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we are here for learning from Lars and I have the absolute pleasure to start the meet up about the insights from your journey at Mercedes-Benz USA I’m just going to say two words about me so my name is Riina I’m the founder of agile HR Community also a trainer and agile Enterprise coach working with everything you know from beginner teams to large scale Global um Transformations and uh I have I I’ve been working with Lars A couple of years it’s a a few years since we met so I would uh I want to give you the word to just introduce yourself and also the organization that you work with so we get the context of what we’re going to hear yeah ABS absolutely Rea warmly welcome thank you thank you very much and hopefully you can hear me okay okay fantastic so Riina as as as you alluded to you and I met several years ago uh I was a student uh and I I think I’m very much still a student of of agile uh learning some of the intricacies but also the artistic side of what it can be and its overall capabilities for our organization I’m the chief HR officer for Mercedes-Benz North America I have the pleasure of uh being with the organization now for nine years um as of this uh past uh March March 30th to be precise and uh and and really for us we’re trying to find unique ways not only to work but to keep our staff in HR engaged but also the broader community and I’ll talk more about that uh later on uh we are in unprecedented times like many other Industries um and we certainly pride ourselves on uh being on the front foot uh as far as uh new ways of working and and changing the overall model uh and and again I will go into much more of that uh in uh in short short duration happy to have you join us and I’m really curious to start learning about what you’ve done we have prepared a few themes that we’re going to talk about but we haven’t really talked in depth about it so it’s going to be a new story for me as well quite often when we are talking about agility there’s there’s a big question about the why so why on Earth should HR team start looking into this what was your why wh why why did you kind of you you started as a chro yourself that’s very rare by the way that the chro starts but would be lovely to hear your story well I’ll tell you uh just personally and then I’ll I’ll certainly get into to why why it was important for us uh number one I really felt uh if if I am to lead an organization in an agile way I needed to to First be um uh under the tutelage of of the experts and and that’s when when I sought uh you and the organization out to really understand uh some of the basics uh but also how I can help to transform the organization by being a model or an example um I felt specifically that uh HR uh is to some degree maybe less so now but is to some degree uh far too traditional I think we still rely on a lot of um proven Concepts certainly but also Concepts that uh that may need to be dusted off and uh refurbished uh if you will I also felt uh in my organization we needed to um to have a bit more rigor around prioritization uh we are not uh being given more uh headcount um uh but of course uh we’re being asked to do more with less uh and and this is one of the finer ways in my opinion to do just that um so we don’t create a a backlash amongst uh the HR uh employees and then as I said uh earlier um I wanted a a different set of working Styles this is certainly one of them I think there are others by all means but this is one of them and the team is really rallied around being able to conceptualize what different working Styles can be oddly enough when we introduced it uh to the broader organization the business organization by way of a an a certification last year we found that there was quite a bit of um um of appetite around working in a different way I just think the idea of prioritization helping people to work closely with the stakeholders to derive new Concepts and new uh new iterations I think I think is is just fascinating and uh and that’s really brought about our our why this is often What I Hear as well from from HR teams who want to start looking into this they are saying they need to move away from the silos they need to be really customer Centric start generate they they are looking at a product mindset in HR how to start generating products that people managers the organization actually want to use and find valuable and maybe also cut away there’s just too much noise there’s too much stuff on H plate um so clearly understanding what is the valuable thing that we’re going to do what’s the real important stuff and maybe leave the rest not done to be honest if you’re a real agilist by the way you are as as interested in what should we not do then what are we focusing on excellent yeah um when when so you work Mercedes-Benz car industry uh it’s going through a massive massive disruption currently um there’s the the e e uh kind of digital car cars and the the the battery industry all of the technology going into cars can you share a little bit about that changing context because it’s also important to remember we in HR are part of that business context so can you share a bit of your thoughts and what’s what’s cooking in the industry well as you said and I think it’s widely known that uh the automotive industry is going through one of the greatest Transformations uh ever uh and I just think of of what we value as human beings we value our homes and and in second behind our families obviously family and friends but in terms of physical assets our homes and then our automobiles um particularly here in the US and I just think given the speed the the agility that’s expected and and the digital nature um the car by all means has never really changed I mean four wheels um transmission uh we are moving away from a different battery setup or or combustion engine now to B now to an electric uh battery um but we’re we’re also seeing that the the vehicle is a lot more digital and there’s a lot more software than ever before and so the expectations are very high as far as customers are concerned and like anything else what an individual is exposed to in our case our employees um with highly demanding customers equals what their demand is on the inside or internally and so we’ve we’ve had to adjust uh quite a bit I’ll tell you as I said it before um uh this this constant prioritization but also asking ourselves if something didn’t work what’s a good alternative what’s a quick turn how can we uh keep our same how can we keep the same Pace but also keep iterating around what’s uh what’s important um and and and Frankly Speaking um we we think that’s that’s here to stay uh I I don’t I don’t see that changing anytime soon oh for sure for sure so I’ve been working a bit as well I I kind of echo what you’re saying with working with Hardware companies I worked somewhat with Hardware R&D and seeing how they are needing and struggling to move towards a more incremental Speedy quarterly prioritization even in the hardware development because you don’t you don’t nowadays have Hardware usually without those um signaling sensors and analytics and services built on that Hardware so you need to start having those interfaces on how to how to really develop products and services with hardware and software connected and this is totally transforming a lot of businesses all the way from from um like uh heavy industry companies that are generating I’m I just recently worked with with a company that are generating like machines worth 10 10 million machine right they are looking at how to digitalize services and products on top of that so it’s it’s nothing new it’s happening now with a with a rapid speed and that is why one one reason why I think H should start waking up for for understanding the organization is changing their ways of working why don’t we be prepared for that and uh start changing ourselves as well that’s exactly it yeah now it reminds me of the the famous story of the the brick masons uh one was asked what are you doing he said I’m breaking rocks the other one was asked what are you doing he said uh I’m making a living and the other one said I’m building a cathedral and uh and and frankly that’s that’s exactly what we’re doing here yes it’s about HR and it’s about the service we provide but we’re part of this overall glorious transformation in the automotive industry thank you for sharing that um when we start talking about agility there is one thing where we always start if so in any agile team one of the big questions is what are we what should we do what’s the core thing that we are delivering and we talked about that that was one of the key key kind of wise for you as well would you talk about prior the focus on prioritization how that changes from what you did before yeah I I’ll show you an example for right now I think we can talk about that later but maybe one of the one of the core fundamental things uh I I introduce and this is by way of um agile HR uh was this concept called Moscow which is must should could or won’t do what must we do what what what must we absolutely do and this having this level of clarity is so good for the team uh because I think the team now can rally around a singular message and sometimes it’s one or two but but then we can stack rank um uh what should come next uh so thus Moscow was introduced very early on um acronyms are very easy in the Western in in the western culture particularly in our culture and so the team really um resonated um or this this concept resonated with them it forced us to get very linear um and and instead of having discussions that tend to go everywhere but really go nowhere in the end uh and really uh getting down to the singular Focus uh has been very important and I’ve been stituted this now across a number of um veins not just in agile but just in general um I love breaking things down to the core objectives I think it goes with the saying that um you can’t major in minors uh so what what are the major things that we must get focused on this is also a skill that I think is quite um quite easy to find within HR uh we tend to we can work with a lot of details but get down to the core set of objectives versus getting lost and that that was certainly uh very helpful for the for the team um as I said before so many things to do you can do everything but make very little impact so we are constantly trying to scratch and Claw away to uh to getting to what it would drive is the biggest impact because at the end of the day it’s about value and it’s about value at scale and then uh it also helps us to uh manage H capacity and workload I can I can determine based on the team’s objectives who’s adding the most value because we know we get a quick return or quick response on that value but I’m also able to measure their overall capacity and load and the team likes that I think they appreciate the leadership or or or having a leadership as well as a team environment where we’re talking about capacity load well-being and agile is is H certainly perfect for that uh that type of uh sponsorship that is a very important one the capacity I usually have said that hatra people it’s it’s the first time they start talking about capacity they they’ve been so good at saying yes to everything because they want to do a good job they want to be serving the organization which leads to kind of blocking the pipeline of too much work in addition to that we in HR tend to be quite domain experts in something that we absolutely love which leads to us picking up these pet projects you know things that you really want to do to improve and to tweak something here and to per you know make something perfect on this little part here and and spending quite a lot of time on that compared to what we should actually be doing so when we sometimes bring in this skill set of having conversations and making it visible it’s quite a quite a shocker for many ha your people to say wow 40% of our weekly time just goes for blocked for meetings that we have every week then this time goes for random meetings that are in projects then I have these things then I got my absences and holidays and then I got my pet projects that I’m working on and what is actually remaining time for doing that value adding strategic project very little what are your thoughts around when I’m sharing this listen I 100% agree I mean I think we and and let me first um share that we’re not we’re still not very good at this I I would not claim to be an expert uh I think it’s it’s kind of a daily uh daily learning daily journey journey um at the same time though I think what we’re getting better at is is the constant asking of of the question and I now find my team asking me when I bring a pet project to them because I’m certainly guilty of what you expressed um is this is this really going to add the most value and and that to me is when you when you see the the wins when the team starts asking those important questions um I I think I may have shared with you in in one of our um leadup calls that uh We’ve now found that agilis so easily ad adopted U by any generation within our Workforce uh so we have a group of um college students uh they work in a in a purely agile environment the grasp that they have is so fast um but but that’s regardless of how young you are in the organization or how seasoned you might be uh I find that people uh resonate with this because I think it is at its basic uh as at its basic level exactly what we believe an organization ought to be um yes we dress it up with uh with fancy terminology like agile and uh various methodologies and incrementals and incremental and scaling Etc but at its basic form I think this is what people appreciate and what they expect a work environment to be about that’s the true when when we start working in an agile way it’s very inclusive um if if you look you talked about cross generational I would even dare to say that um it’s not an as you it’s not an age thing it’s not a it’s not a a what your background is or what your profession is or what your education is it just makes sense for many people to work that way it’s very collaborative and transparent as well what would you say about the inclusion part in in agility because if we work in a you know you’re if if we say agile always are working create an inclusive environment would you agree with that and why yeah I I would definitely agree with it and I I would say if you were to take any project and and let me pick on one of them we actually um we embarked on um revamping our entire onboarding uh process and we wanted agile to be Center Stage uh with with that revamp and everyone that um worked together and when I say everyone I’m talking the entire stakeholder community so you had a group of end users so recent hires number one it HR uh we also had uh payroll was also involved and then we had security uh involved we brought everyone uh to the table there was no hierarchy the level of collaboration was immense because everyone had a a a specific task or set of objectives that uh needed to be met but we set the ground rule the ground rules very early on and we said this is about ensuring that we have a good product that we continue to enhance for the sake of our employees we will measure it by all means means but it’s for the sake of our employees and I think with that in mind uh that that that equal the uh the playing Ground for uh for everyone uh and we’ve we’ve seen a single point increase in our overall satisfaction scores from uh last last from q1 of 2023 to uh Q4 of 2023 we’ll run another survey here uh at the end of um now that it’s the end of q1 so I’m hopeful that we we clean up a few a few areas but that was the complete compl um that was a perfect example of of what complete inclusion looks like um and and again the appetite was so high I think everyone resonated with it we’re embarking on a on a similar project very soon uh we’re testing um an internal GPT or generative AI tool within HR uh and we’re finding the same same thing State the common purpose Express that common purpose um uh extensively um particularly in every interaction bring in your stakeholders so they have a chance to test and and to visualize your prototypes and then you see the team just rally around it and and to me that’s a Hallmark of great uh great great inclusion excellent I I when I look at the inclusion I I love what you’re saying about bringing in kind of cross functional inclusion not just in HR through HR silos like Talent working with L &d working with performance working with reward but we’re looking at a true end to end experience for our employees such as onboarding all of these um elements or or functions that you mentioned are participating in delivering that experience to a newcomer so uh to have them really um swarm around how to do that in a great way and you also mentioned that stepwise process of we I I heard it kind of between the lines correct me if I’m wrong that you’re starting somewhere but you realize that you can do that incrementally improve that onboarding experience incrementally with the team it’s not going to be a one go release and everything is done and perfect but you’re doing that in a more cyclic manner is that true that’s exactly it re in fact um it’s not my genius type at all but I think the genius of of uh this entire discussion but the agile journey is it really has forced us to look at things incrementally uh every time we we don’t EX L get it right that’s that’s agile working or or or in my opinion that’s agile at its at its best where now we have a chance to go back and say okay what what what is missing what else do we need to uh provide I will say it’s a it’s a significant change uh and this is one of the cautions really to um to your audience that you will have uh as the saying goes you will have the body rejecting the uh the organ um uh even internal to uh to each or I have individuals that when it doesn’t work the first time the natural reaction is well it didn’t work and therefore we have to go back to the drawing board no we just start we just pick up where we left off that that’s exactly what I want I want incremental improvements on our seat scores uh in and onboarding because it gives us additional opportunities to improve and then we should look for areas where we did not quote unquote get it right and add that to our our our additional releases I just love it I just I love this IDE of of breaking everything down and having slow steady progress and being able to look back and say I remember when it was a quote disaster and look at where we’ve come I think this this demonstrates to people that you can make progress even in even in the most dismal of times um we have a very similar situation going on uh with uh with with uh payroll and and we have some improvements to make but we will do very much the same thing it’ll be incremental we’ll involve our stakeholders we’ll ask their opinions and uh we’ll we’ll eventually get people on board slowly but steadily what a beautiful beautiful explanation on that one there’s one one skill that I think H people need a bit of mindset stretching and massaging and that is the perfectionist there is a perfectionist living in us and I would like to say here for people that there are areas where we need to be perfectionists when there is a law when there is health safety that’s where we need to be perfectionist but if if onboarding is 80% good taking care of 80% of the needs and that remaining 20% would need quite a lot of effort to get right should we use that effort for some other project for something else than finalizing fine-tuning and perfecting something which is good already so this teaches you to do that effort value um the the weighing of should we put the effort to finalize this to Perfection or should we move that capacity somewhere else what are your thoughts on that one you know I would I would agree and I would also give you an alternate uh perspective so I 100% agree I think 80% is often good uh in fact if anyone’s ever done any work around okrs you know that if you hit 85% you’re usually in the green so so it’s evidence that 80 plus perc is is generally good the alternate perspective I would give I like the team to continue pushing past the 80% because you’ve gotten the majority out of the way you’ve you’ve in a sense perfected or mastered 80% of it could we get increment incrementally better 1% at a time and who knows maybe 1% 2% and additional three to four percentage points is all we can is is is really Perfection at the end of the day or it achieves satisfaction from our employees at the end of the day but I like the team to constantly be uh constantly thinking uh to constantly think about it it’s the reason why we selected onboarding for example we will always hire employees those employees will come with different experiences and perspectives technology will change uh our business will certainly change so this really has forced us um to uh to go for those additional percentage points if you will um but I I think it’s a yes and and again an alternate uh perspective but using the time as you said which is so correct using the time and the effort and overall capacity to focus on other things where we can RVE greater value I think by all means is uh is the name of the game I just think it’s a beautiful as a as a leader um in reflecting on on the day we introduced agile up until now to be able to see the strides we’ve made one you have to have a great memory uh which is very powerful for a leader but also two I think it allows you to continue to recognize the teams overall effort so instead of recognizing recognizing only because something was accomplished once you’re constantly recognizing the team because they’re they’re changing the operating system and the overall landscape uh on an incremental basis love it love it love it love it and I U when when HR people learn how to have these prioritization conversations I think what the most important thing is here is that the decision is explicit you just don’t start working on something because it happens or because somebody shouts at you or because you get an email uh but it is explicit decisions that are explicit decisions that are made that these are the things that we’re going to finish within the next quarter here is where we’re going to put our effort and why this is why this is going to be waiting or this is not going to be done and those are very explicit conversations and then you’re quite calm it’s okay not to touch those 10 things lying on the backlog because you’re focusing on the files that you agreed on so it gives you as you said well-being and and that capacity um understanding where that balance is of of working your hours and how much hours there are to actually work so I think it’s very important Riina if if you don’t mind I want to just give you the irony um that uh that Dawn and US recently so we we um we we we find I I often find that um when something is not if we don’t use agile for a particular project and let’s take Performance Management or perhaps um something that’s a lot more commonplace like uh uh short-term incentive uh payouts um file feeds and data and everything else is uh is is transferred it’s usually not done in an agile way you usually follow some sort of project management methodology well the likelihood that we will be on top of every issue uh is a lot less than perhaps if we had done uh we’ embarked on those initiatives using agile because in agile you’re looking at so many different things you know you’re looking at so many different elements you’re thinking about incremental scale and and and small adjustments there’s a lot more dialogue you’re involving the stakeholders it’s so much more robust than perhaps a project management approach and that doesn’t mean that everything is done in agile or everything should be done in an agile way but I just think that the benefits the the complete 360 of benefits that you get the the uh the tapestry of benefits that you you derive by way of agile in in in a lot of our cases our observation they far out way um the uh the the traditional project management approaches I think I think this these are conversations that are going on um in many hatot teams because sometimes there is a misunderstanding of agility that oh it’s just something you do without a plan and you can change direction whenever you want to or it’s just running faster doing the same but running faster or it is a project management methodology and and these are some of the kind of misunderstandings of agility whereas agile is I tend to say that agility and agile is a way of delivering value it is a way it’s a practice and values and ways of working to get something done and it’s a when you said agility isn’t for everything that’s a great segue to our next theme as well is where agility Works where you might not use agility for specifically a lot of HR leaders are asking oh should we you know the big consultancies are are blasting out news that everybody are going into an agile operating model and I go like hold your horses you know don’t just change everything in HR to Agile that doesn’t make any sense you have to contextualize it what are your thoughts around what you know where agility Works in what contexts um so I’ll give you firstly where it doesn’t uh I I don’t believe that uh and and and i’ I’d love to be enlightened otherwise but uh I don’t believe that Performance Management uh necessarily um should be confined to an agile environment again I’d love to be enlightened I think where it has worked um and we saw this recently and it’s it’s this was this was a long time to get here and we added a mix of of various different things um we have an operational side dayr and of course we have a more strategic side and that operational side there’s so many different transactions happening on a daily basis some of which are good and some of which are not performing um up to up to the task and what we said was let’s get everything um on a whiteboard if you will and and and we met as a team to really discuss openly uh as a full team no hierarchy yes I was facilitating a lot of the discussion but we really wanted to discuss all of the processes who is responsible for what how well do we think it’s performing are we performing to the liking of our our employees um and we found that over time the team actually back doored or or in Reverse entered into an agile uh setup um by not only documenting all of the processes and who was responsible but also over time asking key questions like could we do this any better who else should we involve um is there a different way of us uh approaching this and uh the team has done has now um gotten into this HR operational um Cadence uh for the last six to nine months or so um I’m happy to report that I’d challenged them I said we need a way to to um to create a digital dashboard um even though we had a racy uh Matrix setup uh this responsible accountable Etc um Matrix setup I wanted to make it more operational and and and create a dashboard and they iterated around that and and what they came up with it was was absolutely great um and I said to them I said stop here stop here uh gain feedback from the rest of the team there were two individuals that I asked to lead this uh this particular Endeavor um get feedback from the team use this uh for now keep working on it and then just keep uh keep adapting it as time goes on and and it’s worked very well I mean we went from roughly 12 to 15 processes in total half of which I would say were either red or or yellow in terms of overall performance and meeting our expectations to now only two or three being in the red uh we may have one or two I think are in the yellow but but the vast majority now in the green I’ve asked the team to constantly look at this let’s not rest in our Laurels and assume that it’s all completed but use this opportunity use these operational meetings to consciously challenge whether or not we need to make uh incremental changes and it’s worked very well better understanding across the team of EX exactly who’s working on what I think um a lot better connection across HR and this is perhaps one of the underlying benefits that you don’t typically see we we tend to work in silos because we’re expert driven um but now the team really has a vast uh a vast knowledge much more vast knowledge of um of uh what needs to be what needs to be improved and and where each of them can make uh uh can make Val can can add value brilliant what I’m hearing there is is that so this is often what happens with agile tees because they’re flat everybody are working on the same plan everything is transparent they start understanding the complex dependencies between bits and the second they realize there’s a small change everyone in the team understands or can talk about what does this change impact and how does it impact our plans because in HR if we look at our our processes most of them have interdependencies so looking at for example job change we oh my God God we were working um with a ha is Project where we needed to Define job change as a process and job change we thought we were ready with it so we had job change final description as a template then as a document we ended up with job change version 26 final no really final version three something like that so we had like 28 iterations after we thought it was Final because the second we touched recruitment the second we touched on boarding there was a dependency towards job change as well and and when the teams are working around the same table with the same plan and they get one of these changes they’re very quick on saying oh it affects these materials and this process and this connection and this um this approval and whatever so it’s it’s a really quick way of leading product development in a changing environment because of this transparency

