Strategy and Organisation

Relevance of the topic

Agility in the volatile market environment

To counter this dynamic, more and more companies are turning to agile product development as a possible solution. Through transparency, increased adaptability, and responsiveness, the corresponding mindset, methods, and practices enable the agile project team to cope with changes in a manner appropriate to the situation and use them to their advantage. To this end, the agile approach follows a high-frequency, iterative, and incremental process for the continuous validation of customer needs. According to Scrum, one of the best-known agile frameworks, the project team should implement increments in iterations of two to four weeks. Regular customer feedback, the realization of customer value, and technical excellence are essential and central components of agile development to ensure the competitiveness of the company under so-called VUCA conditions.
While the agile approach originated in the software industry and has already established itself as a quasi-standard there, the agile development of physical products (e.g., mechatronic or cyber-physical systems) is still in its infancy, but is becoming increasingly important. The main challenges are the limitations of physicality, which manifest themselves, for example, in time-consuming and costly prototype production. Further challenges are associated with the complexity of the paradigm and the corresponding mindset.