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Mobile development company Apalon is familiar with change and agility: The company, which was acquired in 2017 and is now part of the Mosaic Group, continually adapts to industry trends and shifts. But with a large and distributed team, efficiency, transparency, and cross-functional collaboration can be challenging.
To help increase collaboration and improve delivery speed, Apalon brought in ICAgile Member Organization AgileLAB, led by Vladimir Gorshunov, to deliver ICAgile-accredited courses.
Building a Foundation with Agile Fundamentals
First, Apalon invited all employees to attend Agile Fundamentals. The biggest benefit of the course was that it helped employees understand the necessity of collaboration, and empowered them to work in new ways, said Aliaksei Aliakseyeu, Apalon’s Director of Engineering.
The focus on collaboration has helped Apalon adapt to the rapidly-evolving world of mobile application development. Apalon teams release features more frequently, iterate more quickly on business hypotheses, and ultimately deliver solutions to customers faster than they did before their agile training.
Improving Company Culture
The emphasis on collaboration also introduced a new culture at Apalon—a culture of shared responsibility, where employees are more open, discussion is welcome, and failure is viewed as a learning opportunity.
Because ICAgile-accredited courses aren’t tied to a specific framework, Apalon’s employees gained a broader perspective on what it means to be agile. Using a specific framework can create an “us” vs. “them” attitude, added Aliakseyeu, where employees might think, “if that team doesn’t do this exactly like the framework teaches, then they are wrong.”
The ICAgile-accredited Agile Fundamentals course helped Apalon’s employees unite around a common vocabulary, mindset and goals, instead of a specific framework.
For Aliakseyeu, the shift in culture has been one of the biggest wins during Apalon’s agile transformation.
Continuing the Learning Journey
After all Apalon employees completed the Agile Fundamentals course, they were able to take other ICAgile-accredited courses to deepen their knowledge. Agile Team Facilitation and Agile Product Ownership have been the most popular courses, but employees have also taken Agile Coaching, Agile Project and Delivery Management, and Delivery at Scale.
Apalon’s deep commitment to agility also helped the company adapt to the abrupt transition to remote work caused by COVID-19. Because the Apalon team was already used to iterative planning and viewing failure as a learning opportunity, they were able to improve their remote collaboration quickly and easily. And now, the company is well-positioned to continue to use agile ways of working to respond to a VUCA world.