Grip op ambities bij Praktijkschool Oost ter Hout

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 […]

Continue reading

Zonder keuzes geen flow

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 […]

Continue reading

Purpose driven people

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.

Continue reading

Culture makes or breaks your agile transition

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.

Continue reading
Use discomfort to learn forward in a continuous dialogue

Use discomfort to learn forward in a continuous dialogue

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.

Continue reading

Organizational agility at New10 and ABN AMRO

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.

Continue reading

The Organizational Agility Heartbeat (TOAH)

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’?

Continue reading
The agile journey of UWV

The agile journey of UWV

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.

Continue reading
Strategy and leadership, an interview with Ron Meyer

Strategy and leadership, an interview with Ron Meyer

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.

Continue reading

Constructing an agile future

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.

Continue reading

An agile journey is like sailing around the world

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.

Continue reading
Froggy Talk - Transparency

Froggy talk: transparency

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!

Continue reading

CUSDEVOPS – in love with your customers

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.  

Continue reading

Digital Obeya – business agility in ‘the new normal’​

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? 

Continue reading
Myths

Agillusions: 10 myths on agile

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…

Continue reading
Innovation for relevance

Innovate to stay relevant

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.

Continue reading

Podcast – We build it before we build it

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.

Continue reading
Agile enough to escape the headlights?

Will you keep on staring at the headlights?

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?

Continue reading

Life Cycle Management value vs business value

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.

Continue reading

In love with agile

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.

Continue reading

Can you feel it? A Sparkle Thermometer for Agile

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!

Continue reading

Silo busting – do or die

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.

Continue reading

Agilize the support functions too

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.

Continue reading

Flow in Sparkling Agile teams

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.

Continue reading

No delayering, No agility

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 […]

Continue reading

Agile Delivery Organizations are the Dream of Programme Managers

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.

Continue reading

The Power of Aligned Autonomous Teams

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.

Continue reading