the there is a question a lovely question in in the chat um it’s around expanding a on the point about Performance Management if if you’re okay Lis I could share a little bit of my experience with Performance Management I love it so looking at a performance management structure in an organization I wouldn’t say you need agility to actually run it there’s the structure there are a processes there’s the metrics kpis objectives the bonus systems rewards you can’t really uh do it differently every quarter right you have that established system but if you want to develop it that’s when you can do it in a more agile way so for example I’ve been working with a couple of these projects where we’re touching a big performance management structure and sometimes we start with asking how can we chunk this into break that into releases what could we update from that big structure and system that could be separately released for example the feedback part we can start improving we can take a quarter or a half a year and improve um how we are giving giving and getting feedback the upskilling of the people in that the the the system how it how it records feedback Etc we can add peer feedback elements or or team feedback elements into that and just that part can be developed tested experim experimented with uh having co-creating happen co-creation happen there and then when we find out this would be a great way this is a good solution for our organizations to do feedback that’s when we freeze it back into the process and say here is now our way of doing feedback we we release that we help the organization and its people start behaving that way and then we can look at another part of that performance management structure maybe it’s the rewards maybe it’s the going from an annual cycle of setting goals to an okr model so that can be done I think developing the Performance Management in a more agile way what are your thoughts around that I 100% agree I I think you I mean this is why you’re you’re the expert um because that was the exact thought I mean it’s so i’ maybe add a bit more color from an organizational view uh there’s so much exposure during the performance management process uh I mean pop down every individual in the organization has some touch Point uh dare I say some direct involvement in Performance Management that you need to be very clinical uh in when you were you move uh uh in into an agile or into an iterative um setup preferably before um uh you kick off the uh the cycle or what is traditionally the cycle end of year or beginning of the year so I think you have to be very clinical and very careful uh because of the the exposure unlike some of the other processes or or initiatives that we’ve um adapted uh to an agile environment those things are more behind the scenes yes of course the exper experience for the employee um uh is is direct but but the inner workings of it is behind the scenes and it’s usually confined to you know a few individuals so that’s why I would say you have to be very delicate but I 100% agree in the redesign uh in the development I think there’s an opportunity to actually go slow and be very steady but be very clear in the questions as to what you would like to see that perhaps you don’t see on a daily basis to the leadership that is um so that you so that you’re working on the right things because again um of all things outside of maybe payroll um it’s Performance Management touches everyone everyone true so true excellent um the from the operating operational side H operations um we sometimes so with the developmental processes agility works really nicely but once you’ve set up these processes I would say you more need a lean approach to see continuous Improvement of the on going process you don’t need a full agile team redesigning everything so it becomes more a lean approach and lean is very well known within the automotive industry as well so um I think that is almost ingrain in in the way how people think is is that a fair assumption it it is yeah no I I would definitely say so um but I will tell you there’s always the there’s always a Temptation I think we have to um describe it as as as it really is we are not for agile you know in our DNA it’s agile is not in our DNA as I love to tell my team so I think you have to constantly um um check your temperament uh to make sure that you you are are fully prepared uh in a lean way to uh to look at some of your to look at some of your processes I can tell you now I’d be tempted to to leave onboarding alone because we’ve achieved a certain level of um satisfaction amongst our employees but there in lies the the the risk um of of going back to where we started when we uh first moved onboarding or start when we first started with onboarding as a as an agile um adoption there is there is a lot of so now if I’m looking at the maturity of of HR teams that I come come across and start speaking with and have having our our customers I would say about 20 to 25% of HR teams are actively looking into setting up a full agile operating model at least for a significant part of their hot teams removing silos starting to build a product base and experience-based organization looking into how to work with other other functions as well release planning chunking things down into smaller parts then I can see a a big portion maybe another 25% looking into using agility in projects maybe ring fencing aob project and saying this project or this product we’re going to develop in an agile way but then we have a big big um group of HR teams that haven’t even started yet uh there is a fantastic question for about that if you’re an organization that embarks on the agile H Journey would you recommend starting with a single process or a product and respective smmes or would it be better to start with the agile mindset and values across the whole HR department this there isn’t a clear clear right answer but what would you say if you would think about this approach last yeah it’s such a I I’m so tempted to be philosophical but let me just tell you practically what we did uh number one I got certified I I think this is crucial I think someone someone or or a few individuals have to be certified I think it just uh it sends a very clear message that you’re you have a conviction about it um and I think in doing so then you bring in uh a not subject matter expertise but you bring a learned approach to um uh to a agile and some of the methodologies and and that where you have um very spirited debate because that’s exactly what will happen spirited debate as to what it should be or or what it is and what it isn’t number one number two I think it’s very I I think it’s important based on our experience to start with one thing uh I was very tempted to say the entire HR team but we started with one thing and prior to that we actually identified an agile lead someone that I I I needed to dedicate I pulled that person out of their line function and I 100% dedicated them I didn’t have the headcount so one of the things I did I said who who would would would adopt this idea right away well I didn’t think any more Beyond who would adopt it other than who would actually naturally gravitate to it and that’s where I got a group of interns so I created a small team led by an agile lead and a group of four interns and they kicked off our our first cycle of interns we’ve now had four or five different cohorts of uh interns uh We’ve now changed the title to juniior associate Consultants because we believe that’s what they actually do for us not they’re not interns in the traditional sense um but having that dedicated team i s I think sends a very clear message they work in a quote scientific way so a lot of what they do is 100% agile um so I ensure that they’re projects starting with that first one and now several different projects all of their projects are ring fence ring fence as you said but that’s a practical approach uh to what it is I if I had to do it again I would probably repeat it I I I don’t know um if it’s wise now having hindsight on my side if it’s wise to go full uh with the entire H organization it’s such a new thing it’s a mindset change and as I said very whimsically um this is not in our DNA you know this is not taught we we’re not taught to work this way we have to learn this and as adults we know that learning is usually second to the task behind working so I I would be very careful and I would likely repeat uh the same approach lovely thank you very much for your your view on that I I have to say I see both ways I see see different ways of starting depending on the context depending on the goal depending on the maturity and what you want to achieve I have one global company that started with the mindset across everyone and and their view was we’re not even going to talk about agile we’re just wanting people to start thinking about the customer talking about validation asking and co-creating with people we want to start asking what are we actually solving for what’s the problem that we’re solving for so they took this let’s not talk about agile let start creating a culture they started with that and they were very successful because when they first started with the mindset then they had a few people join our kind of certified training who then started projects with them uh but that was one way I usually recommend the way that you said is to have a few handful of ambassadors who really have the Mandate and the expectation to if you go to this trading and get certified we’re expecting you to be able to lead projects to kind of bring this into the organization with the help of then upskilling people with the mindset so um kind of have these first deeply upskilled people and then do a bit of mindset according to what you start with there is one one kind of Pitfall is to train people and then nothing happens I’ve seen I think things fail because of that you know you invested in us we learned this fantastic new way of thinking and working but I can’t use it anywhere why don’t we have any projects where I can use it so that’s my one ask for anybody here who is thinking about this don’t start upskilling people here if you don’t move into action so have something where you really have the mandate to work uh with agile give them the opportunity to get the support they need and then I have that as an experiment in your organization and I really appreciate Lis as you said people who start working this way in teams usually need somebody who’s coaching them through the first Cycles because it’s so new they easily gravitate towards back towards the way they’ve been working before to their silos to working by email instead of having a session where they coordinate live uh with live boards so it’s really easy to navigate back to the traditional way of working so holding hands for a few rounds and they start getting the groove then they can take a step back and see how that team starts doing it themselves and you know my work here as a coach is done they can run this by themselves now they get it and they are usually shining so it’s really

