Case Study: How to Approach an Innovative Culture

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Abstract: Flexibility and the ability to make decentralized decisions, as well as a high degree of customer orientation, are core elements of an innovative culture. In addition to specific leadership behaviors, to be able to sustain an innovative culture you need to develop a dedicated toolbox. A project team at Siemens Digital Industries – Factory Automation – was able to lay the foundation for a customer-centric development of new products through a holistic leadership approach. The principles of ORGANIC agility® and the use of specific tools for innovative product development allowed them to verify product hypotheses rapidly and reflect those learnings into their business strategy.

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Organizational Culture Breeds Agility

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Embarking on a journey towards agility often requires a shift in organizational culture. Agility is more than just a set of rules and practices. It calls for a mindset attuned to agile values and principles. Failure to extend this change to organizational culture can end the agile transition before it even begins.

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Effective Large-Scale Learning

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Last week we shared our Corporate Learning Program with our network in a webinar. It was a great pleasure to welcome Katrin Birrer from JTI (Japan Tobacco International) to the session who shared her insights and experience from collaborating with agile42 on JTI’s Agile Champion program, a learning experience which is being rolled out to 10,000 employees. From agile42’s side, our experts Simon Sablowski and Lothar Fischmann, presented the Corporate Learning Program.

More and more large corporates want and need to embrace agility. Becoming agile starts with achieving a shared understanding of the values, principles, and key practices. The challenge is to provide learning to thousands of employees. Agile is existing in many parts of organisations, but having every person attend a stand-alone training, probably with different providers, comes with some problems. The learning is different, in as many ways as there are providers. It takes time to coordinate the training, along with it potentially being a significant investment. 

We’re finding that corporations are seeking solutions that are more cost-effective than sending individuals to training here and there. The Corporate Learning Program, co-created with the client, is more effective, in many ways. 

In the webinar last week we got to take part in JTI’s story and their experience of working with us on their program. We both learnt a great deal through co-creating the program, and we're very pleased with the outcome. You can hear more about this from the recording. 

 

Picture: An example of JTI's program

 

Our Corporate Learning Program offers large-scale learning by:

  • allowing individuals to familiarise themselves with key concepts at their own pace
  • providing everyone with a coherent learning experience
  • customising the learning journey to your company’s needs
  • blending virtual self-learning (understanding key concepts) with experiential learning (putting things into practice)

 

If this sparks your interest, how should you start?

The first step is to get in touch with us, so that we can gain an understanding of your situation - how big of an organisation you are; what your needs are.

Once we understand the needs, we can start to co-create the Corporate Learning Program to ensure the program is tailor-made for your needs and context.

From the picture below, you can see the next steps that follow when we have a program that is ready for employees to start exploring.

 

 

 

Here you can find the slides from the presentation.

 

The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.

 

We hope that you get in touch with us so that we can start to explore your needs!

 

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

agile42 meets Swedbank – in a webinar

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As many of you might have seen, agile42, along with our long-standing client, Swedbank, wrote a Success Story about our journey together. Ever since we've been keen to host a webinar on this, to tell the story! We had the honour of inviting Cecilia Kåhrström to join the webinar with us, where she, together with agile42Sweden's, Giuseppe De Simone, walked the audience through the work we did together. 

The journey has been long: some parts of the work with Swedbank began back in 2014. This webinar and the Success Story, specifically focused on the work with Group IT, which started in 2018. A lot has been done together since then, and we are happy to say that we today can call Cecilia and all Group IT leaders and employees, not clients, but friends. 

In the picture below, Cecilia summarized all the activities that supported the achievement of their current level of agility and we are particularly proud of the bubbles on the right. In fact they show the things which Swedbank continued on their own after we left, witnessing the accomplishment of our mission: grow our clients’ capabilities so that they are able to persevere on their path to agility sustainably after we leave.

The discussion between Cecilia and Giuseppe opened up these topics. 

A particular focus was given to one of the most important factors in this Success Story: how the leaders understood early on that agility could not be achieved just by buying and deploying a predefined process. It was amazing to observe how fast they got this clear understanding compared to other leaders we've met that are just looking for a pre-packaged solution. Every organization that is interested in becoming sustainably agile needs to make this journey on their own: you should not worry about reinventing the wheel, because the journey is more important than the goal.

The slides from the webinar can be found here. You are welcome to have a look at them, and for any questions you have, you can turn to us.

This webinar broke our record with questions from the audience. We had more questions than we could answer. From the recording you can hear the answers that we managed to get to live.

If you missed the live webinar, the recording is available here! It is also available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel free to share it around with friends and colleagues.

We hope that you enjoyed this Success Story. For any questions, feel free to reach out to us!

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

agile42 and Divimove

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agile42 + Divimove reference video

agile42's CEO and Founder, Andrea Tomasini, spoke with Tobias Schiwek, the CEO of Divimove, about how Divimove has grown in resilience through agility, with the help of agile42. This discussion has been recorded as a reference video. A fun way to share client experiences and the work that we do!

Divimove, Europes leading digital studio, has recently gone through a major merge, and as a result has had to overcome challenges within the new organization. One of the hurdles was the merging of teams and finding a way of working together. Divimove's aim was not only to grow in numbers, however, also to grow in a coherent way.

The video covers the early days of agile42 & Divimove's collaboration, along with how we helped them visualise their work as well as tools we used to support their transition. Alignment and getting people on the same page was one particular challenge. We found that supporting the new culture and structure became critical, and in the video you will hear in more detail what the outcome of working with agile42 in only 6 months looks like.

Check out the video and listen to the story of Divimove!

Swedbank success story: making employees happier

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During 2018-2019, agile42 has supported Swedbank IT Delivery in Sweden and the Baltics throughout their agile transition: a very interesting and fun project mainly because of the incredibly open and collaborative human beings the coaches have met throughout the journey and the extraordinarily committed leaders we had the pleasure to support. We at agile42 are very proud of what Swedbank has been doing and has achieved.

No real change will happen without any challenges or hiccups. That was true also for Swedbank. If the change is to be successful and sustainable, it must grow organically within the organization. A true agile transition can be effective only if we are able to create a proper mindset in the organization.

In the end, the greatest achievement of this transformation has been the creation of a collaborative culture within the whole bank.

Check the full success story and download the Case Study PDF

Interview on Dutch TV

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The Dutch television visited one of our customers and interviewed me about what Scrum is an how it can help organisations like AAFM Facility Management.

This customer, which is providing facility servives to organisations is not a typical software organisation implementing Scrum. They don’t develop software, but they are dealing with many different aspects of facility management, like catering, cleaning, security, reception, etc. for which they have experts in-house and on location at customer sites.

Each of their clients is different and by bringing the different disciplines of their organisation together in Scrum teams, these teams can work towards a single shared goal, instead of just being responsible for a single aspect of the facility services.

Who would have thought that the Agile Manifesto, which was inspired by lightweight software development methodswould be an eye opener voor a facility services organisation? Like in software development, by working in short iterations and incorporating feedback from their internal and external stakeholders, they can deliver the best possible solutions to their customers.

Watch the short video embedded here or on YouTube.