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Transforming your organization towards adaptiveness and resilience

We are uncovering better ways of improving organizations and helping others do it. We do this by providing consulting, coaching, hands-on workshops, and training.

Wolfgang Steffens CEO kai kaku Oy

Enough of the change theatre at your organization?

You learned that by simply renaming the roles, artifacts, and events your organization will not become as agile as you want or need it to be?

Maybe it is time for a more in-depth and structural change in your organization. Easier said than done! Maybe you already did a major restructuring of your organization and yet it failed to deliver the results. Introducing an overall system optimization goal will bring transparency to your transformation, and it will allow you to achieve more benefits.

Invite me to join and help you on your journey towards true organizational agility.

Wolfgang, CEO of kai kaku Oy

Our Transformation Approach kai kaku

Our overall transformation approach consists of three major phases:

  1. Preparing the Product Group
  2. Launching the Product Group
  3. Coaching the Product Group

Preparing the Product Group

One of the major aspects during preparation is to determine the organizational design. The design process starts with understanding the need for change and the company’s business strategy. The motivation for this change, the “why”, is important to get people involved and take ownership. The business strategy provides guidance in which direction the organization needs to develop. This step is followed by an analysis of which capabilities the organization needs. Some might be in place already, but others are missing and need to be developed. Then we will explore which organization design will allow the development of those capabilities. The members of the organization will then collaborate in the creation and implementation.

In this organization design phase, we explore the coupling of functions to decouple the unit functions. We develop an understanding of the essential parts of your various Product Groups and identify interdependencies at a task level. All those together are key in your design choices.

Ultimately, all members of the organization together did design their organization like a truck or a race car, a desktop computer, or a mobile phone. Your organization will be fit for purpose.

Like any empirical approach, the members will regularly inspect, reflect, and adapt as required. Wiser mistakes will be made in the next iterations.

Launching the Product Group

In this phase stuff gets real and the work starts. The launch consists of several steps such as creating the teams by using a self-designing teams workshop or applying the Feature Team Adoption Map. Once we have the new teams created, the next step is to create a new Product Backlog with customer-centric Product Backlog Items. This is needed since the breakdown of the requirements up to now was done in a functional, component, siloed view. Since we have combined essential parts into the Product Group, containing reciprocal dependencies within the teams, the requirements and work items need to be defined and sliced in a customer/user-centric way. Other key parts of the launch are for the teams to define their ways of working including a definition of how to make decisions and agreeing on cross-team coordination mechanisms as well as creating the common-for-all-teams Definition of Done. And then the teams start working.

Coaching the Product Group

The time after the launch is also critical. Very often the Product Group will face some implementation challenges, and the work will not go as smoothly as planned. That’s where coaching the teams, the managers, and all others in the Product Group and beyond is essential. This all depends on how much was invested in educating the people up front, and even then, one cannot expect that people do everything very well after a multiple-day classroom training. Based on our experience the devil is in the details, how you conduct sessions, how to keep energy high in events, what people say, how they think and act, and so much more. Examples of leaders are falling back to focus on high team utilization, measuring and comparing teams’ velocities, ordering teams what to do, and interfering in team-level stand-ups for urgent issues. The teams are the nucleus of the new organization and they need to work smoothly. Typical initial hick-ups involve conducting sessions efficiently, getting cross-team coordination working, getting all team members to work together on a common goal, and dealing with individual views.

Coachings

Workshops

Trainings

Selected clients

Danfoss Logo
Cuna Mutual Group Logo
BSH Logo
appear Logo
BMW Logo
Telefonica Logo
Allianz Logo
TEDi Logo
Schaeffler Logo
Siemens Logo
IRS Logo
HUK-Coburg Logo
ingsoft Logo
Danfoss Logo
Cuna Mutual Group Logo
BSH Logo
appear Logo
BMW Logo
Telefonica Logo
Allianz Logo
TEDi Logo
Schaeffler Logo
Siemens Logo
IRS Logo
HUK-Coburg Logo
ingsoft Logo

Testimonials

Wolfgang did an excellent job in turning the rather big ship around an plotting a new course … This made the project sucessfull and earned him great respect.

G. S.

Head of Release Management

Great Job Wolfgang, thank you soooo much, this has been quite a remarkable session! I can defintely recommend this course (Certified LeSS Practitioner)!

A. O.

Agile Coach

… Ohne die Zusammenarbeit mit dir und das Lernen von dir hätte ich das nie geschafft. Ich profitiere so sehr von der Zeit unserer Zusammenarbeit, und vieles von dem, was du damals gelehrt hast und ich damals noch abgelehnt habe, vertrete ich heute eisern …

E. J.

Test Manager

Wolfgang hat mir den Anstoß gegeben Scrum neu zu lernen, eben wie Scrum richtig geht.

J.K.

Scrum Master & Agile Coach

Was great. Gained insights by working on the many really enlightening Causual Loop Diagrams. And I loved your case study, Wolfgang. Thank you very much. Very well invested time.

R. F.

Transition Coach

I was immediately struck by how much substantial agile knowledge he has and how well he can use practical examples.

O. T.

Scrum Master & Trainer

Best Scrum/Agile course (Online LeSS Practitioner) I ever visited!

A.D.

Entrepreneur, Agile Coach

Contact

If you see change not as an enemy, but as a welcome friend, you will secure the most valuable prize of all – the Future!

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