amazing the um we have a few minutes remaining um there is so when we start with agility I had pay I’ll give you an example payroll people sitting in in a class and saying we don’t need a job for anything we’ve got our schedules every month we do the same things we have our processes and we can’t deviate from them why would we need agile and I say I agree for your everyday work you don’t need agility and it’s okay if you’re uh have resistance towards agility for your own work but don’t have resistance because other are other people are starting to work this way and it’s best to understand how they work so if there is a dependency you understand how differently they work from you what are your thoughts about this that some people don’t connect with agility at all yeah I you know I want to be fair because some of my some of my best employees um don’t connect with with agility um but I think as as a leader it’s it’s required of me or it’s incumbent of me to have a certain level of conviction and that’s why I saw it uh agile out I know it has a place it absolutely has a place uh when we rolled out the big test was when we rolled out our our business agility uh certification last year uh we certified 3% of our organization and that’s not a big number but what we’re trying to get to is force multiplication where we can find a small relatively small small cohort of individuals and then extrapolate their expertise across the organ ation over time so again incremental at scale sort of thing um so I I I do I do believe it’s okay uh frankly because I think that is still valuable um and it’s not about pitting one methodology against the other I think it’s trying to derive what’s absolutely best for uh for the customer and I appreciate uh frankly that I have team members that uh have not adopted U this new idea but I’ve seen glimp uh glimpses where where they have and they’ve spoken in an AG way without using you know the language necessarily um but I think I I I go back to what I mentioned about being inclusive I think the I the the idea and the thought around inclusivity um should allow you to uh to look at all types of uh working uh models uh because in every instance there’s one working model that will work the best and drive the most value and sometimes it isn’t always um agile that’s the point I think if you’re a true agilist you’re able to contextualize it you’re able to see not just as as a religion religion I’m going to use everything I’m going to be fully agile sometimes you need a blended approach as well so it is really about understanding deeply what this is about understanding the tools practices the values the principles and then picking up and taking what works to deliver that value you’re there to generate value if agility doesn’t work for that don’t use it or the other hand if agile works for nicely for that then it’s a preferred approach and you it will help you deliver the value as as a as a kind of rounding up everything and kind of summarizing what would you say what would be your elevator speech for why would agile HR uh why would agile be recommended in HR um I think the two primary things I think number one I think there’s no there’s really no better way that I’ve seen in the 20 odd almost 30 years of of of working of of a concept that can really rally an entire team I think this has the power of rallying an entire team couple with that this is the second part no concept that has a has the uniqueness to Rally the customer or to Rally your stakeholders uh and I think you we’re always looking for this Silver Bullet uh to give us just that great team engagement and great stake stakeholder involvement and agile has been exactly that for us amazing thank you very much for sharing that we have a few minutes if there is a question I will pick up one from the chat uh let me see I would love to hear how the business has responded to this agile Journey what has been their response are you are you showing or telling the business that you’re working a new way or don’t they know don’t they know how you’re delivering no they they do they’re quite aware uh so we announced our business agility uh certification we actually canvased the entire organization and asked them explicitly for the individuals that they believe would have uh would have the mindset uh because we didn’t want to start from scratch necessarily um so they they certainly know what we’re doing I would say we have some opportunities to actually uh expand this a bit more uh but at the current Uh current moment it is well it is well uh documented well known that HR um has an agile lead and uh and is very much involved in ad and are they happy to participate when you start validating asking for feedback as well do they know why they are doing that because sometimes like why are you spending our time on your your work well I’ll tell you if any of your audience members or HR folks I know that we have a lot of closet HR people uh in in every aspect of the business so they’re they’re delighted to tell HR how it how it should be done exactly they’ve been trying to do that for 20 years but now we’re finally listening amazing thank you so much much Lars for joining us highly appreciate it love your storyline I wish you all the best with your agile Journey going further and hope that everybody here on the call appreciate that we got um Lars to share their Journey today have a fantastic day everyone and see you in our next meetups thank you so much Lars for being with us bye-bye

Welcome everyone.

My name is Riina Hellstrom
I am the founder of Agile

HR community and a pioneer in Agile HR.

I’ve been working with agility
for 14 years now, both in the management

organizational development scene
and also within HR And i’m

absolutely thrilled today
with the guest, JC

Almira who have we have been
working a bit together with him.

But before we’ll go into introductions,

i’ll just introduce Agile
HR Community to you very quickly.

So we have been around for six years now.

