Additional quotes from findings
| Phase | Quote | Interview ID |
|---|---|---|
| Sensing: exploring opportunities and threats | “For a while, we had discussions about whether you can only apply agile practices in the front end or also back-end applications such as inventory systems, and so on. I'm more of the opinion that you have to apply agile practices in the entire specs and shouldn't just do half of it, because we also need the interplay between front-end and back-end in the interaction of the products.” | ID12 |
| “Up to now, companies have only lost their way since individual decisions were made somewhere at the very top, and then were rigorously implemented top bottom, completely bypassing customer benefits and needs. Boom. And then no one needed Nokia anymore, hmm (laughs).” | ID14 | |
| “Why is this necessary? (…) What I do notice is that a lot of colleagues, especially at a higher strategic level, are talking about the fact that the market is changing at high speed, which is something that we, as end users, are very much aware of. This means that there are new products developed considerably faster. Many more suppliers are entering the market quicker, simply because of digitization. This means that no matter how large or small my company is, and this organization is no exception as the market leader, I must try to adapt to new conditions very quickly.” | ID16 | |
| “So greatest benefit that agile practices can bring, is just to create the end-to-end responsibility and, just make that possible, that across departments, maybe across companies, if it's about technology, to work better with each other and not against each other.” | ID21 | |
| “Our management then went to America to Silicon Valley, and they came back talking about test-driven development and agility.” | ID 36 | |
| Seizing: scaling agility with an agile center of competence (ACC) | “I think that is the biggest success factor of the ACC, because we started in small steps with product increments (…) and we have teams creating something valuable after half a year and with each further release.” | ID16 |
| “A current barrier is creating physical space for the teams. Our current infrastructure is bursting at the seams. Everyone wants and needs space.” | ID19 | |
| “And you are not used to it in this organization, because everyone has their silo (…) you have to break up (the silo structure), to really become a team that interacts with each other. That was the biggest challenge we had to learn. It sounds totally banal, but it was truly hard.” | ID23 | |
| “So, that we've already got the basic right, and agile teams have learned a lot of methodology and mindset (…) and yet, agile scaling is still ahead of us. But I still lack the scaling framework with fixed architectures, with program views on several agile teams.” | ID25 | |
| “The people there (ACC) were freed from the daily work and could do new digital product developments (…).” | ID 36 | |
| Transforming: Disseminating agility across the organization | “C-level management support and an Agile mindset seem to be the crucial factors (…).” | ID10 |
| “And since a few days ago [board member] wrote an article where finally, for the first time after twelve years, our highest boss declares what he understands by organizational agility. It coincides quite well for me with what is also in our textbook.” | ID22 | |
| “Now with this agile scaling initiative, meaning a clear expansion, we look at what already worked well in the ACC, what we can adapt, but also what we have to change. This is because in the ACC we have a single-team context, i.e. we have one team, one backlog, one Product Owner, and in scaling initiative we will combine several teams into tribes. So for the first time we have a scaled setting and that is of course another level.” | ID28 | |
| “You need management commitment, that was also clear learning from the first agile change approach. The management must understand there is a behavioral change, and it starts with themselves. And the second learning embraced, that we only applied agile practices in front-end IT teams, which per se is nonsense, because agility says you need cross-functional teams. Now with the new agile transformation agenda we did it completely different from the very beginning.” | ID30 | |
| “So of course, the biggest challenge is, when you introduce new ways of working in a large or structures in an organization you always have a lot of resistance. By now it manifests that there has already been a significant change, especially in the classic hierarchy (…) “There is also a change in employees' mindset (…).” | ID 31 | |
| “There are three success factors that have made us strong. First. the setting of incremental, iterative learning development, ultimately applying the agile principles ourselves (in the ACC). Second, then there's the principle of one-some-many, i.e. saying I'll think about an implementation, a pilot, and if it works, I'll try it out in two or three other domains of the company. And if it works there, I proceed with disseminating it further. Building the whole thing up in an evolutionary way. And the third is to look first at processes and then at structures.” | ID34 |
