strartup, Scrum,

Holacrarcy, design thinking, etc. This paper is conducted to describe building agile workforce methods. It

purposes to generate a mapping of human development in the digital era by applying a descriptive

qualitative approach and literature review of some previous studies. The results of this study are description

scrum method concept of working as a strategy for facing the competitive industry in the digital era.

1 INTRODUCTION

Rapid changes in the business world require

organizations to always adapt and be able to

innovate to survive in the industry. Changes occur in

recovering work, for organizations must change and

adjust old ways of working with new ways of

working so that the targets being overcome recover.

Changes occur more quickly because it is supported

by the rapid technological development of the

transition of digital technology 4.0. Answering these

challenges requires a work method called Agile

which has been applied by organizations to increase

the speed and accuracy of work and productivity.

Agile is a set of methods, principles, managerial

frameworks that require fast and agile work methods

to complete a work target.

Rapid changes in the business world require

organizations to always adapt and be able to

innovate to survive in the industry. Changes occur in

recovering work, for organizations must change and

adjust old ways of working with new ways of

working so that the targets being overcome recover.

Changes occur more quickly because it is supported

by the rapid technological development of the

transition of digital technology 4.0. Answering these

challenges requires a work method called Agile

which has been applied by organizations to increase

the speed and accuracy of work and productivity.

Agile is a set of methods, principles, managerial

frameworks that require fast and agile work methods

to complete a work target. Historically, Agile was

born from techniques used by innovative Japanese

companies in the 70s and 80s such as Toyota, Fuji,

and Honda. Then in the mid-90s, Jeff Sutherland

was frustrated with projects that were out of

schedule and needed higher budgets. This condition

makes Sutherland try to create a Scrum framework

for implementing Agile work methods. The use of

the Scrum work method is not limited to engineers

or developers but the Scrum framework can be

useful for other types of projects such as marketing,

construction and so on. By applying the Scrum work

method, can complete the work in large quantities

and shorter time (Cervone, 2011).

Changes in the business world that is very

fast demanding, fast and accurate work methods to

produce a product that is accepted by the market so

that makes the organization can compete with the

industry and maintain its existence. Fowler &

Highsmith (2001) in Agile Manifesto, Agile is based

on a set of principles that focus on customer value,

iterative and incremental delivery, intense

collaboration, small integrated teams, self-

organization and small and continuous

improvements. It is often stated that Agile

Management works best with small teams.

According to Bustamante and Sawhney (2011), the

ideal Agile project team is small, co- located,

communicate face to face on a daily basis and has an

Dudija, N.

Building Agile Workforce for Facing Digital Industry.

DOI: 10.5220/0009448302910297

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Psychology (ICPsy 2019), pages 291-297

ISBN: 978-989-758-448-0

291

ideal team size not exceeding nine people. Along

with this, Agile methods such as Scrum recommend

an optimal team size of seven plus or minus two.

However some industry specialists claim that Agile

is a one size fits all methodology and that it can be

scaled up to a 150 person team.

People and team management are based on

various models such as “The five dysfunctions”

(Lencioni, 2016) and Tuckman’s model (Tuckman

& Jensen, 1977). All of these models require that

team members have a lot of interaction. The more

persons there is on a team, the more interaction is

required and the more difficult it is to manage such

teams. In an Agile team, the project manager must

define the relationships between the roles to enable

the effective coordination and control of the project.

Through this paper, we will discuss the application

of Scrum's work methods to produce Agile work

methods in managing human resources. The work

pattern of Scrum is believed to be a fairly complex

but effective work method to produce the novelty of

a product. Referring to these conditions, human

resource management is needed as a team that can

work together.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Agile Principles

According to Agile Manifesto, agility principles

motivated and empowered software developers –

relying on technical excellence and simple designs –

create business value by delivering working

software to users at regular short intervals. These

principles have spawned a number of practices that

are believed to deliver greater value to customers

and change people management. At the core of these

practices is the idea of self-organizing teams whose

members are not only collocated but also work at a

pace that sustains their creativity and productivity.

The principles encourage practices that

accommodate change in requirements at any stage of

the development process. Furthermore, customers

(or their surrogates) are actively involved in the

development process, facilitating feedback and

reflection that can lead to more satisfying outcomes

(Dingsøyr, Nerur, Balijepally, & Moe, 2012). The

principles are not a formal definition of agility, but

are rather guidelines for delivering high-quality

software in an agile manner. While individual

principles and practices of agile development were

not entirely new to the software community, the way

in which they were put together into a cogent

“theoretical and practical framework” was certainly

novel (Williams and Cockburn, 2003). Ever since

the manifesto was articulated, practitioners and

researchers have been trying to explicate agility and

its different facets. At its core, agility entails ability

to rapidly and flexibly create and respond to change

in the business and technical domains (Henderson-

Sellers and Serour, 2005). Other aspects of agility

explored include lightness or leanness (i.e., having

minimal formal processes) (Cockburn, 2007) and

related concepts such as nimbleness, quickness,

dexterity, suppleness or alertness (Erickson et al.,

2005). In essence, these ideas suggest a “light’

methodology that promotes manoeuvrability and

speed of response” (Cockburn, 2007).