We are a small niche player, a consultancy
and a community who are focusing on

bringing agility into the non i.t
non tech space.

We work a lot with HR people
and because we’ve done a good job

with them, they have asked us to work
with the business side as well.

So we are working with supply
chain sourcing quality

hardware, hardware, industry
and leadership teams quite a lot as well.

Through that work with leadership teams
we have come across with with J.C. and

started working with a couple of
with one transformation.

And I’ve also worked with a few bigger
transformations myself.

So today’s theme is Agile transformations.

If you’re interested in learning
more about Agile in HR look into what

we’re offering,
both as a training, training, offering

and consulting coaching
supporting your organizations.

If you’re keen in a low threshold
learning, look into the book.

Agile HR

It might be a nice find with a lot of good
tips and tricks and tools there.

So, JC you are our R&D executive.

We’re working with your leadership team
a bit on the transformation together.

But before we met,
you’ve been having a long, long history

and long experience in technology
and hardware.

So warmly welcome.

JC would you like to share
a couple of words about your experience

and who you are to everyone?

And then we will start
with our theme, Agile Transformations.

Thank you.

Thank you for sharing that. So
good morning. Good afternoon.

Good evening to all.

So I hope you can hear me well.

My name is Jean Christophe Almira.

Yeah, so I go with
JC I’ve been working in

R&D for 21 years now

and global R&D, local R&D.

I’ve been in assignment in China.

I’ve been in assignment
in in North America.

And for the past few years,
I would say the last three years.

So I’ve been leading an Agile
transformation in R&D

at where basically I met you Riina
and we worked together,

which is the subject of the discussion
today.

So quite extensive R&D experience
in managing it and also transforming it.

So excellent. Thank you for that welcome.

I think it’s very fun to have you,
especially because you’re not from HR

And we’ve been working a lot with HR.

And we want to also for this community.

So there are managers online.

There are executives.

Hopefully here
i see some agile transformation people

who are interested in this
and also people.

So now we’re bringing together quite many

from different places
to listen to what we have to say.

So today’s theme is the transformation
and we’re going

to have go through transformation
from different perspectives.

And of course, one hour is very short,

but we’ll do our best
to capture the best insights and ideas.

And as we are both engineers
and we like to know

what we’re talking about a little bit,

we have JC has prepared
a little bit of visuals as well to help

you have visuals in front of you
When we talk about things.

So quite often when we work with,

when we start with Agile transformation,
there needs to be a reason.

Agility is never the goal.

Agility is just means to get to

certain goals, deliver value in a new way.

So one of the themes that we’re
going to talk about today is why Agile

the why of Agile in R&D specifically so.

JC When when your transformation,
the big one that you have

now been working with
in this kind of role, previous role,

where
did you start discussing about the why?

What how did it come up? Why?

Why do you need Agile? Agile in R&D?

Yeah, well,
it started by the world around us.

I mean, that was the concept
continuously changing.

And those two words,
I think that you can see on the screen,

I mean, they are familiar for everybody,
they are pretty trendy right now.

So the megatrends about sustainability

and now we are talking
about transformation in R&D.

So what sustainability means for R&D
was to make sure that we were

we would develop products
that are for long lasting

they are made of the right material
and they are taking the customer,

the customer value for the lifecycle

of your offering
into consideration while we’re doing that.

The second one

is the one that I would like to focus
a little bit more is the technology.

So this is the technology evolution
that has happened in the past year.

So we have, of course, the digitalization,
the artificial intelligence

it is giving some tools

for the companies to offer much more value

and get away for some companies
of the commoditization

business,
that’s a lot of them have entered.

So if you want to create more value
for your customer, then you need to use,

let’s say, tools
nice and your new tools in the same time

those you can use
to those new technology assets,

if I may say so, to improve your

internally efficiency as well,
then we will discuss that as well.

During this hour.

the the trends with R&D.

These are
these are affecting specific now.

You’ve been working
quite a lot in hardware.

What we see there is hardware, supply
chain sourcing, R&D,

all of that is going through a very big
transformation disruption, if I may.

If you look at industries
such as the automotive industry,

I’ve been working
with a couple of heavy industry,

heavyweight industry,
other kind of companies where they do

machinery or parts to machinery or

deliver towards
agriculture and construction.

They have the exact same trends going on
is that you’re moving your value chain

from selling machinery
to selling value and value add.

For example, one of the companies
I was working with, they are

they have acquired
a digital artificial intelligence machine

learning company just to develop solutions
for their customers

and now starting to sell services
instead of just the hardware.

So there’s a massive disruption

not just in the R&D space
but also the commercial space.

Any comments on that?

Now you’re you’re totally right.

I mean, the if you think about the line
in between the hardware

and software,
the digital it’s basically fading away.

And and if you think about the new product
that are coming from all the industry

now in the market, I mean, it’s
not only hardware, so it is software.

It is data, it is connectivity,
it is service.

So, yes, there there’s been a
there’s been a shift then, at least from

me personally, I’ve seen this shift
starting six or seven years ago.

Yeah, we were much more traditional.

A company that is shifting to what
services using this technology innovation.

So that allows us now
to change to the portfolio extreme risk.

So it’s funny, by the way,
how we can see the different I’m

not sure if you agree, but I been working
with a few different companies,

those who are far with this thinking
already, already

automatically thinking about how to add
technology, analytic sensors,

whatever they need to be able
to use the data on on their hardware.

And then I worked with a company recently,
half a year ago,

where they had trouble
even making the case to the

kind of traditional hardware leaders
that they need to start adding sensors

to their machinery to get real time data
of how they are working, to even be able

to enable, for example, predictive
maintenance or something like that.

You can have you
have you seen this kind of maturity

differences
in these traditional industrial companies?

Well, any comments on that one?

Well attested to

the experience that they have.

I mean, I’ve been working doing this

transformation for a company
that has a lot of data that was available.

Yeah, that was so but so the data
was there and the sensor was there.

So we had a lot of data

that’s in our disposal
to create those services.

And the thinking is that
how do you use this, this data and to,

to create the tools to create value,
how do get organized the data?

So so I think it’s done by that.

So you need to have the sensor,
you need to have the data, and you need to

think about how I can use the data
to create value for my customer.

But it starts by basically
having proper data that you can use.

So if you have the data that you create
but services and it doesn’t help anybody.

So we just need to start to create,
to talk, to clean your own environments.

If I may say store first
and then you still have that, how

to commercialize that, how
to conceptualize that and how to price it

so that it actually makes sense to build
all that.

Let’s a little bit forward.

So the scale of the transformation
that you started

working with your team around,
can you share about that?

Yes, of course. Saw.

So the transformation that that I had to
that’s a pleasure to lead

is for a company
that has been continent 12 of in business

we are talking about six R&D sites
around the world and the size of the team

where the transformation has happened
was 1200 people.

So quite, quite big organization

and quite widely spread from a geographic

point of view, basically from China
to the US and everything in the middle

and this is

so, so having worked with this a bit,
it is a big mindset shift.

If you look at the traditions,
the history, how things have been set.

This is a very well successful company.

They’ve done a really good job.

So how to make the case up?

We need to start evolving,
how to make the case that we need to start

shifting and start doing this
in scale is very exciting.

So talk about the trend,
the transformation objectives.

You clearly needed to have

certain outcomes that you wanted from
from a transformation like this.

So share a little bit around that place.

Why the. Yes, of course.

I mean, you don’t

you don’t do an natural transformation
just for the sake of being agile.

I mean, the words itself,

and especially for me in
the beginning was was it was a buzz word.

So those, for example, about the objective

of the transformation, it’s
I think and it’s it’s in order

when you can see on the screen
basically from left to right.

So everything is stored by the customer.

So you put the customer in the center
of everything, what you are doing,

you want

to create more value for the customer.

Then the employee experience was very,
very important.

So let me dig a little bit in this one.

So employee experience,

in order to increase the engagements
obviously of of the employee.

So so the change that we’ve been doing
and I will come back a little bit later

in the in the deck about
that was was to empower to get it

to get outside of organized and in tribes

and get expert leading experts so

so that the
the organization is is working by itself.

They make decisions by themselves
so they don’t need to create the

very complicated steering environment
that we used

to have everywhere in order to, let’s say,
to grant mission or to go further.

So the people are much more

empowered, enabled,

but they are much more accountable
also of of the outputs.

The third one speed doesn’t go
without the last one, which is efficiency.

So they are interlinked.

If you think about that, of course

when we do the transformation

and you change the way of working,
so you want to develop a bit

more all the way,
like you are developing software

and you change is basically the operating
model, the way of doing prioritization.

For example,
and the way of doing the execution.

It happened.

If you are able to manage very well
your portfolio, so you have a portfolio

that is organized, that is priority
and the backlog that is prioritized.

So that’s why I’m saying
that the efficiency is impacting the speed

in which you you are executing
what has been prioritized.

And this number that you can see
on the top of the speed, 30 to 50%, those

where the numbers that were given to us,
let’s see us as average

of the companies
that are doing transformation.

And I have to say that
from my own experience,

the 50% is probably a stretch
or it depends

what’s
what kind of product you are developing.

But 50% is possible. Definitely.

I’m when
I’m looking at this, there’s one thing

that we tried to teach people
who want to move towards

steering things in a more agile way,
more frequent and more quarterly manner.

And it’s that
stop starting, start finishing.

And one of the things that stood up for me
in this slide

is the max two projects per engineer.

So you’re not dispersing your time
on ten different things,

but you’re focusing the capacity
and not wasting time on that context.

Switching Could you summarize this
to the couple of sentences?

What’s this all about?

Yes. So basically we used to work in a
in an annual planning,

like we’re doing this
kind of annual budgeting,

which is a whole new way of working
and executing the project, let’s say,

in the waterfall,
in the whole waterfall domain.

So we shifted towards
just to be closer to the customer

and having much more check
with the business lines.

So to review the priority
on the quarterly basis.

Okay, So on a corporate basis,
you review your portfolio

and your priority
and what what you’re doing every quarter

we do

we do
capacity based planning for the quarter.

So you take the priority and just like,
okay, project number one, you check

what kind of resource and competencies
you need to to get to work on the project.

And then you,

you do the team up of this.

So you put the resource

based on the competence
and you start the project like this.

And of course by doing that,
that means that if you have that priority

you can probably start
only the first three one,

which doesn’t mean that
you can finish them during the quarter,

but at least you’ll become much
more disciplined in putting the red line.

So okay, here
we have used all our capacity.

Those items that are below

we rated, we’ll come back to them
in the next quarter.

So instead of spreading the resource
on more project and saying

yes to everything and delaying everything,

we do less but faster.

And then of course then you execute faster
and the cycle time

is reduced for a specific project
or a specific program.

But of course you
you have to learn to say no

or talk to you later.

Yes, this is what I’m kind of

very often referring to.

It’s tough for leaders.

This is tough to start
steering like this for leaders because

it’s your responsibility
to make priorities.

It’s your responsibility to delay things
or say no to things.

