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University of The People

UNIT 7: Information Systems Design and Development

Case Assignment: Panera Bread

BUS 5114 - Management Information Systems and Technology

Dr. James Butler

March 12th, 2023

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Case: Panera Bread in Agile Methodology

Panera Bread is an American chain of bakeries and cafes operating in the United States

and Canada. It operates under the name Saint Louis Bread Company around St. Louis. As of

2014, the chain has over 1,700 locations. Panera Bread needed to speed the delivery of its IT

solutions to support its high growth and rapidly changing business. It began with a series of

agile-training workshops, then piloted the new approach on two critical projects with the help of

an agile coach (Null, N.d). Panera Bread is about 250 individuals who work in Panera's IT

department, which supports a variety of custom-built systems combined with off-the-shelf

products. The agile methodology comes in when the President expressed his concerns about IT's

capacity to keep up with the business's rate of change at the beginning of 2013. Panera made the

decision that the company needed to undergo a transformation to implement agile delivery in a

structured way.

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) as the methodology implemented

One of the simplest and least complicated ways to turn a concept and a variety of needs into

workable software solutions is to use the agile methodology. For Panera Bread, they opted for

the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process decision framework (Ambler, 2013) to address

these challenges. This Agile methodology helps Panera by increasing its delivery speed in the

market and the availability of its product to customers which gives them a considerable

competitive advantage. To reach that level of efficiency, Panera used a gradual approach of DAD

implemented by SA+A (2013) focused on these forces within the organization.

1- Evaluation of the Teams and the Organization basically, the framework's primary

principle was to modify the procedure according to the circumstances. After evaluating
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Panera's current procedures for three days, SA+A created a plan for moving the company

from a traditional solution delivery model to the Disciplined Agile model.

2- The Team has been trained (Executive and delivery). For the methodology to work, the

team needs to be involved from head to bottom which has been done, they did this for the

executive in a one-day session led by SA+A to ensure that everyone understood the new

paradigm of intense and continuous engagement between the business and IT that would

be necessary for success. Whereas the delivery teams did three days of training on the

new approach to follow and were then instructed on the methodology immediately before

the start of two experimental DAD projects.

3- The support and engagement from the whole business. This needed the inclusion of

the shareholders of the company. These parties as well attended a Product Owner training

session led by SA+A. Also, to keep up the favorable adoption momentum that had

already been built, Panera utilized DAD advocates from both the business and the IT

departments.

4- Geographically implementation. From those results, they started the implementation

phase in different areas where the organization where located, and just-in-time coaching

expedited lessons learned and displayed got quick results.

5- Follow up on the strategies. To make sure that those strategies were good enough,

SA+A performed health checks on their agile projects after a while to help them improve

their procedures and deal with any problems that teams were still having.

6- Constant communication after the implementation. The teams had to communicate

with each other and other stakeholders, including operations, infrastructure, data, and

shared services, in a disciplined manner to scale successfully. To help them throughout

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this step, SA+A put up an engagement model which helped them streamline these

exchanges and reduce red tape without raising the risk. This included giving the agile

PMO advice on a simplified governance model that included a list of agile metrics and

pointers for putting agile tooling into practice.

The value chain, a set of operations carried out by the business to produce a good or

service, is how value is created. The worth of a good or service increases at every stage of the

value chain. The value chain offers a tool to examine how a firm is producing value, even though

it may not be the ideal model for all business types. Primary activities and support activities are

the two categories of activities that make up the value chain (Bourgeois, 2019). Panera Bread has

while implementing the DAD methodology lies on both primary and support activities according

to Porter’s Value Chain.

On primary activities, we have the following Outbound logistics; Sales/Marketing and service.

The benefit that Agile brought to these primary activities is that the methodology allowed the

organization to better examine how the product should be available to the consumer, which

improved their service level and allowed them to develop an innovative logistics delivery

system.

On support activities, we have the following, Human Resource Management, Technology

development, and procurement. The benefit that Agile has brought to these support activities is

that it has trained and equipped the human resource involved in the process. Also, it was able to

set up actionable items for the entire team as well as the stakeholders. As a result, everyone felt

involved and was involved in the change.

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Recommendation/observation/conclusion: In the end, we can see that applying the Agile

methodology is an important challenge but above all, it requires a great capacity for innovation

and change. This has worked to the advantage of Panera Bread, which today has a gross profit of

502.82 million dollars (PNRA, n.d).

References:

Ambler, http://www.ambysoft.com/surveys/projectInitiation2013.html, Ambysoft, 2013

Bourgois, D.T., Smith, J.L., Wang, S., & Mortati, J. (2019, August 1). Information systems for
business and beyond (2019). Saylor Foundation.
https://digitalcommons.biola.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=open-textbooks.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0.

Null, C. (n.d.). 10 companies killing it at scaling agile. TechBeacon. https://techbeacon.com/app-

dev-testing/10-companies-killing-it-scaling-agile
Panera Bread Company (PNRA) (n.d). Retrieved from Investing. Com.
https://fr.investing.com/equities/panera-bread-company-income-statement

Scott Ambler + Associates (SA+A). (2013). TRANSFORMING FROM TRADITIONAL TO

DISCIPLINED AGILE DELIVERY. Retrieved from
https://corporateagility.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Panera-Case-Study-1.pdf