According to Deemer, Benefield, Larman, &

Vodde (2010) The agile family of development

methods were born out of a belief that an approach

more grounded in human reality – and the product

development reality of learning, innovation, and

change – would yield better results. Agile principles

emphasize building working software that people

can get hands on quickly, versus spending a lot of

time writing specifications up front. Agile

development focuses on cross-functional teams

empowered to make decisions, versus big

hierarchies and compartmentalization by function.

And it focuses on rapid iteration, with continuous

customer input along the way. Often when people

learn about agile development or Scrum, there’s a

glimmer of recognition – it sounds a lot like back in

the start-up days, when we “just did it.”

By far the most popular agile method is Scrum

(See Figure 1). It was strongly influenced by a 1986

Harvard Business Review article on the practices

associated with successful product development

groups; in this paper the term “Rugby” was

introduced, which later morphed into “Scrum” in

Wicked Problems, Righteous Solutions (DeGrace

and Stahl, 1993) relating successful development to

the game of Rugby in which a self-organizing team

moves together down the field of product

development. It was then formalized in 1993 by Ken

Schwaber and Dr. Jeff Sutherland. Scrum is now

used by companies large and small, including

Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin,

Motorola, SAP, Cisco, GE, CapitalOne and the US

Federal Reserve. Many teams using Scrum report

significant improvements, and in some cases

complete transformations, in both productivity and

morale. For product developers – many of whom

have been burned by the “management fad of the

month club” – this is significant. Scrum is simple

and powerful.

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Figure 1: Scrum - Agile Process (Deemer, Benefield,

Larman & Vodde, 2010).

Deemer, Benefield, Larman & Vodde (2010)

explained that the Scrum work process to produce

Agility work methods begins with the product

owner, the sprint planning meeting by the team that

the whole process will be managed by the Scrum

master with the work target to produce a potential

product for the company and consumer. The

following is an explanation of the Scrum Agile

Process. Scrum or agile process techniques have

been used in several companies in Indonesia to

produce a product that has a competitive advantage

and can be accepted by the market. This step starts

from determining or choosing a team that can work

and thinks quickly right (sprint think). For example

one of the telecommunications companies in

Indonesia selected hundreds of employees and

selected approximately 10 people who were placed

as The Team. This team has challenges and tasks

that must be completed every week. the work of the

team will always be evaluated and monitored by the

Scrum Masters determined by the company. This

activity takes place continuously in a period of

approximately 6 to 12 months. The output of this

team produces a product that is in line with market

expectations and can produce innovations and

profitable profits for the company.

2.2 Scrum Basics

Deemer, Benefield, Larman, and Vodde (2010)

explain the process of the Scrum method. Mentioned

that scrum is an iterative, incremental framework.

Scrum structures product development in cycles of

work called Sprints, iterations of work which are

typically 1-4 weeks in length, and which take place

one after the other. The Sprints are of fixed duration

– they end on a specific date whether the work has

been completed or not, and are never extended. At

the beginning of each Sprint, a cross-functional team

selects items from a prioritized list of requirements,

and commits to complete them by the end of the

Sprint; during the Sprint, the deliverable does not

change. Each work day, the team gathers briefly to

report to each other on progress, and update simple

charts that orient them to the work remaining. At the

end of the Sprint, the team demonstrates what they

have built, and gets feedback which can then be

incorporated in the next Sprint. Scrum emphasizes

producing working product at the end of the Sprint is

really “done”; in the case of software, this means

code that is fully tested and potentially shippable.

In Scrum, there are three primary roles: The

Product Owner, The Team, and The ScrumMaster.

The Product Owner is responsible for achieving

maximum business value, by taking all the inputs

into what should be produced – from the customer or

end-user of the product, as well as from Team

Members and stakeholders – and translating this into

a prioritized list. In some cases, the Product Owner

and the customer are the same person; in other cases,

the customer might actually be millions of different

people with a variety of needs. The Product Owner

role maps to the Product Manager or Product

Marketing Manager position in many organizations.