You’re not just starting everything
and hope or pray that will be done

or letting people prioritize
in their own teams with their time.

They’ve got 100% of their capacity.

If you go if you add 150%
capacity to them, they will prioritize.

They can’t do it all.

So I really want to highlight this for
for the listeners.

This is where where Agile really makes

the difference for leadership teams
is that they start doing this

with a discipline. Excellent.

Let’s move forward to talking about
the road, the kind of transformation.

What does it look like there?

So first of all, for those
who are listening, this is not a recipe.

There is never a recipe for
how to do agile transformations.

It’s all contextual.

You have to do your homework.

You have to have people who help you
set up your roadmap.

We’re hearing here one type of a roadmap.

So please, Traci, would you share what
what did your transformation look like?

What happened?

Yes. Well, I think the first thing to say,
if you look at the

the bottom line with this scale,
it does take time.

So it does take time from the moment you

you think about doing a transformation
and the transformation is happening.

So you need to have a lot of patience
and as I was telling before,

that Agile was was for me back in 2019,
that kind of buzz word.

And yes, I knew that Agile was used
for software development,

but I was thinking, okay,
but we are developing hardware

that needs to be tested,
that need to be certified.

How I can use the same methodology
for for doing that.

So I think the first think is, okay,
let’s, let’s try those agile methodology

to see if it work, if it’s applicable

for the kind of work that we were doing
more in the hardware R&D.

And this is what we started in 2019

and we selected a few projects

for new

innovation and that where from lifecycle
management, if we concluded that way

that had the multi geography

participation needed
so that we could really test

this, this global deployment of the Agile,
So having the team working together

and, and what we have discovered

because when you do that, you break silos,

you create cross-functional team

and much more frequent communication.

I mean every day stand by your stand up.

So we started to have meeting roaming

the different R&D units, you know where
there was no table people were standing,

you had Kanban board and people
were moving Post-its everywhere.

So, so this is the way that we started
in 2019

and we, we continue
for basically a couple of years

and we extended the principle, but
I would say very fast where we could see

that for both new product implementation,
but as well product optimization

lifecycle management as we call it,
we could see two things.

That’s when people could concentrate
and we let the people concentrate

without steering, letting them
taking decision for a project.

Quick executes the project much faster.

So even in the beginning
we could see those 40% improvement.

But I think there was one thing
that was very good and I think

equally important
than the speed of the throughput,

it was to see
the engagement of the people.

So you could see that the people

that were working in this way of working,
they were much more engaged.

So they were they were really like,

you know, they were accountable,
of course, of the outputs,

but they appreciated also the autonomy
that they had in making the decision,

you know, because, I mean,
I was one of those stakeholder

that basically was playing and steering
group me to enjoy your sales are

having to step up
said thumbs up, thumbs down, you know,

without having any value to the process
because a decision was already made.

So when you cut this kind of bottleneck

from the process, then then
then you get much better results.

And now we are in 2021.

One thing worth mentioning,
probably that while we were doing

all of those those piloting
or those testing to validate,

let’s say, to the operating model

to see if it would work,
we started as well the blueprint design,

because I mean, you needed to change
to the way we needed to change

the way that we had organized

and also in the way in the
what we are doing and also in the

how we were doing, how we come back
to that in the next the next slide.

But after we have done those 5 minutes

basically and design

the model in the
I think it was in the end of 2022,

we basically did the shift off
of the organization.

So you remember the size of the
organization that we are talking about.

So I do we are talking about 1200 people.

And if I recall correctly, the numbers

80% of the people

basically had their role changed,
eight zero,

which is which is massive.

Then we created, of course, some new role.

So when you are moving towards
this new type of organization,

suddenly you have Agile
Coach appearing Scrum Master

product owner execution lead.

So those are kind of new role
that one has to to create.

And also the

the know

how I will

come back later in the lesson learned
because I realize that we spent more time

but I think what I wanted to say
about this, from the moment

when you do the switch,
you have to do the switch in one go.

I mean, this is this is something
that you cannot live with.

We have to model to do it in parallel.

Excellent.

So so let me analyze this
from kind of a bit of a distance now,

which is which
is great to have a distance.

First of all, what I’m

learning from here and what I recommend
very much is try to figure out

what kind of model works for
you and try to do that in small scale,

but still small scale, but still something
which really matters.

Don’t give, don’t start with projects
that don’t matter.

Something where you need speed.

We need collaboration,
where customer centricity, customer value

is very important.

Start
at those places, gets people together.

And I know that you upskilled
these people on a good enough level

so they could actually deliver
in this way.

It wasn’t.

So they were given support.

They were given upskilling.

So you invested
well in the first experiments.

Then when you started scaling, you
chose to do it as a one big bang change.

I think it took a couple of up
to how a quarter half year

to actually go into this model
and it’s never pain free.

Of course,
there is a lot of a lot of things

firefighting, a lot of things
that you also might get a bit wrong.

You need to tweak and shift that.

But that’s what transformations are about.

I would

like to, if I if you may challenge
you on that.

So companies are okay
not to do things in a big bang.

Some companies can start
this kind of transformation

saying we’re going to start
with this value stream first.

For example, we’re going to look
at this type of product family

or where this type of a region or whatever
and start there and then scale.

You chose the method.

We’re going to do this
across 1200 people in one go.

That was very bold of you.

Is there something that
what what was the pros and cons

with this kind of a change?

Okay.

Well, you can imagine that
when you’re doing that kind of

scale change, I mean,
you need to be sure of what you are doing.

And when I say you,
it’s not the me that had to be.

So I think you need to have

of course you need to have the high level
to execute the sponsorship.

But I think in our case,
I have to say that there was a lot of,

I would
say thrust of the an on the unknown,

because if you look at those dates
where that was happening

on the date where we made the switch.

So we basically were testing
during the COVID and they did

the design and finalize the design
and changed the organization during

the logistic issue, the geopolitical
situation, the semiconductor crisis, etc..

So and as you said, that was a company
that was doing pretty well.

So I mean,
there was a big risk of messing up

basically everything and R&D
being the heart of of of what

the company is doing and basically
delivering, let’s say, to the customers.

So that was I think, a a big fate,

a leap of faith, if you want to call it
that way, from from the executive on.

Yes, it takes
time to ramp up to get used to it.

But I think that we were able to to to
to to roll it out in the right way.

And remember, also, one thing,
this was not an exaggerated

when you’re doing that kind of shift,
you are changing the way you are working,

you are changing the way
you are working with the business line,

you are changing the way you are working
with the manufacturing and the sourcing.

So the people that are impacting by such

a transformation, it’s
not only you in the middle as R&D.

You are taking your friends
from the business and from the supply line

or so and you need to train them
is this new way of working.

So there is a big percentage of
of the whole corporate

that you take along as well.

That’s what I think is the most exciting
with this transformation

as myself
is that you kind of start from a certain

problems or needs or tensions.

I call them tensions First
start with teams and maybe between teams

and managers and managers and managers.

Then it moves to a portfolio level
of prioritization

and leadership and executives.

Then it moves
beyond your own unit towards

the dependency units or dependencies
within that value chain.

So it’s very interesting what’s going on.

We start with these transformations.

Excellent. Let’s move forward.

So this one talks
about how it really changed from

to share a little bit of your thoughts
around this.

Yeah, so I try to do illustrated
in a very simple way.

So on the left side was previously on the
right side is after the transformation.

So the way to read the graph on the left
side was that the site would be

released sides so in order in the unit
in a specific country.

So the already units
were pretty independent.

We have certain level of competence

and let’s say that we’re managing their,
their own product.

So basically one can say
that we would reinvent

the wheel every time that we would
deliver, develop the product.

So you do the same work several time.

So when we did the shift,

let’s say changing towards this,
this new operating model of course,

I mean, one of the things that

we’ve done at first was was to harmonize
and simplify the offering.

So because you cannot have global team,

global product team
if you don’t have global products.

So there is there is
there is a prerequisite that you need

to have the part of your offering
that is kind of that kind of global

and this is what is shown on on the over
on the other side.

So the product is much more important,
much more global,

and the competence is basically the same.

But the difference with the left diagrams
is that the competence on the right

are they could be people
from all the R&D unit, just depending

on your competence profile, whereas before
the competence were more unit based.

So this is the people I have
in my R&D unit.

I can use those people
well in the transform,

let’s say model, you can have people,

people from

China working for a product
in North America, for example,

and therefore the importance of the site
is becoming smaller.

It doesn’t mean that it’s really become
smaller what the site is doing, but that’s

there is less focus on a specific R&D
and more focused on global product.

That’s what it means.

I’m sorry. I’m

sorry. Go ahead then.

I’ll go go.

So that’s okay.

Now, I’ve seen this trend
in a couple of other industries as well

where where they’re speaking about
they need to look at the architecture

of the product portfolio
before they really can move

the organization in moving and working
in a new way, because they need to look

at, as I said, harmonization,
simplifying the product portfolio.

You’re looking at modularization,
so how interfaces are working together

so that for example,
Tesla is is looking at how they can

they are changing something
in the production several times a week.

So there’s kind of versions of the car
coming out from production

where they have parallel ways
of improving that old reproduction.

So they are really, really innovating and
rethinking about how to set up a product.

It’s very exciting
and very intriguing what’s going on there?

excellent.

Let’s move forward
because we’ve got so much to talk about.

So before the before the transformation,
a typical day for an engineer.

This is what it looks like.

Yes. So,
so so basically what I was saying.

So you had a large, large steering
group meeting that were making decisions.

It was difficult to take the time
to agreed on the time.

And then the project was very often,
depending on the availability of the

of the stakeholder,
if I many say so, for for nothing.

The prioritization was not done
in a global level, thanks to,

let’s say, the global portfolio,
but that was done in a regional level.

But I was okay in that sense
because the product,

we’re not treated as global
and that was okay.

And then working on global product,
it means that the resource that

we’re in a physical location,
we’re focusing on, on this location

and the last one on the right.

Yes, of course.

I mean, people

from the other side of the world
did not know what,

for example,

a Chinese colleague didn’t know what the
North American College were working on.

So there was no visibility whatsoever,

let’s say.

And that was before the transformation
like this.

And if we go to the next slide
that is showing the

typical day now.

So we have global team
working on global project,

the way we are doing the planning.

So this quarterly planning that I was
I was talking before.

So we don’t do quarterly planning
per region or geography.

It’s those are 2 to 3 days,

quarterly planning days that are opening

with with all the teams participating.

So this is,
this is massive. Everybody together.

And the first

point was about the empowerment.

So the leaders, the leaders sorry,

the experts are making decisions
for experts.

So when they think that they are ready,
they just continue to do their work.

And if they are not,
then basically they know when to stop.

So they were making the decision
themselves autonomously.

And if a leader like myself

would need to know more about
about a specific program

on a specific project,
you have demos that are available

and you just have them in your calendar
and you pick up the product or the program

that’s that brings interest to you.

You will go to see the demo and you are

you’re
basically you get up today to the status

and there is those demo meeting
where you can ask a question,

but there is not this kind of,
okay, I need to know about this program.

