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.
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?
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.
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?
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.