John Deere Practicing Agile Development in Design

Aug 23, 2012

An Innovative New Approach to Farm Equipment Design

John Deere is a world class leader in farm equipment technology and design, with more than 175 years of business experience making farm equipment and machinery designed for the everyday needs of farmers. For the first time in the company’s long standing history, John Deere engineers have started to take a different approach to innovation and design with a concept known as agile development, a term perhaps more familiar to those in the tech industry -companies such as Facebook or Google, says Aaron Senneff, development manager at John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group.

Prior to incorporating agile development, he explained, John Deere worked on long-range plans.

“We would design for a long time, consider those designs for a long time and then execute and test for a long time, so that we had confidence when we launched the product in the marketplace,” he said.

“Agile development is totally different — every two months, we re-plan,” he said. “It recognizes that technology and customer needs change rapidly, so we try to adjust for that.”

This recent change in their approach to development side is intended to increase the company’s ability to bring new products and solutions to the marketplace at a faster pace, while maintaining the highest quality workmanship and standards the John Deere brand in known for.

We call it release planning, and this happens every two months,” Senneff noted. ‘The engineers break into small design teams and after two months they demonstrate new product innovations and then the process starts over again.”

“Now we have a process to improve the speed to market by putting products quickly in the hands of customers and getting their feedback,” he explained. “So we can understand the market potential much faster.”

It will be interesting to see what types of results are yielded from this new approach, but one thing is for sure – we can always count on John Deere to be a leading innovator and champion for the future of farm technology and innovations.

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Struggling with inconsistent planting depth from row to row? The new DuraWear Depth Handle from Precision Planting is designed to eliminate depth variability and make accurate calibration easier than ever.

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