Please do a presentation for me or for
this audience or is not working like this.

So it was the other way around
that the leader had to go

towards the people,
the engineer, if they want to know more.

And the last one.

Yes, yes.

I’m power team autonomy.

So so gets a little bit with the
with the third one

this is I love these two slides
when you speak about them.

This tells me as an organizational
development person, as a leadership

development person, as a person
who works a lot with leadership teams,

this shifts
the leadership mindset around fully.

This is a full three, 60, 180 degrees

change in how you view leadership.

As in I’m sitting in a steering group
and you come here and make

make a case for me to do either thumbs up
or thumbs down for whatever you are

proposing is to, hey, the experts know

best about this work as long as they have
the constraints, the goals,

what we’re doing, let them do their work,
let them make the decisions.

If there are things that
they need to escalate, they probably will.

And there are people
who have the responsibility then to help.

But this is a massive
shift in leadership skills.

And if you think that it’s

it’s not easy
for the people that need to change

role to get used to the new way
of working, it’s equally difficult

for the leaders to have,
let’s say, to have this shift.

So, I mean, especially for,

you know, when you working,
when you are a leader, working

in the control and comment kind of style,
when you need to basically let it go

and just remove the roadblocks
and create a long term vision.

And,
you know, it’s kind of it hits you like

you want to jump on the project
like before.

So but you need to refrain yourself.

So there is also a lot of learning

from this new ways of working for
for the leaders, as you said.

I mean, that’s it’s a totally different
leadership style that need to

are used.

Absolutely excellent.

So so if we think about
the transformation, what it looks like

we talked about that
there is a certain element

of experimenting, trying a small scale
and see what what works.

Then to start looking at
how do we scale and what order,

how quickly is it a big bang?

Is it gradually?

How do we upskill not just our own people
but also the dependency teams?

If I may call that them?

If you are in a certain value chain,
there are dependencies.

They have to know not how you work.

So for example, in another client

I was speaking about their supply chain
and their quality.

Their quality said We don’t work
in quarterly, quarterly cycles.

We have our quality processes
that work certain parts

and we have a certain
certification process.

But they really needed to understand

how the whole at product
people are starting to work.

So they could then embed quality

in the agile cycle, if that makes sense.

So it’s really important
with that end to end thinking as well.

Now we spoke about how how this behavior
shifts.

And it’s not just for

the people who are working in these teams,
but also for the leaders.

I just love these changes because they are
so holistic and it is very exciting.

Here are some of the overarching
commonalities.

If you want to look
at the operating models around

Agile transformations and Agile units.

Can you talk about this a bit?

Sure.

I think the first bullet point,
the first part on the topic,

we already discussed about that.

So we were organizing
this quarterly planning cycle.

So your review of the portfolio,
your review, the the priority backlog

and you do once a quarter to capacity
based allocation

and when there is no resource,
you draw the line.

Probably something too hard on this one.

You know, the world is not perfect,
then you cannot plan everything.

So you need to to preserve that little bit
of your allocation

of your capacity for unplanned activity.

Obviously otherwise,
because it happened in all the company,

that you have some urgent things
to unfold on your table.

You need to have also in this way
of working the capacity

to handle those projects and the buffer
capacity that we spoke about.

About the buffer capacity, Yes.

So and then the feedback on that also.

So you deliver more, so
you do a little bit more as a small step.

So instead of going with, for example,
a big development, you do a lot of it.

As much as it’s and thanks to this
digital, let’s say developing service,

we can do much

more faster a minimum viable product
that can be tested.

Let’s say we can test the value to
the customer and then you test the value,

you come back with the feedback
and then you do a iteration

and you do a smaller, smaller batch

and you need to be able to measure.

And we put in place this, okay,
our objective and key results.

And then I think those okay
after are very useful because you could

you basically link the okay to you

your mentioning the value stream
before to the corporate strategy.

So you can have basically
the same objective but different results,

but you can really map what you are doing
to the bigger picture of the company

and the way that, let’s say those tribes

are showing
their progress off to the demos.

And then you have this
this last point about driving improvement.

It’s this is a constantly learning
organization.

So this is a very

it’s a

safe learning, So you do a retrospective,
you do experiments, you do Kaizen

and you have created,
I think, a very flexible organization.

You were mentioning this example of this,

that before,
I mean, you can change the whole thing.

I mean, you can create tribe overnight
and put the resource.

And that’s what we did actually.

We had a very big problem
and we were an enabler.

Basically all the team was able
to basically put up a people of right

competence overnight,
working on it for two weeks.

And we heard there was a problem
only when the problem had been fixed.

And the reason why we heard that it was
because it was during the Finnish

summer already, which are as you know,
there is no one working.

But people managed to organize themselves,
fix the problem

and go back to the normal way
of working after.

So that was just
so brilliant, the flexibility

that that it could bring.

And what a story.

What a story.

And this is an excellent story
about not having

you can’t go to anybody else
to make decisions.

You just get together

with smart people and fix
what can be fixed and be innovative.

Take chances. That’s amazing.

I really will not.

Go ahead.

We were not aware of it all,
but that point,

it went so fast
that the time we got to where it was.

How good is that? How good is that?

You can be on your summer holiday
and big problems will get fixed.

The last bit, though,
driving improvements are really what

this is in the center of being agile
is to understand there is no perfect.

We need to improve.

We can continue to improve.

We can find places where we can add
change, iterate, pivot, experiment

I remember
we’re working with this transformation.

I was walking around in the offices
as well where there was a demo ongoing

and it was a hardware demo,
but they had no hardware there.

They had built something out of cardboard
boxes and a pallet and a pallet,

and they had maintenance people
in, they had some other people in,

and they were talking about
the different gadgets that were cardboard

boxes where they would be on a pallet.

And that was the kind of quick, cheap
and low fidelity,

just actually professional

speaking together about the product
before it even was built.

This is really cool
to see this happening a real time.

Excellent.

So leadership, we
all just started talking about that a bit.

So massive

in influence in how first of all,

how you can lead a change and start

helping people

work this way, but also with the leaders
themselves start changing behavior

and start behaving in another way, start
influencing people.

You said setting vision, setting goals,
aligning, removing roadblocks.

Talk about this a little bit least. I see.

Yes. I mean,
I think this the first bullet point

being a servant leader,
I think that that’s that’s what it means.

So so basically.

So you have to step away
from from the daily operation

and see the big picture
and basically removing the block,

the roadblocks for the people.

So roadblocks
being a resource issue, a money issue

so that and then you take care of that,
all that kind of,

let’s say, leadership problem
without basically

putting the burden on the team so the team
can concentrate in doing the work.

I think that was
one very good thing about the about this

this shift of the word from the leaders
is that we did

took a step backwards,
but I would say elevated.

I would say not backward,
where you can see the big picture

and you can think more
what a leader should think about.

So basically the big picture,
the strategy thinking,

so not being buried in operation
all the time, but you have time to think

to set up then off start to work on these
so-called that I was mentioning.

You set up the direction and also
take care of the people competence.

So we were organizing competencies
domain all the way to software,

let’s say system engineer, bank.

And you take care.

You make sure that that the competence
for the specific

competence
domain are developed in the right level.

So you develop the skills of the people.

This one is not very easy.

No, I am I’m remembering the first point.

Show the direction
in how the leadership team

also we started working in a cadence.

We brought in a Kanban board
to lead the change.

So you started leading walking the talk
and realizing how difficult it is

when everything needs to be done,
but you need to prioritize

having big chunks of work.

Also regarding change management,
communication or change and all that.

So the product side
was handled on another backlog,

but the change was handled
on the leadership team’s backlog

and that brought together that
that also kind of connected you to see

we are leading this together.

There’s no consultants
leading this, there’s nobody doing this.

We need to be able to lead this.

Could you comment on that?

I was that was super important.

I mean, when it’s walking the talk,
so when there is an operating model

that there has been change
that can be used, isolating

the way you are leading,
let’s say, during the that case.

So of course it was our duty to to work
like like the team was we’re working on.

We did that review arena.

So we had once a quarter
this review on we’re doing the plan

and working the same way
that a tribe would be working.

So we were this leadership
tribe that put the actions

and we had also our backlog
to be executed.

It it was it was good.

It was good as well to realize to have
head is on a work

about what we are asking to
the people can be used as well

in the leadership team
and we are organizing the same way.

So it’s it’s very important.

It’s working the talks or not
just telling the people

how they should work, but
working as they are working themselves.

It was super important

and also to get organized
because as you said,

there was a lot of things to be done.

So I think that’s that’s
gives you as a leader,

that gives you the credibility to say
we’re trying this ourselves as well.

We are also struggling
with these kind of things.

We have problems of prioritizing.

Sometimes we’ve got conflicting priorities
and we need to sort things out.

We had some obstacles or blockers as well.

So bringing that, we are in the same boat

and I really, really want to kind of
highlight how important that is.

And you did a great job with that
with your leadership team.

So just aware of time.

We are leading towards
the learned lessons

and here comes the best
tips and lessons from transformations.

Alla JC Almira. So let’s start with these.

Yes, there was a lot of lessons.

So this is

this is the best stuff of the list
and it is the one that struck me the most.

So I think the first one is pretty clear.

So despite the fact that we have this,
everything goes together

now, these digital and physical
and digital, they were still remained

differentiated between the hardware
and so and the software development.

So of course you can try to automate
and synchronize as much as you can,

which you should do,
but it doesn’t mean that you can develop

hardware in the same speed of software
because what you have to do will remain

the same thing
that you used to have before,

but you can improve the way you are doing
it, which is what we did.

The second one was

synchronize different cycle time.

So yes,

thinking that one size fits all,
it doesn’t work, I think.

And you realize that
when you start working on the on the

on the on on that that kind of operation.

So again, it’s linked to the first one.

So So there is still going
to be different.

For example, really cycle
you can do really software every weeks,

every couple of weeks but
it’s not a problem if you have a hardware

release every, every quarter, for example.

Yes, this is I just made kind of touchable

in that order because this is not just in
hardware and software.

I can see this in many other companies
where you’ve got, for example, banks,

where they’ve got certain
compliance routines that run

every quarter, every month.

They cannot go into weekly routines.

It just doesn’t happen.

But the thing is
that you need to find the touchpoints

between the different cycles
so that they work.

And when I work with these kind
of tensions in organizations,

the more traditional
or the slower part is slower

cycle time units often have difficulties
in understanding

what on earth is going on in those agile
parts of the organization.

And then the other side, the agile
side of the organization goes like,

but they’re so slow and kind of pointing
fingers at the more traditional,

more slow cycle time organization parts.

But this isn’t helpful.

Where two sides are kind of pointing
fingers is we need to understand

why different units
or different parts of this value chain

is working in a different cycle time

and figure out what the touchpoints are
so we can make the best out of it.

Neither is right,
neither is there is no right and wrong.

There is no new and old.

It’s just different needs and
we need to find the synchronized cycles.

Just wanted to mention that.

Go ahead. Sorry about not jumping in here.

No, no. Very important point. Thank you.

