In grote organisaties wordt steeds vaker een kwartaalritme toegepast om op een wendbare en gecontroleerde manier strategie te vertalen naar uitvoering. Hetzelfde principe kan waardevol zijn in andersoortige organisaties. In dit artikel beschrijf ik de manier waarop Praktijkschool Oost ter Hout grip heeft gekregen op de activiteiten die nodig zijn om de ambities uit het schoolplan waar te maken. “Ik […]
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.
Vincent Snijder and Henk Venema had the privilege to interview Joost Brouwer. Joost Brouwer is grid-owner for Corporate Credits at ABN AMRO. Interestingly is that he also experienced what it takes to start up a brand new initiative and scale that towards a high level of maturity. In his current position as well as in his previous role at New10 he explored various ways to implement scaled agile.
In a fast-changing world, organizations must be able to respond adequately to internal and external developments. Sustainable success depends on the speed with which adjustments in the strategy lead to an actual changed course. In other words: how long does it take for the organization to change course after turning the ‘strategy steering wheel’?
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.
Interview with Royal BAM Group
An agile transformation is never an objective in itself. It is always an enabler to achieve something else. For a lot of organisations, this boils down to becoming more adaptive to change, transforming toward digitalization and building a great place to work.
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 theme of this first issue of the Blue Striped Frog Magazine is transparency. Not the stifling Big Brother transparency from ‘The Circle’, but the trust- creating transparency that makes it possible to be agile and continuously improve. Read the editor’s Froggy Talk!
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.
Agile ways of working have drastically extended the already big vocabulary of consultancy. Part of this new set of words is the acronym BUSDEVOPS. This is used to qualify multi-disciplined teams with representatives coming from Business, (IT) development and (IT) operations. In this article we will argue that CUSDEVOPS should be a better term, where CUS is an acronym for Customer.
Agile teams traditionally excel when their members are co-located and the work is physically visualised on walls and boards: sticky notes all over the place. Since the COVID-19 virus hit us, the overall experience is that the switch to remote working on team-level was relatively easy. The clear rhythm and routines facilitated a smooth transition towards a distributed way-of-working. But what about the visualisation on corporate level in so-called Obeya’s? Can we also easily transition this into a digital variant?
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.
Marcel Riemersma and Vincent Snijder were interviewed about the agile transformation at Royal BAM Group. The interviewers were Roderick and Bart of TeamForge. Roderick Göttgens is former interim manager with a focus on organizational- and team development. Bart is Officer in the Dutch army.
What the VUCA. Traditionally, organizations are often depicted as a pyramid. This then stands for a solid organization, powerful, stable, safe, robust. But are those still the ultimate characteristics that will make an organisation survive and thrive these days?
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.
Agility is a strategic asset, a philosophy that could really take leadership forward. It helps organizations to continue serving their purpose. Here’s some examples that show why organizational agility is important. Are you a rabbit or a leopard?
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.
Slowely organizations are moving toward an agile setting. In these organizations agile is not a hype anymore, but it is becoming a way of ‘living’.
Staying relevant these days to fulfill your purpose as a company is a hell of a job. Societal and digital influences are forcing companies to constantly change according to customer needs and external threats.
Meet Inspinity.
In my previous blog I was looking for features and conditions to sparkle in Agile Teams. In this blog I investigate to what extent a Growth Mindset contributes to this. To finally summarize it all with wise words from Pippi Longstocking …
I believe that Agile organisations are ‘sparkling’ organisations. But what is ’sparkling’? How can we determine the ‘degree of sparkle’ in an organisation? Which aspects influence it? How can this be helpful to improve the Agile Mindset?
In this blog I cover these questions as the start of a series of blogs and I ask for your input to define ‘sparkling’. Hopefully this contributes to more and more sparkling Agile organisations!
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.
In my blog last month, I stated that Agile organisations are ‘sparkling’ organisations. I cannot imagine a situation where a genuine Agile organisation does not sparkle because I believe that a true Agile mindset is uplifting, engaging and passion generating.
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.