The Team builds the product that the customer is

going to consume: the software or website, for

example. The team in Scrum is “cross-functional” –

it includes all the expertise necessary to deliver the

potentially shippable product each Sprint – and it is

“self-managing”, with a very high degree of

autonomy and accountability. The team decides

what to commit to, and how best to accomplish that

commitment; in Scrum lore, the team are known as

“Pigs” and everyone else in the organization are

“Chickens” (which comes from a joke about a pig

and a chicken deciding to open a restaurant called

“Ham and Eggs,” and the pig having second

thoughts because “he would be truly committed, but

the chicken would only be involved”).

The team in Scrum is typically five to ten people,

although teams as large as 15 and as small as 3

report benefits, and for a software project the team

might include analysts, developers, interface

designers, and testers. The team builds the product,

but they also provide input and ideas to the Product

Owner about how to make the product as good as it

can be. While team members can split their time

between Scrum projects and other projects, it’s

much more productive to have team members fully

dedicated. Team members can also change from one

Sprint to the next, but that also reduces the

productivity of the team. Projects with larger teams

are organized as multiple Scrums, each focused on a

Building Agile Workforce for Facing Digital Industry

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different aspect of the product development, with

close coordination of their efforts.

The Scrum Master is one of the most important

elements of Scrum success. The ScrumMaster does

whatever is in their power to help the team be

successful. The ScrumMaster is not the manager of

the team; instead, the ScrumMaster serves the team,

protects the team from outside interference, and

guides the team’s use of Scrum. The ScrumMaster

makes sure everyone on the team (as well as those in

management) understands and follows the practices

of Scrum, and they help lead the organization

through the often difficult change required to

achieve success with Agile methods. Since Scrum

makes visible many impediments and threats to the

team’s effectiveness, it’s important to have a strong

ScrumMaster working energetically to help resolve

those issues, or the team will find it difficult to

succeed. Scrum teams should have someone

dedicated full-time to the role of ScrumMaster (often

the person who previously played the role of Project

Manager), although a smaller team might have a

team member play this role (carrying a lighter load

of regular work when they do so). Great Scrum

Masters have come from all backgrounds and

disciplines: Project Management, Engineering,

Design, Testing. The ScrumMaster and the Product

Owner shouldn’t be the same individual; at times,

the ScrumMaster may be called upon to push back

on the Product Owner (for example, if they try to

introduce new deliverables in the middle of a

Sprint). And unlike a Project Manager, the

ScrumMaster doesn’t tell people what to do or

assign tasks – they facilitate the process, supporting

the team as it organizes and manages itself – so if

the Scrum Master was previously in a position

managing the team, they will need to significantly

evolve their mindset and style of interaction in order

for the team to be successful with Scrum (Deemer,

Benefield, Larman & Vodde, 2010).

In addition to these three roles, there are other

important contributors to the success of the project:

Perhaps the most important of these are Managers.

While their role evolves in Scrum, they remain

critically important – they support the team by

respecting the rules and spirit of Scrum, they help

remove impediments that the team identifies, and

they make their expertise and experience available to

the team. In Scrum, these individuals replace the

time they previously spent “playing nanny”

(assigning tasks, getting status reports, and other

forms of micromanagement) with more time

“playing teacher” (mentoring, coaching, helping

remove obstacles, helping problem-solve, providing

creative input, and guiding the skills development of

team members). In making this shift, managers may

need to evolve their management style; for example,

using Socratic questioning to help the team discover

the solution to a problem, rather than simply

deciding a solution and assigning it to the team.

Figure 2: Scrum Method (Schwaber, 1997).

Schwaber (1997) state that Characteristics of

SCRUM methodology are:

1. The first and last phases (Planning and

Closure) consist of defined processes, where all

processes, inputs and outputs are well defined.

The knowledge of how to do these processes is

explicit. The flow is linear, with some

iterations in the planning phase.

2. The Sprint phase is an empirical process. Many

of the processes in the sprint phase are

unidentified or uncontrolled. It is treated as a

black box that requires external controls.

Accordingly, controls, including risk

management, are put on each iteration of the

Sprint phase to avoid chaos while maximizing

flexibility.

3. Sprints are nonlinear and flexible. Where

available, explicit process knowledge is used;

otherwise tacit knowledge and trial and error is

used to build process knowledge. Sprints are

used to evolve the final product.

4. The project is open to the environment until the

Closure phase. The deliverable can be changed

at any time during the Planning and Sprint

phases of the project. The project remains open

to environmental complexity, including

competitive, time, quality, and financial

pressures, throughout these phases.

5. The deliverable is determined during the

project based on the environment.

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3 RESEARCH METHOD

This study collected several literature studies on the

results of research and reviews on the

implementation of Agile Scrum in human resource

management. The results of the review are explained

using systematic qualitative descriptive methods in

the form of agile methods and their application in

industries in the current digital era that requires

innovation and new ways of working in order

become sustainable organizations and able to deal

with rapidly changing business competition.