But number three,
I already discussed about this one.

So this is a one product development
change have company wide implication.

I would say that personally, this is
this is a point that we discover

going, moving,
moving on towards, let’s say, towards the.

So we didn’t realize in the beginning
that we needed that

it was not only the change in R&D,
but of course more we were designing,

the more data and more we understood
that it was impacting over people.

I know but function.
So it became this is a very big

number for organize, for autonomy. So.

So this one means that it’s
not because you are organizing tribe

in product, Tribe for example, that
there is not interaction between tribe

and this is this is super important.

But during the especially those those
those those quarterly

planning day
the tribes are discussing with each other

because you always have interdependency
and one tribe

can be depending on the other one.

So they need to work together, but then
they need to do that in a notable way.

Number five, I think we

we discussed about that,
so I probably will skip this one.

Number six, the adoption
always done transformation mindset.

So for example, the example I was
I was saying before, you don’t

you learn, you do a retrospect
if you are just and I would say that

transformation

is done long live the transformation.

I think that would be the right,
the right word.

So you never stop transforming.

So so there is another hand
to the transformation.

You are constantly.

It’s a flexible organization
that needs to have more,

but you are much more flexible and you can
do the change in a much faster way.

Number seven is I was stating
that do not underestimate,

underestimate, sorry,
the upfront prepare Asian.

I mean there is some enablers
that need to be in place.

So for example, in order to be efficient,
you need to have a portfolio tool.

You need to have the backlog tool.

And when I said you need to have
you need to make sure

that all your team use the same backlog,
the same portfolio.

So so so there is some investments
that are needed in order to

to change the model.

So you cannot change
if you don’t have that in place.

So therefore, you need to
have, of course, to know that

you need

to have some tools to be invested in
before you’re going to starting a project.

And you need to move the backlog
from one to the other.

For example, it requires time.

So it’s not it’s not happening by itself.

So this is one one thing,
which is I’m kind of on the fence here.

Sometimes I feel like,
okay, can we just from the start agree

that everybody uses the same tool
for backlog management because later on

it’s much easier to build a portfolio
level view and visibility into that.

The the agile part of me says no, let’s,

let’s give teams the freedom to use
whatever tool brings value to them.

But then when we come to the point
in a transformation where we start seeing

scaling and wanting to do
portfolio prioritization a higher level,

it’s a mess going from 15 different ways

of using backlogs to one tool.

So it’s a massive effort to do that.

So I’m on the fence there,
but interesting discussion.

Thank what about eight?

Number eight and number eight, of course,
be prepared for the cultural differences,

especially in your transformation,
is impacting different geography.

I mean, let’s an example of empowerment.

You let the team do side by themselves.

I mean, you

can imagine
that there are some regions of the world

that are more inclined to they
they keep them.

They execute things like, for example,

Finland or America or Italy,
there is no problem.

But then then when you go to India
or China, for example,

all this disempowerment
and it can be a little bit I would say

it’s not stop, but slow, slow down
because people feel

not comfortable and the accountability
that is given to them.

So you always have the leader
that need to take the decision.

So if I take the decision myself,
what does it mean?

What does it mean
if I am accountable of the output?

So you need to take that
into consideration as well.

I mean, the design that’s super important
and this is one of the things

that you don’t realize you
you are deploying the mode

that obviously this is
this is quite interesting in my opinion.

It has to do with the long lived culture
because some of the culture

are more social and not that individual.

It is more around
the group, it is more around

the hierarchies that have been there
for for hundreds of years.

So this is actually challenging
many cultures to rethink how we work.

And we might need small tweaks here
and there to, make it work

in these cultures where there is a high
fiber hierarchy from from the beginning.

Yeah, very, very important. Excellent.

Thank you. Last one.

And the last point
I want to discuss about data.

At least for us,

it was easier to make the switch overnight
than.

Than working in a hybrid model
because working in a neighboring model

that would have been confusing, especially
for the people, for the other functions.

So why? Why? I’m working
still the whole way.

What you saw
people are working in this other way

and then you might be the same person
working on two project

which two different operating model
and that

that’s not good.

So you need to be bold
when you are convinced that it would work.

Okay, I personally recommend to do
the switch.

Let’s say in one shot.

I absolutely adore that last one.

One of the teams that I were working with
said the same thing.

At some point they realized
they’ve got double steering going on,

they got double decision
making, double steering,

and they needed
to kind of rip the Band-Aid off

and just say, we’re going to stop
with these kind of the waterfall

steering groups
and just go into the agile steering.

I am absolutely so glad
we had this conversation.

I hope that the people in line have
learned a lot from this exciting story.

There are very few transformations
that are done on this scale,

which are global across different units
and across different cultures,

and there is a lot to learn
from this one’s

journey of yourself as a leader.

Would you
would you dare to say a couple of things

that you have seen change in yourself
as a leader as a result of this change?

Is there something
that you can mention here

of course.

I mean, it’s changed.

I have changed as a leader,
and I’d say I needed

to be to adapt myself
to this changing leadership style.

And I would say that it’s hard
to get your hands off when you work almost

20 years in one away, deep in operation,
that it’s very hard to to let it go.

But when you let it

go, you have time to focus on
other things, such as the bigger picture.

And I think this is in the end,
what the leader need to do

to see the bigger picture,

to work on the strategy
to help the over leaders work arounds.

And and I think it was

it was not an easy shift,

but that’s shift that that is very
that brings a lot of joy

let’s say I would say this is super good

and anyway the people

they are the one that do the thing now.

They are the experts.

So they don’t need, again,
the leaders to be always whispering,

you know, like briefing behind their ears
all the time.

So they are much more accountable.

People wants to take it
so they are able to take it. So.

So this is

but the change behavior of the leader

is not to be underestimated because it

when it hits you, it

may take a while to get your story.

But I think now

I’ve been working lots of months now
or actually

couple of years
with with with this new leadership style.

And this is good
because we can think a little bit bigger.

We can think about what leader
need to think.

So a warm, warm
thank you, Jessie, for being here with us.

I am absolutely honored
to have been working with you around this.

And thank you,
everyone who have joined us for this hour.

If you’re interested
in having some support for these kind

of transformations,
we are happy also to be supporting.

Even if our name is Agile

HR community would do a lot of work
with leadership

teams, with transformations
on the business side as well.

Thank you so much,
JC and everyone have a fantastic spring.

Our next meetup is going to be around
the North American

HR leader of Mercedes-Benz
talking about what it looks like from a

HR perspective in the automotive industry
moving towards Agile,

and they have also taken in an Agile
experience and agile operating model.

See you all there
having a fantastic evening, day or night.

Thank you everyone.

Thank you.

Bye bye.

