After successfully transforming over a thousand employees into self-organized value streams, the strategic orientation and common clarity of objectives needed to be secured without restricting the decentralized decision-making autonomy of the ARTs.
The customer
After successfully transforming more than a thousand employees into flexible, adaptable, and self-organized value streams, the challenge for the company was to align employees with a common strategy and common goals while maintaining decentralized decision-making and the autonomy of the Agile Release Trains. The process was further complicated by the extreme complexity of the product landscape and the enormous size of the organization, which prompted the decision to seek help and advice from KEGON experts.
The KEGON solution
With regard to lean agile values and an agile mindset, the KEGON coaches introduced the lean portfolio management process as follows:
- Formulation of an inspiring vision and strategy in the form of OKRs to facilitate understanding and enable empirical progress monitoring
- Systematic derivation of strategic portfolio epics
- Establishment of guidelines to enable decentralized decision-making
- Initialization of a participatory decision-making event
- Establishment of a portfolio Kanban board for the subsequent execution phase
- Introduction of an agile meeting model at the portfolio level for permanent adaptability and flexibility as well as progress measurement
- Proposal for an agile economic framework to enable hypothesis-based progress and rapid feedback
Following the successful establishment of self-organized value streams, the company consistently continued its agile transformation. As early as 2015, the first agile release trains emerged in a highly heterogeneous value stream landscape – from web TV and mobile communications products to cloud services and network operations. This diversity necessitated a decentralized transformation approach, which proved to be a key success factor: each unit was able to develop according to its specific technical requirements without being slowed down by rigid specifications.
Results/target
Over the years, this resulted in an impressive agile structure with around 50 agile release trains, some of which were bundled into 12 solution trains, and a total of approximately 2,000 employees in agile value streams.
However, as the agile organization grew, so did the need for an overarching strategic framework. Therefore, in 2019, the company began to gradually embed all value streams into a complete lean-agile portfolio implementation. The goal was to strengthen the previously decentralized agility through a common strategic alignment, transparent decision-making processes, and uniform portfolio management – without restricting the autonomy of the individual divisions.
The biggest challenge was the heterogeneity of the value streams and the strong independence of the business units. At the same time, it was precisely this diversity that was the key to the success of the decentralized transformation approach, which was later harmonized and strategically linked through integrated lean portfolio management.
Would you like more information or do you have any questions?
Feel free to contact us!
Irina Heck
Tel +49 611 20 50 80
irina.heck(at)kegon.de
