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Agile transformation from the trenches at Ericsson – with an HR twist

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In this blog post, I would like to share my overall learnings and 7 key takeaways, from an HR perspective, one of the largest and successful Agile transformations that I have taken part in at the Telecom Company Ericsson. I would love to listen in to your reflections too, so please feel free to share your thoughts, challenges, and experiences in the comments below.

Background

The part of Ericsson where I worked, had a need to improve the quality, drastically shorten the lead time for delivery and increase customer value within the same, or even shrinking, budget. After searching both internally and externally for “best of breed” in terms of product development, we decided to go the Lean & Agile way. 

During this period, I was an HR Business Partner for 2 units, each one of them was + 1800 people. This was combined with the role of Lean & Agile HR Driver for the business unit (BU) and People Strategy Driver, which in turn led to the role of HR representative in the BU Lean & Agile change program, basically a project office for the transformation.

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How iZettle facilitate refinement to enable a growth mindset in Agile teams with the Cynefin Context Cards

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Andreas Nordlund who is an Agile Coach at the payment provider iZettle came by the Dandy office to buy the Cynefin Context Cards to his team. I was curious and asked if he would like to share how he was planning on using the cards.

This picture is from another company using the cards.

Mia: How come you want to try the Cynefin Context Cards?
Andreas: We are a group of Agile Coaches at iZettle who meet and share learnings and tips. Some of the other coaches have been using the cards and said they were good. I just got back from a training with Dave Snowden in Berlin in how to use the Cynefin Sense-Making Framework and I felt I wanted to try the cards.

Mia: What purpose do you see that the cards will serve?
Andreas: We often talk about the work we do as if we are in the complicated domain, but often realize that we are in the complex domain. I want to help my team to put words on that, to facilitate that discussion in a structured way. Support the team to more easily come to the conclusion experiments are needed when they are in the complex domain.

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Using Collective Intelligence and OKRs to create an improvement journey that matters

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In the IT department of the telecom company 3 of around 200 people, we worked with improvements on team-level and had a forum for improving the whole, but the overall improvements had come to an end after we met our previous change goal. Since we believe in experimentation, we decided to try Objectives and Key Results, OKRs, as a model to set the objectives.

Johan Hjort presenting the new OKRs for the Journey to Awesome for the people involved in creating them.

How do you create a change journey that matters? That involves the people in the organization in the why, what and how? That goes beyond the teams for long term agility and continuous improvement? This was something we needed to figure out, and we found a pretty cool way to do it that served us well, perhaps it can inspire you too to try something different.

The use of OKRs started in the ’70s in Intel, in 1999 Google was introduced to OKRs by John Doerr, and it’s still a key in how they run the business.

Before starting the work with the OKRs, we had created a common vision of how it would feel to work with digital services and products at 3 in about 5 years, a description embracing change and innovation,  awesome collaboration on all levels, and IT stack that enables business value with short time to market and most important, high customer focus. 

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Avanza Case Study – Agile Transformation with Customer Focus

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Avanza is a tech company with bank licence (you can call them a bank) here in Stockholm. A few years back they started their journey from a traditional silos based organization to a cross functional product organization organized around the customer journey – IT, Product, Marketing and Operations working as one. Here we want to share their own story in the video they recorded at their Avanza Tech Meetup – and as a Case Study.

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The Customer Journey Product Organization – with Lean Teams on a Mission – In a Nutshell Poster

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Since the customer is what drives the value in the organization, we must also organize accordingly. Narrow minded, sub-optimized-silos-days are finally over – future proof organizations with teams that have customer focus and can use their brain power to deliver value – here we come!

Poster downloads (PDF):

English version of the poster > 

Brazilian Portuguese version of the poster >

French version of the poster >

Spanish version of the poster >

business valueTo organize around the customer journey has proven to be extremely effective in order to deliver as much value as possible, as fast as possible – and to make the customer as well as the employees feel awesome! In most organization the organization structure itself is what´s causing the most pain – maybe no wonder when you reflect on that the silos based hierarchical organization is over 100 years old! You can download the Agile Leadership poster for more on that topic.

We are starting to see great results from organizations that have embraced this that makes for a strong business case for any organization. We love to be able to finally be able to share this concept with you. Enjoy!

The Over all Structure of the Customer Journey Product Organization

We have captured the over all visualization of how the organization can work hoping to give you a goal picture and a common understanding.

Here you can Download the poster in high resolution (PDF) > 

At Dandy People we support teams and organizations to become Agile to be able to focus on the business strategies and to mobilize the brain power in the teams to deliver value continuously. We call these value driven Agile teams for “Lean Teams” since they own the process end 2 end to deliver value, and that they also own the part of the service or product end 2 end. These teams work hypothesis based and have clear missions for 6-12 months with clear KPIs that gives them mandate to decide what to do when and enables them to have a ongoing learning process – all which is needed in a fast paced world if you desire to be the leading product or service within your niche. Crucial for these teams are of course the T-shape of the team members. The T-shape is something that enables the team to work as a team and it creates a really strong teams without dependencies to people within the team – and it also prevents the team to not do mini-waterfall in the team (just doing their part and handing over to the next). You can read more about T-shape here and how to grow it as a leader.

