Agile transactie

The Agile transition of Bijenkorf, Knab, ABN AMRO and PVH…. a challenging journey

The promise of agile product development and self-direction is no longer for the innovators, but for the crowd. Agile now seems to be the new normal. In practice, an Agile transition proves to be a challenging journey, testing change capability. Agile transition leads from the Bijenkorf, Knab, ABN AMRO and PVH share experiences about the journey – which they are in the middle of – and conclude with advice for other organizations.

Adopting the Agile mindset is challenging. This transition impacts the “soft” organizational factors on 3 levels:

  • Organizational culture – strategic level;
  • Leadership – tactical level;
  • Teams – operational level.

To get into the right mindset, “hard” interventions are used. In these, the same 3 levels are distinguished:

  • A new operational model (strategic level);
  • Create value streams from the customer perspective (service design, tactical level);
  • Finding new rhythms to translate strategy into execution.

Using the above 6 factors, transition leads share their experiences.

Organizational Culture

Faster, better, more fun

After several successful experiments, ABN AMRO began its transition in early 2016. “Anything but a traditional implementation process. It really started with the teams before a management decision followed,” said Ronald Maas, transition lead ABN AMRO. The banking company chose an agile transition to be faster, better for the customer and more fun for the employee. To be successful, ABN AMRO needs to create space for people to be a little rebellious. This is the cultural shift the bank is in the middle of.

The transition is now entering its next phase: next year, teams will be given broader responsibilities: ABN AMRO will also make the DevOps transition. Ronald: “Teams will not only be responsible for development, but also for incidents. Will colleagues also be willing to work the occasional picket shift?”

Leadership

From planning to experimentation

The mission of PVH (known for the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger brands, among others) is to become a fashion tech company. This includes digitization of the entire value chain. PVH sees an Agile transition, which started around September 2017, as an indispensable tool. This is a big change in leadership.

Manyana Schmitz (transition lead at PVH): “The Agile transition is also a personal transition for me. I was used to working in a very planned and structured way. However, at the start of a transition you have the least knowledge. I learned to address these uncertainties in the organization by getting started: experimenting, learning and then building further.”

Frameworks versus freedom

Bijenkorf launched its Agile transition in 2015. This involved – in addition to training the teams in scrum – initially taking a lot of inspiration from Spotify’s model. Christiaan Mourik (technology lead at de Bijenkorf): “We discovered that too much freedom is not good for the teams because it also creates ambiguity. The transition was perhaps too overwhelming at times. Looking back, we would have been better off helping the teams with clear strategic priorities, instead of asking them to come up with their own vision. After all, those priorities are there and remain there.”

In addition to frameworks in the form of strategic priorities, Bijenkorf is now working on a second form of framework: technical frameworks. Together with Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, they are looking at how technical standardization and directions can be implemented without compromising the mandate and autonomy of teams.

Team Development

Facilitating continuous learning

An Agile transition can be seen as a learning task for all levels of the organization: how do you secure experimentation and continuous learning in the DNA of the organization? ABN AMRO has placed this learning challenge at the heart of its change approach: “We started to look differently at the learning interventions we offered our employees, because this is an important part of agility,” said Ronald Maas.

The results of traditional, external classroom training were not inadequate. The banking company has now shifted the balance to much more internal education. For example, 2 large multi-day learning events (Agile Summer & Winter School) that are particularly well appreciated by employees and offer better learning results, are organized for the entire organization. 80 percent of the trainers are colleagues who share their experiences.

ABN AMRO’s current learning challenge is the T-shaping of teams. This means that teams and managers have to learn new habits and, perhaps more difficult, also unlearn old habits. The latter is an important point of focus, Ronald knows. “We teach our colleagues that reporting is different from transparency. Questions about transparency are open questions, where reporting questions are often closed questions.

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From management to people management

Value for consumers by adopting a “growth mindset” is a key pillar in PVH’s transition. A breakthrough in this was moving people management responsibilities from traditional managers to people managers (with an average span of PM of thirty people).

