Our journey to find travel’s nexus

In the modern world the many paths of travel all ultimately converge on one very important point: technology.

At Hotelbeds we are committed to continually pushing forward the boundaries of travel technology and recently we have adopted a new technique for achieving this: Nexus Agile Framework.

What does that involve? To understand the Nexus framework, you must first understand something called ‘Agile’. This is a framework for iterative and incremental value delivery that bases its way of working on frequent feedback and collaborative decision making. This differs from traditional methods by getting teams to work in ‘sprints’ (you can learn more in this YouTube video).

The Nexus Agile Framework takes this one step further, working across multiple teams to help them come together to deliver services or features to multiple stakeholders.

Already we have finished our third Nexus four week ‘sprint’, with the first one taking place only a few months ago.

We aimed to improve collaboration between platform groups within our Technology department – which is made up of seven different teams covering Operations, IT Architecture and IT Technology Delivery – to establish common priorities and focus on the end destination in our journey to become Agile.

Thanks to the efforts of all those involved our teams are now better aligned and delivering enhanced value to the business – for example optimizing cloud services and also reducing cloud costs. Just as importantly, stakeholders are interacted with via a single contact point and we are improving transparency on value delivery. 

An additional huge benefit is the fact that transparency, alignment and focus help teams become more engaged and committed. This is a really big deal: the more an employee is driven by purpose and passion, the more positive the impact will be for the organization’s results.

So it is clear what Nexus does for us, but what does that mean for our supplier and customer network? The framework enables us to deliver more products and services faster, with greater surety and predictability.

This means we can keep suppliers and clients at the leading edge of product definition, give them a faster ‘MTTM’ (mean time to market) and an experience that is both significantly more consistent and reliable. Given the current environment, this is more important than ever before.

I´d just like to say to all my colleagues involved how enormously proud I am of our success in delivering Nexus Agile Framework. That´s because there are hardly any cases of pure technology teams implementing scrum in platform teams. We really have had to draw our own roadmap and that makes the achievement both remarkable and rewarding.

Keen to find out more about how you could use Nexus Agile Framework in your work environment? Whilst clearly this is not a Hotelbeds service, we´d still be pleased to offer advice on how your business could benefit from this approach to project management. Drop me an email today on smatthews@hotelbeds.com and let´s compare notes on where our respective journeys converge.