How Agile Is Helping Unilever Go Forward Faster Posted on : Jun 18 - 2020

“We weren’t even making hand sanitizers in the U.S. in early 2020. Leveraging our Suave brand, we went from idea to market in 6 weeks in 7 formats - amazingly we were out of stock in less than 1 day.  While that is typically unheard of, our consumers are looking for us to respond to their needs as quick as possible, so we need to move fast and work differently.

That’s radical adaptability in the face of a COVID-disrupted economy. The speaker is Michael Clementi, an Executive Vice President of HR at Unilever responsible for its global markets and customer development teams based in North America. I’m hearing more stories like his recently: Organizations that used this crisis moment to transform how they work. There are plenty of challenges but more often than not people are discovering they had the ability to achieve better collaboration, more accountability, creativity, and growth.

The Go Forward Action Plan

Here are the steps Unilever uses to deliver value faster through agile ways of working:

1. Step One – Ruthlessly prioritize projects based on which matter most to the customer and deal with them one at a time. Re-prioritize every month/two weeks or more frequently as needed.
2. Step Two - Have a team prepare a detailed brief on each project. Everyone has to read it and get aligned around who’s doing what and when.
3. Step Three - Start working. De-emphasize process and focus on delivering value. Put agile practices in place like daily standups, asking 3 simple questions from each member 1) what did I do yesterday; 2) what am I working on today; 3) where do I need help? The purpose is to update on progress, assign tasks, and identify roadblocks and owners.
4. Step Four - Share demos of the early work with key stakeholders to get early input
5. Step Five - Conduct a retrospective for learnings and fast fails - move to the next sprint and repeat

The story about getting hand-sanitizer to the market faster than Unilever thought possible came out of a conversation about the company’s broader shift to agile, a working discipline developed by software programmers where you iterate quickly and communicate and solve roadblocks continuously with the goal of getting value to the customer faster. You make mistakes and challenge established rules and norms, but you course-correct often. Accountability is forefront. Because agile methods have delivered so much value to the software industry, they’re spreading rapidly into all kinds of functions and companies. View More