Different understandings of lean&agile

[mstakh.i.mom.i]

Until today eprimos DNA and success has always relied on hands-on entrepreneurship and a proactive and open mindset. When the customer service team faced a growth challenge they embraced digital to meet their ambitious efficiency targets. An agile way of working was suggested to master this challenge. Kundenservice 4.0 turned out to be our first agile lighthouse. The customer service team delivered very promising results both in performance as employee satisfaction and thus encouraged other teams to follow suit. Gini was out of the bottle. Teams and leaders in different areas like innovation or IT started their respective agile initiatives. We started to experience the downside of our approach. Different external agile coaches introduced their philosophy and tools. Some teams embraced the new ways of working, others refused. Acceptance levels in teams and leadership varied. Imagine the interfaces and the complexity caused by different ways of working, different understandings and languages of lean&agile. Despite clear improvements in their respective areas lean&agile generated new complexity and caused resistance in important and significant parts of the company. This development underscored the need to orchestrate and calibrate lean&agile across eprimo.

To address these 4 core deficiencies we started our transformation focussing on transportation email list 4 building blocks:

Inspired by positive experiences in other industries and building on the positive results of the internal agile lighthouses we embraced lean&agile for the entire company. To kickoff and run our transformation early 2018 we established an appropriate organizational setup consisting of two basic elements providing 100% flexibility in structure and resource allocation.

An agile room organized in product delivery teams along the customer journey and support teams. New agile roles were introduced.
A personal development center caring for the eprimos. Ultimately to stuff the agile room according requirement and to foster personal growth.
The overhead functions remained non-agile in the very beginning. The trustful collaboration of both management and workers council enabled this organizational setup signing a respective transformation agreement.

What we experienced since then is an exciting journey of an entire company full of wow and oh-No moments, but ultimately a journey worth riding. Looking back we started mastering digital challenges and ended up unlocking the human potential we already got inside.