Industrial Agile

Hands-On Learning

Hands-On Learning

If you’ve recently decided to put together a team to develop a new product, you might be a little overwhelmed at all of the work that needs to be accomplished before you have a viable prototype that can be thoroughly tested, improved, and then produced.

At Big Orange Square, we’ve developed a method of teaching agile production in a way that makes its tenets intimately familiar to everyone who participates! Whether you’re in software or product development, this class can help your team learn to harness the power of iterative development. By approaching development in this way, not only will you be able to have a working product sooner, your product will already have many of its problems worked out before it gets into the hands of consumers. Contact us today to learn about how we can teach your team or read on to learn a little bit about our innovative process!

Our Agile/Scrum Process

In order for the ideas behind Agile/scrum to really make sense, we employ several different stages in our process to fully illuminate the ways that you can make it work for you. Because every company is different and every group of people are working with a different set of skills, we try to impart this new knowledge in ways that translate easily for everyone.

The Quick Simulation

During the quick simulation, we teach you how to make different technologies work together by having groups separately build the components of a small car. After the individual pieces have been constructed, we then bring them together to form a working model. During this stage we try to teach you how to divide a project and what each team needs in order to produce work that is not only useful on its own but as an important part of a larger project.

The Extended Simulation

This is where we kick these principles into high gear. During the extended simulation, your team will build a car! We provide some of the basic systems and then teach you how to bring them all together by working on smaller teams that work toward completing the entire project. By scaling up the processes in the quick simulation, you can see how your team works towards meeting larger goals.

The Results

Not only will your team have had the fun of completing this project together, we will also sit down with your entire team and go over YOUR process to see where these techniques can benefit your business. This simulation works well for any kind of business, not just automotive groups. We choose to teach using cars because they are complex machines that all of us understand on some basic level. This familiarity allows your team to jump into the simulations without having to learn all of the ins and outs of another kind of software or product.

How To Manage Trade-Offs In Design

How To Manage Trade-Offs In Design

Budgets: It’s Not Just Money That Is Scarce

By Hubert Smits

The Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation system initially proposed by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is one of the most exciting technological propositions in recent history. To accelerate its development, SpaceX announced an open competition for engineering teams to design their own Hyperloop pods to compete on a test track in 2016. Formed on social media site reddit, rLoop is the only non-student team to reach the final stage of the competition.

Recently, I had the incredible opportunity to work with these dynamic, brilliant and very dedicated volunteers.

The Challenge:

The rLoop team wondered whether all their parts would fit into the available space of the pod. For example, extra batteries would make it easier to design magnets and brakes, but they add weight and take up space. Stronger magnets produce more heat, which is difficult to get rid of in a vacuum. The challenge was how to handle the trade-offs needed in this situation.

The Solution:

My proposal was to treat the scarce resources like money: lay out a budget for the use of a resource. With 100Ah of electricity available for all the power consuming parts inside of the pod, decisions had to be made: 40Ah to levitation, 30Ah to braking, 20Ah to logic, 10Ah to spare.

Just like in your household budget, you can shift allocation. For example, less money for vacation, more for the new car. In the rLoop environment, it may be more power for levitation, less for braking. Some of those trade-offs are needed. The magnets may not be able to lift the weight of the pod, so something has to give (like you give up your vacation when the car breaks down). Others might enable more elaborate solutions. Teams can negotiate and haggle about the use of the budget. Ever done that with your family members?

The trade-offs are more complex than your household budget because different budgets influence each other. For example, the need for more power may dictate bigger batteries, which influences the weight budget. Now negotiating a power budget becomes more difficult: more teams are involved and more factors need to be taken care of.

Just like other reports in Scrum (Burn-down and Burn-up charts), the main goal of managing the budget is to give warnings when a budget is challenged. The Scrum Master can issue the warning and the team has to find a solution.

Here are some photos I took while working with the rLoop team:

This is the brake system this team developed from scratch. It is one one of the reasons they were recognized with the Innovation Award.
This tube is the model required for the SpaceX test flights. It is 25% of the real pod.
These drawings are the documentation linked to the Scrum task board.

