Big A and Little a Agile Approaches and Customer Experience

Doing customer experience well requires people, process, and platforms working together in harmony. It also requires that the organization is able to adapt and adjust using the best information and approaches available. This is where agile practices can complement CX initiatives very well. 

Not every organization has fully embraced agile practices and an agile mindset, however. This does not need to prevent you from using some form of agile approaches in your customer experience efforts. It may determine whether you use what I call Big A versus little a agile, though. Let’s explore what each means and how they can be applied to CX.

Big A agile

Let’s start with the more formal of the two. Big A agile utilizes the documented and principles including things like the Scrum methodology, for which team members can be certified, and there are many classes, books, and other training materials available.

Utilizing Big A agile means that your teams are engaging in the formal adoption of the elements of Scrum such as product backlogs and retrospectives, as well as assigning roles such as the product owner and scrum master. For many that are already familiar with this (often those who have worked in technology companies or at least the software teams within an organization), this Big A approach will come naturally. For those that have no familiarity, it may take some adjustments.

This Big A approach to agile is often driven by a company-wide adoption of agile as a business, with the requisite training required and frequent update sessions and coaching available to make sure new team members are up to speed.

“Little a” agile

For those organizations who have not formally adopted agile enterprise-wide, there is the 

little a using an agile mindset but modified to work within an organization’s existing environment. 

The little a agile approach takes an iterative approach to planning, designing, and implementation (much like its more formal variant), but may or may not include formal agile roles and terminology. This can be a simpler way to ease an organization into an agile, methodical way of thinking and performing work without the feeling that draconian measures are being implemented and enforced before the value of the shift in mindset is perceived.

Quite often, organizations that see quick wins in little a agile go on to take steps to further formalize it and graduate to Big A agile.

How it can be applied

Regardless of the approach, applying an agile mindset and principles to your customer experience allows you to use a methodical approach to create hypotheses, test them, and iterate based on results, and gives you the ability to adapt quickly to both internal and external changes. Compare this to the alternative of a longer, slower “waterfall” approach to making decisions and measuring results, and you can quickly see the benefits of agile.

As you can see, whether you take the more formal Big A agile or less formal little a approach, you can still benefit from applying an agile mindset to your customer experience efforts.