Manyana Schmitz (PVH): “On the face of it, this seems like a ‘hard’ factor in change, but it is a very important soft factor in our transition: conversations about team growth became much more valuable. The removal of an entire management layer also made the agile transition very tangible for teams. The new expectation is that decisions are made as low down in the organization as possible. People managers are there to support employees in this process.”

Organizational model

From components to feature teams

Knab’s transition started with team-level Scrum work. This created only limited value. “In 2017, Knab also adjusted the organizational model to further facilitate the agile mindset. From then on, more value was created, said Jelmer Koekkoek (Lead Scrum Master at Knab). “The adjustments are aimed at letting teams do their work autonomously, with as few dependencies to other teams as possible.

During Knab Increment Planning, much time is spent on understanding dependencies between teams. This is also where the need to look for new ways of working often arises. An example of this is making teams jointly responsible for applications, making them work more end-to-end. As a result, teams are increasingly becoming true feature teams.”

Top-down versus bottom-up

Manyana Schmitz is critical of the start of the PVH transition: “We started our Agile transition in September 2017 by designing a new operating model. After this, things fell silent: nothing significant happened for the employees. In September 2018, we started training scrum teams and the transition really began.

“CHANGING A MINDSET EVERY DAY IS BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS”

If I could do it over, I would start by restructuring the teams: ‘Just do it’ is particularly important.” Some 220 employees now work in agile teams, mainly from “digital” (170 people) and “business” (50 people). The current challenge for PVH is the difference that arises between the Agile teams and the rest of the organization. PVH wants to reduce this gap by involving functions, such as HR and legal, in the agile transition. PVH does this by training and coaching these colleagues and involving them in team composition decision-making.

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Service Design

Delivering value in value streams

At Knab, all teams are grouped around value streams. This ensures greater commitment to the strategic priorities. Each value stream has an owner in the Knab management team. Knab is now experimenting with simplifying working in value streams.

Jelmer Koekkoek explains: “What works well is that the MT always speaks with one mouth.” However, some teams are currently working for multiple value streams. This quickly creates complexity. “Reducing this complexity has our full attention. This requires both technical adjustments in applications and changes in responsibilities between teams.”

Translating strategy to execution

Setting goals & priorities

A valuable investment by Knab may have been setting up the Knab Increment Planning sessions, said Jelmer Koekkoek. On one working day, priorities for the company are determined on a quarterly basis with a large part of the organization (350 people). The great value is that truly the entire organization is involved in setting these priorities. The current challenge for Knab is to set sharper goals. Jelmer: “We are looking at which mechanism best suits us as an organization: perhaps Objectives & Key Results, perhaps a variation on this.”

Portfolio Management

Christiaan Mourik (de Bijenkorf): “We find that cross-team projects – such as the introduction of a new CRM system – pose many challenges for our teams. That’s why we are so happy to have our project managers on the floor. The project managers are also very much appreciated by the teams because they do not interfere with the mandate and autonomy of the teams.”

Furthermore, Christiaan Mourik indicates that Bijenkorf is experimenting with its portfolio management. Increment planning sessions (from the SAFe model) are seen as a valuable addition to the current way of working.

Advice to start-up organizations

The four agile transition leads are unanimous when asked what advice they would like to give to organizations at the beginning of their journey: have the guts to create your own model and experiment with it. Copying an existing model, such as from Spotify or SAFe, they all advise against.

“Start by answering the question of what adopting an agile mindset is a solution for,” said Jelmer Koekkoek (Knab). Manyana Schmitz (PVH) adds: “The big value of the transition is in adopting the mindset, not in using scrum or implementing a scaling model.” Christiaan Mourik (de Bijenkorf) sees an agile transition as a trial and error task: “I don’t believe it helps to live by all the letters of the Agile laws. I see that we have created the most value by cherry picking from the various frameworks.”

And finally Ronald Maas (ABN AMRO): “Changing the organizational chart and the setup of the teams is the easy part. Agile is a mindset, a way of thinking. Changing a mindset every day is blood, sweat and tears. Realize that old habits die slowly.”