• Agile Coach

Why Agile working is never the goal for Richard de Rijke

Richard is hard at work for Internationale Nederlanden Groep, better known as ING, when it is announced that a transformation is imminent. More Agile working, less traditional project management. He finds this new way of working mindblowing. That’s about 10 years ago now. But the impact of Agile working is still lifechanging.

We are writing the year 2013. A year in which the Netherlands gets a king on the throne for the first time in 123 years, Microsoft launches Windows 8.1 and Richard discovers that he is having increasing difficulty with traditional project management. “You had to compete for your resources, jump through all kinds of hoops for budget and get people along who were not intrinsically motivated,” he looks back. Fortunately for him, his then-employer ING transformed and he quickly found peace in Agile teams. The Product Owner on duty facilitates the conditions that allow team members to do their work with more focus. It inspires Richard: “The Agile Principles felt more than logical and I saw more and more happy faces in the workplace.” The spark strikes.

From spark to flame

From flame to blazing fire. Richard is under the spell of Agile Coaching and at ING, under the guidance of an experienced colleague, gives his first trainings. It starts with Agile Awareness, an introduction to Agile, but soon he is also giving Scrum Master trainings, Product Owner trainings and Kanban trainings. His career soon takes off, because through Schiphol Group, where he guides the entire transformation as a team, he starts training external professionals together with colleague Erik Bras. Not surprisingly, these two Agile professionals now train and coach at Scrum Academy.

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Value Driven Portfolio Management

While Richards is working at Schiphol, the organization is transforming into a more agile, customer-centric, value- and data-driven club. Here they are also experimenting at the Portfolio level. Like any experiment, this goes with fits and starts, hurdles and stops, but also yields best practices. The basis for an impactful framework: Value Drive Portfolio Management (VDPM). “A new perspective on Portfolio Management, where the focus is on managing values. VDPM therefore distinguishes itself from models that focus more on managing solutions,” says de Rijke enthusiastically. The counter of the number of VDPM training courses is now running into the dozens, moreover, the issues of interested parties are becoming more diverse and challenging. “We receive questions not only about value- and data-driven organizations and Agile Portfolio Management, but also about cross-silo collaboration,” Richard informs.

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Don’t worry, be happy

If you meet Richard, you immediately know you are dealing with an Agile fanatic. Feel free to call him a professional idiot. All the teams he coaches will notice this immediately. All the more so when he tells them that Agile is never the goal. Richard explains: “Personally, it makes me happy when employees’ job satisfaction increases. For that, cooperation, support, direction, autonomy, appreciation and creativity are important drivers.” For Richard, working Agile is thus primarily a tool to scrutinize and improve this well. With this mindset, he and all Scrum Academy colleagues are eagerly anticipating the next 10 years of Agile working.