Go Deeper

More about rLoop. rLoop is an open-source, crowdsourced, online think tank. Visit their website: www.rloop.org

Burn-down and Burn-up Charts
“The team displays, somewhere on a wall of the project room, a large graph relating the quantity of work remaining (on the vertical axis) and the time elapsed since the start of the project (on the horizontal, showing future as well as past). This constitutes an “information radiator,” provided it is updated regularly. Two variants exist, depending on whether the amount graphed is for the work remaining in the iteration (“sprint burndown”) or more commonly the entire project (“product burndown”).” — AgileAlliance.com

Scrum Makes Sense For Startups: Part Two

Scrum Makes Sense For Startups: Part Two

In our last blog, we discussed how the Scrum framework can be helpful to startups who are looking to get the most amount of work done as quickly as possible in order to get it on the market as soon as they can. We also talked about how Scrum is an adaptable framework that can change the way you think about your final goal.

In today’s entry, we will talk about why moving towards iterative development can be so beneficial for your startup team in an age that demands speed and flexibility. If you want your team to start working more efficiently, call us at Big Orange Square. We offer public classes about Scrum and agile development as well as personalized training programs built specifically for your team. We have trained more than 15,000 people over the last 10 years and we can help you, too.

Iterative Development

Iterative development is the cyclic process of developing a prototype, testing it, and then refining the prototype after analysis. While this might not sound much different than the way that products and some software is traditionally built, it is actually a different process. While traditional development focuses on taking steps in order, iterative design instead looks at the final product as a collection of products that must each be built in order for the final product to function correctly. By accepting this model, teams don’t have to wait for other pieces to be completed in order to complete theirs. Instead, teams work in parallel to build the products that will then combine in the end for the final product that you want to take to market.

Each team works on their own product separately but they all come together frequently to share their findings and to show the others how their product will eventually fit in with the others. By repeating this process of prototyping and refining, each team is solving problems every day that might otherwise take weeks, months, or even years, to be discovered. The iterative design and development process basically creates a large number of scenarios that mirror the actual use of your product by users without having to risk the bad press that follows broken software or a product.

At Big Orange Square, our approach to teaching Scrum is tailored to both software and physical product development. Our method will help you work through the processes and make your work move more quickly by actually engaging your minds with hands-on training. We have found that tactile training yields the best results by showing teams that the prototyping process is much less scary than they think it is and that it yields faster results with better solutions.

Contact us today to find out how we can help your startup team get off on the right foot. We have years of experience helping software development teams get started with agile Scrum and we have tailored these processes to work with physical product development in a way that hasn’t been done before.

Scrum Makes Sense For Startups: Part One

Scrum Makes Sense For Startups: Part One

If you’re just getting your startup off of the ground and you’re looking for a way to maximize your results in the least amount of time, you have a lot of options. While you could go the standard route of having your entire team work on one problem until it is solved and then move on to the next one, there is a way that allows you to break a goal up into smaller pieces that can be tackled simultaneously by smaller teams.

The Scrum framework is an agile project management framework that takes all of a project’s requirements and breaks them down into pieces that can be completed by a team within a short amount of time. The benefits to using the Scrum methodology are many, and in this blog we will cover why Scrum can be a good idea for some startups, especially those startups that are trying to build physical products or create software.

If you’re looking for a way for your team to effectively learn the agile framework of Scrum, get in touch with us at Big Orange Square. We have years of experience helping teams learn the process of iterative product delivery through personalized programs built just for you and your team. Our hands-on classes are the most effective way to get ahead of your schedule while still delivering the highest quality products.

Learning The Scrum Framework

While Scrum sounds like a spectacular way to work, many people are confused about the basic steps. Part of this confusion may lie in the fact that instead of having rules that apply to every possible situation, Scrum is actually a much more malleable way of approaching your work than it is a list of hard and fast rules.

Instead of thinking about Scrum as a rule book, try thinking about it as conversations with a philosopher. While books are great (they’re fun to read and full of knowledge you might not have), they don’t answer you when you ask questions and they don’t change when the outside world changes. Thinking of the methodology as a conversation is more helpful because a conversation not only teaches you something in a way that is similar to a book, it also teaches you how to think and how to teach yourself. Because a conversation with a philosopher adapts and molds around the give and take between ideas, it is infinitely more flexible and helpful than an inert book.

One of the most important things that you will learn when you attend one of our agile Scrum classes, is that Scrum will help your business adapt to design and build challenges much more quickly than you would be able to following regular design and build procedures. By breaking the process into small pieces and tackling several of them concurrently, your team will move forward at a rate that is almost hard to believe.

In our next entry, we will continue this introductory discussion of how Scrum can work for your group. Contact Big Orange Square now to learn about how we are bringing Scrum to design and manufacturing.