WikiSpeed

PRASHANTH RAJENDRAN

Key organizational principles by which team Wikispeed is organized

and which have driven its development?

They follow agile methodology of Product development.

They have a Product owner, Team member and scrum master.
Scrum Masters main responsibility is to remove any obstacles or
processes that slows down the entire team and affects the product. He
has no authority on the product
There was no central manager who allocated Tasks. It was left to the
choice of members to choose their favorite tasks.
The project has been divided into different small modules.
This enabled each teams to work independently and not waste time
waiting for some other team complete
To Summarize the entire sprint process Product Planning -> Product
Board -> Sprint Story Board -> Analyze/Design/Build -> Test -> Deploy ->
Retrospect.
A short but multiple cycles enable faster development. WikiSpeed used
only 7 Days sprints. Which was highly efficient

If you were in Joe situation, would you move quickly and decide to
cut the axles and weld them back together to the right length? OR
should he opt to design exactly the axles they need and figure out a
way to build them on their own?

I would move quickly than wasting time to figure out the exact
measurements.

The reason is Their model of development is similar to Open Source

Software. Successful open source softwares like Mozilla, RedHat use
Agile Development

Majority of the employees are volunteers. They will try to pick stories
in which they are comfortable, So it will work perfectly.

WikiSpeeds main success has come through shorter product

development cycles. Since they have successfully modularized the
whole product. This should not be an Issue at all to them.

Do you think that the tools and techniques that Wikispeed

uses to approach product development could be adapted
by large industrial goods companies?

The problems of using Agile development in large industrial goods companies

are as follows.

1. Modularity is not always possible. For agile to work, you should be able to
modularize your product into small segments. In Industrial companies, all
processes are likely dependent on each other.

2. High Switching Costs - Companies have invested quite a lot on infrastructure

currently. They are not using free tools like Wikispeed for their product
development. Also it requires training of your current workforce.

3. Large Industrial goods companies such as Boiler, Motor, tools manufacturing

do not have short product development cycles and quality is really important.
For example Facebook follows Agile. If their Chat system breaks (It did break in
2011 for 1 day). They can revert back the changes immediately and its not really
critical either. Whereas if a fault in Boiler or Motor can affect the brand image of
the company as such. So they have to follow water fall model.

Bigger companies have external dependents such as raw material suppliers and
3rd party contracts. Agile is really difficult if you are having external dependency.

My Final Take
Main advantage Agile has is smaller product release cycles
and can be inexpensive
So a Big company can make certain division like GE or
section of a product using agile.
For example in Prototyping phase, Agile will really benefit in
making rapid inexpensive prototypes.
So I feel divisions like R&D can be much more productive.
Sometimes the main issue is Companies try to restrict
changing policies. So