Who are the Agile Mavericks?
Agile Mavericks LTD1 seeks to transform organizations, start-ups, and teams through Agile ways of working, to enable them to realize customer outcomes for business or societal value. Our signature delivery style offers co-creative experiential learning through games and participant engagement which reinforces learning and owning one’s capability development for impact.
Our value proposition is delivered through a needs assessment to answer the fundamental question “Why Agile?” from the customer lens, then tailoring agile coaching as a service and Agile training to satisfy our customer’s needs.
We are human oriented, change catalysts, big on sustainability through our ‘Agile in the Wild’ and ‘Agile for Kids’ social impact programs. Agile in the Wild complements Agile with Wildlife Conservation efforts to achieve an ecosystem balance for a better world. Agile for Kids empowers young children with Agile techniques to be change agents in their Children homes, to own their destiny in partnership with their caregivers.
What got you interested in the agile ways of working and what made you persevere despite Waterfall still being the methodology of choice in most large organizations?
The focus on cross functional, self-organizing teams with a shared purpose is liberating. Knowing that diversity and inclusion with a learning mindset can steer us incrementally towards a big hairy goal is fulfilling. It restores hope in humans being capable of solving their own problems. The test and learn approach and belief that you do not have to get it right always, that there is always room for improvement in the spirit of Kaizen.
What are your thoughts on the agile maturity of organizations in Kenya?
Referencing the Agile Fluency model, most are in the Focusing or Delivering zones i.e. 2-3 years in their agile transformation. This is characterized by having teams that produce business value and teams that ship to the market with a certain cadence, respectively. Leaders are dealing with complexity and are yearning for simplicity. Thus, the opportunity is making agile knowledge accessible for all, to decipher what it means for them and how to enable business agility. Some started with piloting Agile in digital accelerators but now realize that it is inevitable that the entire business needs to adopt agile. Thus, the business case for Agility and the ROI for coaching specialized skill set, agile capability building and spaces, are emergent themes leaders now grapple with besides the traditional costs that were the norm.
What are the gaps in the Kenyan market and how does Agile help address these?
Agile Mavericks LTD is continuously validating customer problems faced through Minimum Viable Experiments. These help us to ascertain that our services address customer needs and increase loyalty through referrals. The Kenyan market is fast moving like any other digital economy faced with changing customer needs and socio-economic environment. This necessitates firms to be ahead as they face hyper competition. They need to leverage Agile as an enabler to spur their digital transformation journey. The State of Agile Africa 2021 report2 clearly highlights relevant themes that clearly depict the Kenyan landscape: customer centricity; ability to adapt to change and business IT alignment to focus on shared mission. Agile enables understanding customer needs, frequent delivery to meet time to market and increased quality, focus on outcomes through Objectives and Key Results as well as creativity and innovation amongst other benefits accrued via continuous value justification.
What is your dream or aspiration of Agile within the East Africa region?
Our aspiration for Agile within East Africa is for it to be a lifestyle that enables people to embrace complexity and uncertainty in the world we live in. It is grounded in a pair of 4 values and 12 principles such as sustainable pace which ensures humans find meaningful work as they put concerted effort towards a purpose. Currently the early adopters are telecommunication, financial services and insurance industries occasioned by nimble start-ups offering a competitive landscape by claiming market share.
