Inleiding In grote organisaties, waarin ICT een steeds crucialere rol vervult, worden vaak initiatieven genomen op het gebied van wendbaarheid. Men wil wendbaarder zijn in de manier waarop de producten en diensten aan de klanten wordt aangeboden. Sneller kunnen inspelen op wijzigingen in klantvraag, toepassen nieuwe technologie etc. Vele boeken zijn hier al aan gewijd waarbij termen als VUCA (Volatile […]
Interview with Alize Hofmeester: As a passionate People & Change Executive, I help organizations to stay relevant to their customers, by reshaping their future way of working and facilitating a fresh mindset that leads to companywide flow and business agility. Over the years I have gained unique insights on how to introduce and transform companies into becoming successful and sustainable business-agility entities.
We all know Peter Drucker’s famous quote ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and I transformed that into ‘Culture makes or breaks your agile transition’. For me this is reason number one why so many agile transitions fail. In this article I explain what I mean with culture, I make some references to books or articles explaining culture and I make a reference to my Bird’s eye view on the agile forest and elaborate on the, what I call, culture targeted frameworks or ways of working.
Agile working is developed to face complex problems in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) context. Agility helps to anticipate and adjust to changes while keeping the purpose ahead. The Agile way of working stimulates us to use all talents and perspectives in our team, which enables us to solve complex problems. When things go well, people experience work-energy and flow.
Fred Hoekstra is director of the department Social Medical Affairs (Sociaal Medische Zaken – SMZ) at UWV. Fred has been working for a while to make the organization more agile. This has accelerated due to the COVID-19 situation. From the start of COVID-19, UWV has contributed to help employees and employers in the Netherlands who ran into problems due to the sudden pandemic. With the foundations that had already been laid, Fred helped to bring out the best in the organization.
Ron Meyer and Ronald Meijers published an article on ‘Leaders Beware: Four Megatrends Shaping the Age of Agility’. Inspired by the article Vincent Snijder and Maarten Leeuw interviewed one of the authors. They reached out to Prof. dr. Ron Meyer, thought leader on strategy and leadership. The aim was to get a more specific and broader perspective on, amongst others, strategy development in agile companies.
Why should we suddenly care more about leadership agility than before? It is because there is definitely something new going on, at a very fundamental level – we have entered the age of agility, in which Darwinian survival of the fittest has been shifted up a gear.
The leadership purpose of one of the Inspinity partners is ‘leading the expedition into unchartered territories and enjoying the journey more than the destination’. This contains two important elements that characterize every agile journey; it will be different than planned and it must be pleasant.
The first BSF magazine has been released. It contains, among other, articles that were created in collaboration with representatives of Royal BAM group, The Diversity Company, Best-seller author Tim Wiegel.
So much has been said about agile. We thought it would also be good to show you the almighty myths of the corridor chat. Here are some statements that you should definitely question! Let us enlighten you why…
Imagine you are a manager of a support department. A manager leading 10-30 people. It is a collection of functions. Your biggest frustration? Definitely the fact that you have no control over the priorities of your department.
Change is always hard. But not changing, will be harder in the end. Although you should think big, it sometimes starts with small steps…
An important driver for organizations to become an agile organization is the need to cope with fast changing external circumstances. This can be anything like new technology, new eco-platforms, new legislation, new competitor products etcetera. This implies that innovation is a key element in the strategy.
Now that the whole world is fighting against the impact of the COVID-19 virus, it is our professional assumption that organisations that are becoming quite mature in their continuous agile journey are better equipped to survive the crisis. Let me further elaborate.
Delivering business value is often seen as the holy grail for agile teams or agile organisations. Although true in itself but if the price for fixation on business value is that prioritisation for Life Cycle Management pays the price for that, you are putting your organisation at risk.
Valentine’s Day, every year it keeps many people busy. A large imaginary pink cloud is pouring out across the world for a euphoric peak around the thought that love overcomes everything.
Old school organisations with traditional silo’s as Front Office/Mid Office/Back Office/IT/Risk…. will die. Like the dinosaurs they cannot adapt quick enough to changing circumstances. The solution for that are multi-disciplined teams where all relevant disciplines are represented. But is this also a realistic scenario for large organisations with hundred or even thousands of teams? In this article some best practices are shared on this leading to the answer ‘yes, that is possible’, even in large organisations.
A lot of organizations by now recognize the benefits of working in multi-disciplined BusDevOps teams. Teams where IT engineers closely collaborate with business oriented colleagues coming from Product Management for instance. We recognize the fact that these teams are much better equipped to deliver products and services that customers really want. Do the right things and do the things right.
Many organisations are transforming into agile organisations nowadays. This is often born out of necessity to be able to cope with fast changes in the context of the organisation. In order to be able to quickly adapt to those changing circumstances a transformation is started where multi-disciplined teams are the foundation of the delivery organisation. For large organisations the concept […]
There was a time when programme management was regarded as an instrument of the non-agile world. This has caused a lot of uncertainty and a negative perception of agile ways-of-working in the professional community of programme managers. Programme managers could rightfully not understand how some of the complex change programmes they were working on could be handled without proper orchestration.
Working in a Lean/Agile way of working is not new anymore for a lot of organizations. Many best practices are available showing examples how the organization can benefit from working in an agile manner. But many of the bigger organizations with a potential of hundreds of autonomous teams struggle with the question how to scale the agile way of working in such a way that it works in their context. This article describes the concept of Aligned Autonomy as a way to help big organizations to fully benefit from agile ways of working.