4 DISCUSSION

Digital transformation strategies take on a different

perspective and pursue different goals. Coming from

a business-centric perspective, they focus on the

transformation of products, processes, and

organizational aspects owing to new technologies.

Their scope is more broadly designed and explicitly

includes digital activities at the interface with or

fully on the side of customers, such as digital

technologies as part of end-user products. This

depicts a clear difference to process automation and

optimization, since digital transformation strategies

go be- yond the process paradigm, and include

changes to and implications for products, services,

and business models as a whole.

Changes in the business environment that is very

fast to make conventional ways of working must be

changed with the times. Learning agility is

considered as one of the trends in human resource

management that can maximize the work of

employees, especially millennials.

Figure 3: Conceptual Model of Learning Agility

(Lombardo & Eichinger, 2000).

Lombardo and Eichinger (2000) defined learning

agility as the willingness and ability to learn new

competencies in order to perform under first-time,

tough, or different conditions. The formulated a

conceptual framework of learning agility consisting

of the following four factors (see Figure 1):

1. People agility: the extent to which individuals

know themselves well, learn from experience,

treat others constructively, and are cool and

resilient under the pressures of change.

2. Change agility: the level to which individuals

are curious, have passion for ideas, like to

experiment with test cases, and engage in skill-

building activities.

3. Results agility: the extent to which individuals

get results under tough conditions, inspire

others to perform beyond normal, and exhibit

the sort of presence that builds confidence in

others.

4. Mental agility: the degree to which individuals

think through problems from a fresh point of

view and are comfortable with complexity,

ambiguity, and explaining their thinking to

others.

Since the time Lombardo and Eichinger (2000)

proposed the construct of learning agility as a

possible indicator of high-potential talent, it has

transformed into a pervasive leadership tool. Many

organizations today assess learning agility when

making decisions about whom to hire for leadership

positions, whom to promote, whom to designate for

global assignments, and whom to place into

emerging-leaders or high-potential programs. In

addition, fundamental to leadership-development

efforts is an individual’s capability to deal with

complexity, ambiguity, novelty, diversity, and

adversity (Hooijberg, Hunt, & Dodge, 1997). Scores

on the various facets of learning agility provide

diagnostic guidance on areas that need particular

developmental attention (De Meuse, 2017).

Hastie (2004) discusses how Agile differs from

traditional methods by putting much more emphasis

on team work, cooperation and self organisation.

One of the key to the success of Agile is trust, which

needs to be present both between the leader and the

team and among the team members themselves.

“AGILE like many methods look great on paper but

fail to work in reality because they forget the human

factor. Any paradigm, which has human interaction

at its heart, will fail if human psychology is not

understood and taken into account. The key aspects

of human nature which IT development/project

management methods have to take into account are

no different to those at the heart of most modern

Building Agile Workforce for Facing Digital Industry

295

economic theories”, (Brady, 2006): People will

always put their own interests ahead of the interests

of the group, People are self-interested, Commercial

production decisions are based on rational

expectations, Karl Popper’s “First law of collective

action”. You can never get more than 5 people to

agree on anything.”

Management of human resources using Scrum

work methods in order to achieve Agile work

behavior is a challenge for the change in work

mindset that must be done to face business

competition in the digital age that demands precise

and appropriate work methods. The advantages of

agile project management and particularly the

Scrum-based approach is its simplicity. Within an

agile project, roles are clearly defined and do not

cross boundaries. Features can be completely

developed and tested in short iteration cycles.

Because each team members bears major

responsibility for their part of the project, ownership

of the project is more broadly based. The methods of

agile project management enforce extensive

communication, which helps teams organize more

effectively. This, ultimately, can lead to greater

productivity for everyone involved.

5 CONCLUSION

Agile work methods using Scrum processes are not

new to IT Development or the field of project

management. Because the need for work that is right

on target and quality makes other fields of work also

use the Scrum method. The implementation of Agile

- Scrum Process in the digital era is now an urgent,

highly dynamic external environment urging

organizations to be able to keep up with changes in

the external environment and meet various market

demands.

The application of the Scrum method in

organizations requires commitment from the

leadership and the working group that runs it. The

sprints method in Scrum requires the team to always

review, adjust, develop and wrap. This cycle will

continue to be carried out to produce a product by

following the expected targets. But in its

implementation, organizations must be able to grow

and implement learning agility before running the

Scrum method set. Learning agility is formed from

mental agility, people agility, change agility, results

agility.

Based on this explanation, it can be concluded

that building the agility work patterns of the most

important elements is not only the methods applied

but the readiness of the human resources that will

carry out the agile patterns, as well as the ability of

human resources to change mindsets and work

patterns that use the old ways no longer in

accordance with the demands of an industry that has

changed rapidly and is very dynamic.

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