allWomen Talk: Marcela Ospina & Ingrid Astiz — How to evolve in an Agile Culture
Have you ever thought that your company needs to be more aligned?
Let me explain to you how companies are improving their employee experience today.
Marcela and Ingrid are the two women that founded Wise Work. During the Covid crisis, the online business became a reality, and people needed to improve their communication skills among teams. This led to Wise Work’s idea, an Agency, created by Marcela and Ingrid to help other companies increase their effectiveness and continue their businesses.
Marcela is the Director of Communication in Wise work and she has a long career in communications positions and has lived in Spain, France, and Colombia. Over the last four years, she has been on Oxfam Intermon Board of Directors. She has been responsible for communication, fundraising, and fair trade.
Ingrid is the Director of the company, she has a long career coaching many companies from Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and many more countries in Latino America. She co-lead many initiatives to coach and transform to an Agile culture in many businesses.
Many methodologies can be applied to business:
Today you will learn what Agile methodology is and how we can apply it to any kind of business, as Marcela and Ingrid showed us.
Agile is a methodology that delivers software or value incrementally from the start of the project instead of all at once at the end. It’s an iterative and time-boxed model based on the demands of customers by delivery to increase competitiveness.
For Wise work, Agile methodologies can be applied to all kinds of business, to do so, there are four core principles:
- Deliver value constantly is the key. The ability to deliver to customers from the beginning of the project is crucial, but you will fail if you can’t provide any value. As a result, the key to adopting this method is to continuously check what “value” is to our customers and to have the organizational capability to deliver appropriate products and services.
2. Security is the answer to achieving high performance for the people we interact with. They focus on enhancing psychological safety within the company. This means that employees should be able to demonstrate their self-worth without fear of negative consequences.
3. Experiment and learn fast: Learning is essential for making people perform well and ensuring safety as well. This is accomplished by doing and receiving feedback. Experimental designs are made so that if they fail, we can conduct more experiments with safety. Failure proves that we need to conduct more experiments.
4. Make people awesome: By doing so, these people will attain their goals more easily while being able to set more challenging goals.
There are two basic frameworks
The waterfall project is the kind of structure you can see on the following graph: it’s linear and traces successive phases. This means that each new phase does not begin until the previous one has been completed. It’s a temporary effort with a clear beginning and end
The other is the “iterative approach” which is not linear but cyclical. Agile methods are integrated into this iterative approach. The basic principle is to break the project workflow into smaller phases, simplify the design process, and deliver value in the first few cycles. This methodology has no clear ending, it is a continuous process that can lead to complex changes.
As you read there are many methodologies to organize tasks in the business environment and those can lead you through the different objectives that you may have.
Agile methodologies aim to have a good understanding of our user background and their pain points
Therefore, the factors limiting them, and the goals they wish to achieve will enable us to solve problems and help them implement the agile methodology. As Marcela and Ingrid explained it can be applied in any kind of business and the results are effective.
Find out more about Marcela and Ingrid and their work through their talk on AllWomen’s Youtube Channel.
If you are a woman in tech or a supporter of women in tech and would like to be interviewed by AllWomen, contact us at ines@allwomen.tech
