Practices and Reflections on Splitting and Decoupling in Agile and Lean Delivery

Challenge

Our most important large‑scale project still follows a waterfall plan with yearly delivery cycles and high risk, while many business units lack willingness or knowledge to adopt agile methods.

Staff are allocated by project, causing uneven workload: critical projects consume most people, yet unclear requirements prevent continuous high‑value delivery, and maintenance, audit, and optimisation requests suffer from insufficient resources.

Solution

New Delivery Mode

We cannot apply agile to the large project directly, so we started a pilot on business‑process‑optimisation tasks, experimenting with a "new delivery mode" that embraces change, splits work, simplifies processes, visualises progress, and continuously improves service.

Embrace Change – adapt to any requirement change, split original requests, deliver the most important part quickly, gather feedback, and iterate.

Split – break large requests into the smallest deliverable artifacts to shorten delivery time and enable continuous delivery.

Simplify Process – let end users and developers communicate directly via JIRA, eliminating hand‑offs and excessive documentation.

Transparent Visualization – track requirements and details in JIRA, visualise progress and blockers on a Kanban board, and report regularly.

Improve Service – collect business feedback after each delivery and create a delivery leaderboard to motivate participation.

Previously, a request for five reports required a three‑month cycle of full analysis, design, development, and testing, with high change cost. The new approach splits the request into five independent deliveries, prioritises the most valuable report, delivers it within two to three weeks, gathers feedback, and iterates, reducing cycle time dramatically.

Product Squads

To solve staff allocation, we formed product‑oriented squads responsible for end‑to‑end delivery of their product, including maintenance, audit, optimisation, and large projects. Squad members are no longer tied to a single project; project managers only submit requests to the appropriate squad.

Principles guiding this restructure:

Reduce external dependencies.

Increase communication and delivery efficiency.

Enable autonomous decision‑making.

Visualise requirements and dependencies, prioritising by business value.

Insights on Splitting

Splitting reduces management granularity: breaking a large demand into the smallest deliverable work items (or user stories) allows faster value delivery and clearer dependency management.

Insights on Decoupling

Decoupling means reducing dependencies to accelerate decisions and delivery; the splitting process makes dependencies visible and attackable, and reorganising teams into feature‑focused squads further isolates decision‑making.

Future Plans

We aim to extend the new delivery mode to all projects by itemising every demand, holding monthly prioritisation meetings with business stakeholders, and allocating resources based on highest overall value rather than project boundaries.

User‑Story‑Driven Development

Large requirements will be broken into minimal viable products (MVPs) or user stories. For each story we will confirm understanding with the business, ask why the need exists, and define concrete acceptance criteria, e.g., a stock‑price monitoring app that notifies investors when price falls below a target.

Conclusion

Following the Japanese "Shu‑Ha‑Ri" learning stages—obey, break, separate—we continuously improve our agile and lean practices, focusing on value, delivery efficiency, and team empowerment.