Our Consulting Service

Servant Leadership

Agile development is more than a new method of project management. Command and Control is yesterday’s news. Today, self-organized teams making decentralized decisions and applying empirical process control to projects require catalyst leadership. The executive is no longer the complete expert, but instead creates the conditions and framework in which teams will succeed.
That is why the agile transformation begins with a change in top management’s mind-set.

• Impart agile foundations and persuasion
• Develop an entry scenario
• Train stakeholders and teams
• Set up and coach pilot projects
• Adapt and implement agile scaling frameworks
• Coach the agile transformation of your entire organization

Agile Awareness

An agile transformation should begin with an «Agile Awareness Day».

At such an event, the responsible management team becomes familiar with the agile framework and the principles of agile leadership - and their associated consequences. At the same time, all expectations of the agile process can be harmonized among the team. Which improvements can be expected and which of them are realistic?

Management can then decide on an agile implementation and commit to the process. Otherwise, either your corporate culture has not developed far enough for this step or the slight complexity of the business area can furthermore be controlled by defined processes. Our consultants lead you through the Agile Awareness Day and help you during your decision-making.

Entry Scenario

Most companies spend the initial stages of transition gathering experience in the use of agile principles, by applying Scrum or Kanban frameworks to pilot projects or within selected development teams. This enables them to:

• Determine whether or not their expectations of speed, better control of changing product requirements and priorities, higher productivity and product quality, can be met
• Gain first-hand experience in altering leadership and working behaviours, which ultimately change their corporate culture.

Our consultants are on hand to help you to select the right pilot project(s).

Training

Executives, stakeholders and teams affected by a pilot project deserve to be briefed from the outset. This will enable familiarity with the respective frameworks and the ability to speak the same language early on in the process. The content and duration of training can be adjusted as required, and conducted with or without certification.

Coaching pilot projects

After training comes role allocation – at Scrum the Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team. We create a product vision and the product backlog. We determine working agreement, definition of ready, definition of done and the duration of the sprints. We also prepare the Scrum or Kanban-board, ready for the team to start on its first sprint.

The consultant accompanies the team as an additional agile coach, supporting the internal scrum master or agile coach, who takes on more responsibilities and tasks as time goes by.

Agile scaling frameworks

In our experience, companies will embrace more agile leadership and roll out agile methods following successful pilot projects:

• Further projects and development teams use Scrum or Kanban
• Large and complex projects are accomplished with agile
• Complete value streams become agile
• The whole organization becomes agile

We introduce alternative scaling frameworks such as SAFe®, LeSS®, Scrum@Scale® and NEXUS®, providing full support during your adaptation and implementation.

Finally, we help you build a change management team and carry out the consultancy project together, embracing agile principles.

Agile Transformation

The agile transformation of a whole company has different dimensions:

• The change management process which begins on the Agile Awareness Day
• The cross-functional usage of agile methods beyond product development
• The adjustment of the organizational structure