Making Agile a reality for Dreamland.
What we did
The Client
Part of the Colruyt Group, Dreamland wants to inspire children and their parents, grandparents, family and friends to play and have fun together. Dreamland offers a huge range of products, both online and in stores, all devoted to family fun. Apart from outdoor and indoor toys, there is garden and camping equipment on offer plus a varied range of games and multimedia, school supplies, books, furniture, and even tickets to amusement parks. A booming business bursting with potential!
The Case
Dreamland and Colruyt group are very large organizations with an enormously diverse and complex range of processes and systems. Pàu was contracted to support the development of functionalities for the Dreamland website. In terms of marketing communication, Pàu acted as the bridge between the business and a web content creation team. A Product owner looked carefully at the requirements, budgets, and business needs, then structured them and communicated with the development teams.
Pàu’s Scrum Master took care of coordination, checking, and filtering all the marketing requests. It was crucial to work in a way that was in line with budgets and resources. Pàu also worked closely on the technical support for the Dreamland website. Because of the size of the businesses and the challenges this entails, this was no mean feat, but a feat that Pàu accomplished nonetheless.
Our main task was to oversee Agile development. That way, release planning is clear-cut and the business is able to admire the results at the right time.
An effective office design can help to stimulate divergent levels of thinking by providing an environment that is conducive to employee needs, which promotes employee engagement.
Pàu also familiarized the teams with the Kanban method for dividing tasks. Kanban is a workflow management method to define, manage and improve services. Meaning ‘billboard’ in Japanese, it literally helps visualize the work, maximize efficiency, and improve continuously. Starting off in manufacturing, it has now been embraced by Agile software development teams. Also, this particular team had to be highly flexible as it had to be able to react quickly to new communication plans.
The Conclusion
Pàu’s input was key in optimizing existing workflows for Dreamland and Colruyt. It showed that with the right ambition and drive to change things, you can go very far. Pàu often spotted processes that could not continue in the same way any longer and wasn’t scared to say so. Because it was better for the business. Sometimes it’s more effective in the long run to think in a future-proof way than to find a quick fix. Cooperation between the various teams was considerably improved. And everyone could feel the knock-on effects of this because more work could be done with the same amount of resources.