In this post you can download the poster for free and learn more about:

  • Lean Teams Connected to the Customer Journey with Missions
  • User research, Planning and Delivery across the Organization – connects as never before
  • Slicing for Value with User Story Mapping to create Alignment
  • The different type of teams
  • Cross-functional competences is needed in the Lean Team
  • Modern Agile and Continuous improvement of the System
  • Choosing what type of Organization you want to have Together
  • Avanza Leads the way with Lean Teams and Customer Journey Organization
  • Presentation on the Customer Journey Product Organization

Lean Teams Connected to the Customer Journey with Missions

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The Product Discovery Journey of a Team and the Remarkable Effect it had on their Product Delivery

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When you are working with such a heartwarming idea as electric cars, you almost don’t need a pitch to be interested in joining it, that at least it goes for me. Deep inside of you, you feel like you are contributing to the greater global purpose. One that generations to come will simply enjoy like we do now with smartphones.

As you can read in the “Roadmap for a fossil fuel-free Stockholm 2050”:

“The City of Stockholm has declared its ambition
to be fossil fuel-free by the year 2050.”*

It feels both inspiring and exciting, knowing that you are seeing the history in the making, one that will inspire other cities worldwide and will make a global difference.

The Story

Art by Joanne Nh Wong
Art by Joanne Nh Wong

By sharing this story, story about a small scrum team, I’m aiming to inspire those who feel demotivated and lose hope and think their organisations will never join the agile revolution. This team who works in a large organisation, was put together in the same time as both department and the business were going through a reorganisation. The drive, commitment and trust that they put in each others skills helped them to reach their goals and shortly after that build up on their first success. Being cross-functional, with: UX, UI, testing, development, content management and marketing expertise, helped them to define clear path together.  The science behind this success is something I’m happy to share with you today.

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Team Self Selection workshop

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Introduction

Last blog I wrote about how we coached and supported the management group to identify next steps in their agile transformation. One of the actions was to change the teams to become Feature teams. Teams who have all needed competences to deliver end customer value.  This blog I will describe how I facilitated the Feature team self selection workshop.

Overall agenda for the workshop

Each step of the workshop is described in a few more words under each heading in the blogpost. I described the overall workshop process with a flip chart that you can see below to make the workshop process easy to understand for all participants.

  • Presentation of Self selection boundaries
  • Product Owner present example deliveries from the backlog
  •  All prepare their own “avatar” with skills
  • Collaboration and self selection
  • Each new team validate towards boundaries
  • Each team identify concerns with their team setup
  • Repeat 4-7 until we reach our goal “Good enough for now, Safe enough to try”
  • Short retrospective

Presentation of Self Selection boundaries

We had a few rules to guide them in their self selection and collaboration efforts to identify Feature teams.;

  • Do what is best for the company
  • Go for teams that is close to equal in size, experience and competence
  • We want self managing teams able to deliver on the example backlog items
  • We want teams who learn how to collaborate and share knowledge to develop as a team over time

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Agile transformation in a fail safe environment – Prototyping Teams

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This is a story how we used a two day workshop with a management group to help them find out next steps needed in their Agile Transformation.

We knew the client well and had been working with them for some time. It was now time to discuss their progress and potential next steps.

Background

They had Scrum teams up and running, each team with their own product owner. Each team covering one part of their product. Earlier they had discussed and identified their challenges and problems so they where known and a good input to the workshop.

The Workshop

Overall agenda for these two days:

  • Purpose, why
  • Vision
  • Experiencing Feature teams
  • LeSS introduction
  • Guiding Principles for the product organization
  • Prototyping new Agile teams
  • Decisions and next steps

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Transforming to a People- and Innovation Friendly Organisation using Agile

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Is your organisation starting to feel out of date, making you slow and ineffective? Do you need to evaluate what type of organisation you should have instead to speed up your development? Then you probably want to continue and read the full article. This post also contains Workshop agenda & Free Templates.

Agile Coaches

The three amigos of Agile coaches on the set is so much better than one 😀
Thank you Viktor and Stefan!

Many companies and organisations who are working in a complex fast moving domain find themselves growing out of their existing organization and ways of working. These organisations may suffer from problems like long lead times, inability to innovate or quality issues. Feeling left behind when new companies move faster. People in these organizations often find themselves being stressed out, attending too many meetings, communicating to everyone and no one about everything, and often little or even no time to be creative, collaborate with team members and stakeholders or to do the actual work.

To become great product organisations fit for people and enable innovation, short lead times and high quality we apply Agile and Lean thinking and ways of working in order to solve existing problems step by step – also called Agile Change Management. We believe that change has to happen on an individual level, as well as a system level, and it can only be sustainable and successful if it comes from intrinsic motivation.

To enable organizations to improve and reorganize as easy as possible we needed a collaborative way to evaluate the existing organization, what works well and what not, and at the same time learn how it could work instead in the future. We also wanted to build on intrinsic motivation and enable people to make the decisions needed based on actual knowledge. That’s why we created this product organisation evaluation workshop and method. It worked really well and we would love to share it with the Agile community to see if it might could be of use to more people.

Outlines of the workshop

This workshop is:

  • Experienced based
  • Collaborative
  • Visual
  • Data driven
  • Probe, sense, respond – prototype based

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