| Phase | Quote | Interview ID |
|---|---|---|
| Sensing: exploring opportunities and threats | “For a while, we had discussions about whether you can only apply agile practices in the front end or also back-end applications such as inventory systems, and so on. I'm more of the opinion that you have to apply agile practices in the entire specs and shouldn't just do half of it, because we also need the interplay between front-end and back-end in the interaction of the products.” | |
| “Up to now, companies have only lost their way since individual decisions were made somewhere at the very top, and then were rigorously implemented top bottom, completely bypassing customer benefits and needs. Boom. And then no one needed Nokia anymore, hmm (laughs).” | ||
| “Why is this necessary? (…) What I do notice is that a lot of colleagues, especially at a higher strategic level, are talking about the fact that the market is changing at high speed, which is something that we, as end users, are very much aware of. This means that there are new products developed considerably faster. Many more suppliers are entering the market quicker, simply because of digitization. This means that no matter how large or small my company is, and this organization is no exception as the market leader, I must try to adapt to new conditions very quickly.” | ||
| “So greatest benefit that agile practices can bring, is just to create the end-to-end responsibility and, just make that possible, that across departments, maybe across companies, if it's about technology, to work better with each other and not against each other.” | ||
| “Our management then went to America to Silicon Valley, and they came back talking about test-driven development and agility.” | ||
| Seizing: scaling agility with an agile center of competence (ACC) | “I think that is the biggest success factor of the ACC, because we started in small steps with product increments (…) and we have teams creating something valuable after half a year and with each further release.” | ID16 |
| “A current barrier is creating physical space for the teams. Our current infrastructure is bursting at the seams. Everyone wants and needs space.” | ID19 | |
| “And you are not used to it in this organization, because everyone has their silo (…) you have to break up (the silo structure), to really become a team that interacts with each other. That was the biggest challenge we had to learn. It sounds totally banal, but it was truly hard.” | ID23 | |
| “So, that we've already got the basic right, and agile teams have learned a lot of methodology and mindset (…) and yet, agile scaling is still ahead of us. But I still lack the scaling framework with fixed architectures, with program views on several agile teams.” | ID25 | |
| “The people there (ACC) were freed from the daily work and could do new digital product developments (…).” | ID 36 | |
| Transforming: Disseminating agility across the organization | “C-level management support and an Agile mindset seem to be the crucial factors (…).” | ID10 |
| “And since a few days ago [board member] wrote an article where finally, for the first time after twelve years, our highest boss declares what he understands by organizational agility. It coincides quite well for me with what is also in our textbook.” | ID22 | |
| “Now with this agile scaling initiative, meaning a clear expansion, we look at what already worked well in the ACC, what we can adapt, but also what we have to change. This is because in the ACC we have a single-team context, i.e. we have one team, one backlog, one Product Owner, and in scaling initiative we will combine several teams into tribes. So for the first time we have a scaled setting and that is of course another level.” | ID28 | |
| “You need management commitment, that was also clear learning from the first agile change approach. The management must understand there is a behavioral change, and it starts with themselves. And the second learning embraced, that we only applied agile practices in front-end IT teams, which per se is nonsense, because agility says you need cross-functional teams. Now with the new agile transformation agenda we did it completely different from the very beginning.” | ID30 | |
| “So of course, the biggest challenge is, when you introduce new ways of working in a large or structures in an organization you always have a lot of resistance. By now it manifests that there has already been a significant change, especially in the classic hierarchy (…) “There is also a change in employees' mindset (…).” | ID 31 | |
| “There are three success factors that have made us strong. First. the setting of incremental, iterative learning development, ultimately applying the agile principles ourselves (in the ACC). Second, then there's the principle of one-some-many, i.e. saying I'll think about an implementation, a pilot, and if it works, I'll try it out in two or three other domains of the company. And if it works there, I proceed with disseminating it further. Building the whole thing up in an evolutionary way. And the third is to look first at processes and then at structures.” | ID34 |
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