we are focusing on people operations and HR services and uh specifically about agile and lean within that what are the differences between agile and lean and giving you examples of both they kind of go a bit hand in hand because lean principles are in the background of agile so let’s start digging in before we do that though let’s have a short introduction so I’ll just use two words to introduce myself my name is Riina hellstrom I am the founder of Agile HR Community and a HR leader that started looking into agile in 2010 so 13 years ago and when I started looking into agility I realized that that’s going to change how organizations are wrong that was the time when it was only used in software but I realized that wow this is going to change because the world is getting so complex and the changes are so frequent and so quick that organizations can’t keep up with the annual planning with the traditional organization where we have manager after manager after manager very many layers it’s too slow so they need to figure out other ways of working which meant that agility is going to come as an operating model to different places in the organization that left me uh in a place where I needed to stop my work jump off the corporate ladder and start working with agility and bringing that in so that’s that’s the path I am I am on and I’m super thrilled super honored to have agile nature Community to help companies now and have amazing colleagues such as Monica Murer who is our agile HR lead trainer and also people operations leader so in our organization we have consultants and trainers who also are HR or change strategy professionals so Monica would you would you be kind to welcome first of all lovely to have you here I’m very happy to have this session for the EU and APAC time zone with you would you be so kind to introduce your background and yourself so we know who we’re what kind of experience we’re we’re kind of getting to hear from definitely thank you Arena and good morning everyone wherever you are I see lots of uh cool places where you are dialing in so we are very honored to have you to have you here um so my name is Monica murer as Riina mentioned uh I have um started learning the agile HR practitioner trainer with Riina’s team a little under two years ago trying to kind of you know like um deepen my knowledge and and kind of you know like learn from the best basically and I got very much attracted by this concept of the fact that basically the people that are delivering trainings and that are working on all the Consulting materials um they are not 100 Consultants but they come from what I call kind of you know like the real world so they are still in touch with all of the operational and stakeholder engagement and everything else um so that’s something you know like that’s quite unique and that’s got me attracted to uh to become part of Arena’s team as well um in my kind of day-to-day job uh currently I work for Uber and I lead to the people operations team for EMEA and APAC um and we pretty much you know like use agile and lean intertwined in a lot of ways across all of the HR um functions um and previously I have uh quite a lengthy experience working for more traditional companies manufacturing environment I’ve been working for Siemens and Honeywell for a long time not only in HR but also previously in procurement in it so I’m kind of you know like this product of um yeah support functions and uh understanding you know like the connection between all of the processes and I feel you know kind of that’s a little bit my superpower that I can not only speak HR language but also other functions language uh and a little bit technical as well so so that kind of facilitates um my life on a day-to-day basis and um yeah allows me to contribute differently to to the success of of our teams um otherwise you know like um I have started um let’s say my journey with lean and Six Sigma from the yeah let’s say manufacturing environment very traditional uh way of looking at a Six Sigma very process oriented then you know like moved into lean uh went through the certifications and all of these statistics that go behind it uh in a lot of these things um with a wish to understand it better and to be able to apply it within my day-to-day job um and um yeah recently I think you know like I realized that actually this combination of lean and agile is yeah kind of tackling the problems that we need to solve from two very important angles one kind of you know like the human centered way and the other one the process side uh so yeah that’s um that’s how I got to do what I’m doing and I’m quite excited about it excellent thank you for for your background story what I think is really important here when when we’re speaking with Monica is to understand she has the you’ve been you’ve been working with process development all across the organization not just in HR and I think that brings you another perspective into you’ve been the either the customer the user or the victim of HR Services right if you can use these words so that’s pretty much right yeah so I could I could have this picture you know like I think when I moved into HR um yeah a little over 10 years ago and I I can’t say I found my home right because I feel like we have uh I can have a lot more impacts towards people’s lives in the way we shape the processes in a way we kind of you know like um yeah make like lives easier uh in most of the cases for for our users um I think you know like it was a big uh yeah big change mindset change saying okay now I moved from being a customer or a user of the services and a partner into actually you know like kind of understanding how it works and you know like why things are done in a certain age so that’s that’s quite uh quite interesting uh it’s help it has helped me many times there were also times uh yeah when probably you know like I had to explain it a little bit you know like um where I’m coming from and and the way of yeah changing the video perspective well fantastic this kit takes us into the first conversation area um thinking about what are the trends in HR service now so a little bit of background I think that HR Services is a place where who many people work in and they don’t realize how big of a difference how big of an impact their services have throughout the whole organization some people come I think might not respect and and have that acknowledgment of that work enough um thinking that they’re they’re just running operations but every time you do a transactional operation you’re helping somebody on the front line close to your customer or in in your operations to do their job in a better way to be a better employee to get their performance um rolling to get something done and an administrative task which is important for them and I think that first I want to acknowledge the HR services and the operations because some people think that only the Strategic projects are the trendy important things but that’s not what it is if your operations aren’t running well you can’t do really development or strategic projects on top of that so just wanted to do that acknowledgment first here let’s raise raise our cats for for HR Services first and then start thinking about what are the trends that’s happening in this area right now the HR Services Monica what what are you what are you seeing um I I would say that’s you know I’ll start saying that generally I’m an optimist um so when I look at the um hardest period in my life in HR services that has been coveted and I can imagine that you know like a lot of my peers that are part you know like of the people operations teams um they acknowledge that uh because you know like the coffee period came with yeah I would say a traumatic event uh for all of us but if I look at the bright side right if I try to to look at what was good coming out of that is that I think it elevated the value of the people operations and HR services in general I think a lot of companies that were not yet convinced about investments in technology about in like the importance of maturing this function this part of the HR understood very quickly that they had to have a very uh well organized um HR let’s say and I don’t like the term back office right because it’s very much front office in many many areas but that they need to invest in that and um the ones that had already made the investments in in technology in kind of you know like having methodologies on how they approach continuous Improvement in their people operations environments they were pretty much navigating much easier so I think you know like that’s out of covet if I’m taking one positive thing is that it did Elevate the value and it improved the visibility of the value that people operations teams bring Furniture organization not only in terms in times of Crisis and when you know I kind of you have a lot of events that bring a lot of volumes and urgency but also in general in ensuring that you keep that employee experience and you treat your users your customers internal customers with respect and in a way you know like that they engage uh in a positive way with with the services and the processes that you’re deploying so I think you know coming from um from that you know um we also have seen that within you know 2021 2022 I think the technology area in people operations has attracted um a record amount of Investments as well because you know like everything just you know like was in demand um not only new tools and new processes but also being able to scale them very very quickly in an agile way right um so for me you know if I look back at this period and uh also you know like things that I was working pre-covered on when I was when I was in Honeywell I would say there are three different Trends um that I would articulate very clearly the first one would be the experience uh so a huge focus on how does it feel how easy is it um yes kind of you know like this concept of consumer grade experiences which you know like I remember a few years ago you know like within HR we had to Google it to understand what it means and then you know to kind of figure out well okay if this is what it means outside of HR what does it actually mean within um the HR function the second one which is very much interlinked is the automation um with a good and the bad um I think there is a huge effort to go after the coolest most amazing tool and with we sometimes forget that the tool isn’t and everything and when I start looking at new processes I always tell my teams we don’t talk too yet we just first have to figure out what is the vision of the process how it should look like what it should do for us and only then we invite all the technology consultants in the room uh and we figure excellent the technology can can help us because I’ve seen it very often you know like um that you know we go after the tool and we try to make the process fit the tool and at the end of the day you know like you end up in those projects you know like that don’t bring the don’t bring the results um and you know I’m pretty sure that a lot of us here in in the session have been part of those you know rushed technology implementations without necessarily taking the time to think about the process first exactly great we used uh two million euros to to get a tool into the house and nobody’s actually using it so yeah these kind of things and I would I would guess you know like coming out of the um also yeah I would say postcode area than the current economic situation I see a huge interest in value added services within people operations so can we do more within people operations can we simplify the processes more and um can we you know like kind of adopt agile principles in the way we collaborate and we work together so I think that’s the third Trend and kind of all together basically they bring that value right like the experience the Automation and the value add Services I would say you know like intertwined they bring that value to um to the stakeholders we’re working with internally in the teams amazing thank you experience based Automation value-added Services a couple of things which I kind of would like it’s kind of a perspectives into these the first one is because I’m working with these type of things I call it kind of participative development so it’s not any longer so that operations is in the end of the chain and they are handed over a ready baked product or Frozen saying here here’s how you how you kind of maintain the operations for this process now I see that they are much more also participating in the development of processes because they’ve got the touch points towards the users so this is clearly a trend that I’m seeing um happening now kind of if we speak agile words it’s devops type of a thinking where the operational part is included in the development part because they are so connected have you seen this it’s it’s kind of an upcoming Trend it’s not that big yet but more and more I can see this I I guess it depends on the maturity um you know kind of the of the organization as well I guess you know where you have a good collaboration and a partnership and the let’s say um yeah I would say a good working engine when it comes to you know like co-creating and um HSS services having a seat at the table in HR councils or you know like kind of uh people leadership teams and so on I think you see what you are mentioning right you see that um you know like that recognition that okay you know like we have a new process to set up well you know like Monica from people Ops can you work out what the process could look like so that we can operationalize it later and scale it and then you know like get all the buy-in from the other team so I think there is a recognition of that um I’ve been uh recently you know like talking to um colleagues you know like from you know big companies as well where you would expect you know to have like kind of that level of maturity and they were saying yeah well we don’t really have a seat at the table right so we normally are the last ones to find out and you know like we are told well this is the new process or we find out this is a new process go and figure it out and often you know like there are questions like okay but this doesn’t work in this country exactly their dependencies or something yeah yeah so I think it’s a lot it’s a lot about you know like the level of collaboration and um the um yeah yeah the inclusion right of uh and the recognition of the value of the people operations what I started with in the beginning um that is yes where you know like you um yeah you you keep the accountability on the people operations um of doing what they are good at managing you know how to operationalize the process and scale it and you hold them accountable to that at the same time you recognize the value that they bring to the organization and I think doing more and more that will um improve the lives of everyone within all of the HR functions because all of the sudden we achieve what we all talk about you know like working on value adds services and correct where you are bringing value versus where you you know like you don’t bring any value but you just patch a broken process that that’s where that’s where the second thing comes I’m working with a very large organization currently and they’re in um I mean it’s like 50 000 people so you know in in that type of an organization that HR is a bit siled because it’s so big so you take care of your own areas and now uh there’s um the new type of a hris system Development coming up um they’re kind of running their own stream and I’m trying to say when I’m working with process development with agile and with the development part is to when we develop you have to go to connect with that hris stream because we can’t develop something that can’t be can’t be kind of delivered through the hris later on we have to have the in agility call about definition of done we have to have the constraints kind of the box here is the box that will be that we need to fit things into which will later on be easier plugged into the system and this is a really important thing and finding and one of the key things there is also part of what we talked about automation is the the architecture of the people data is how do we when we develop something how do we build the people data flow the information flow what information are we connect collecting sharing how is it stored so it can be used later on because one of the key trends is now also of course AI I mean chat gbt just changed the game totally and there are new new ones coming in now when anybody who doesn’t have a coding possibility I can speak with an AI just with natural language processing and that can that can practically analyze Millions rows of data for me in a split second we’re in a new era uh AI is going to come into HR operations and HR Services very quickly we’re not quite there yet but um many of these HRI assistants already have ai assisted analytics AI assisted Tools in them um any any comments on that AI machine learning part it’s not new right like it’s been uh it’s been there since since a while so we’ve been playing you know like in the past you know with the robotic process automation with you know like chat Bots that would learn intelligently you know like based on what your answer asking what what the answers should be um and you know like I you know like I feel like you know there is no threat in there maybe I’m a little bit naive I think you know like it’s a process um that will go through and that we will go through I mean imagine you know like in the past you know like um maybe you know like um I I remember many years ago when I was in I.T um we had started partnering with servicenow and they were at the very beginning and the only thing they did was uh I.T service management and it looked very ugly I mean I remember it very very vividly that it was just terrible experience and the process was so clunky and and so on and look where service now is today so like um and I would say you know like my job doesn’t didn’t disappear uh it just you know like got enriched and I think you know like a lot of the a lot of the jobs you know like uh in the industry just got enriched yeah of course you know like I guess you know like the um data entry type of roles that still probably exists in a lot of organizations they who maybe know like cannot afford um making investments in in tools that take away that you know like would get facilitated something like that and I think in general it will be something good right um yes I think for our industry and it will just enrich our roles and and free up our hands from from things you know like that probably doesn’t make sense um at the moment so um I I think you know like um you know I’m I’m welcoming those changes I think we can experiment with them um on small scale medium scale and then learn from it and see how you know like kind of how it works and adapt right um and what I also kind of you know like realize um we’re running uh currently you know like a big exercise and you know like kind of yeah understanding um sentiment across the company around you know like Services we’re doing and so on and I am you know like kind of astonished you know like from the interviews empathy interviews they’ve been running um how much you know like how little actually people talk about automation like actual employees working with tools and how much they talk about the need of human interaction so I think you know like these things you know like kind of they need to be balanced they go hand in hand yeah on the other hand I see the younger generation they don’t want to call for getting help of a service right they want to do good job or they want to set you know do it in a in a way which isn’t uh online with a person and it needs to be correct and it needs to be right now it needs to be personalized so I think AI will help a lot with that as well whereas um specifically for the benefit of the employee that’s where I think Ai and machine learning and the chat Bots and all these will be helpful and also as I said enrich the work of the HR services and operations where you don’t have to do the basic how many how many holiday days do I have remaining and then you go in system then you answer by email but that can be handled automatically you know automatically let’s move into agile and lean so perfect um what is it we have a theme called what is the difference between lean and leaning HR and agile in HR and Lena agile are words which are kind of used in a very light way people often say that without understanding what really what it really means lean has a very robust background very disciplined way of working and very much continuous Improvement human-centered way of working and agile comes in whereas um things are new new products are developed we’re working in a very collaborative ways in incremental ways there so they they are not just words lightly used by US who are lean and agile professionals we actually understand what the theory the background the practices principles and values Behind These are so what would you say are the differences between lean in HR and agile in HR Monica um I’ll use you know like kind of um yeah differentiation that’s you know like I’ve been using for a while right to explain it I feel for me like kind of lean starts from the process View and agile style is kind of you know starting from a human View of the same outcome and when I say that you know like I think you know you’re right um lean is a lot about you know like kind of getting alignment on how we do things and then doing things how we align we’re going to do them uh so it’s a lot about you know kind of that um uh consistency in in practices and processes um taking care that you know like the foundational uh elements are are working fine the way you know like for example in HR Services you look at um your the volumes you’re handling and their slas and um you know the feedback from the uh from the users and you know like how many continuous Improvement ideas you’ve implemented and how do you spot them and how do you do problem solving um I feel like kind of that takes care of all of the foundations and it takes away um you know the constant firefighting I I sometimes talk to peers of mine and you know like you see them tired and you know like kind of you know thinking saying you know like oh we got escalations after escalations you know I can’t sleep at night and you know like I’m in firefighting mode all the time um I feel like lean is bringing a system together and it’s allowing you to have some structure in that yeah rather chaotic operational environment um and that allows you then to be able to um also introduce you know like these other elements from agile like kind of you know like how can you bring new ideas to life in an incremental way um and how can you carve time for that basically because if you don’t get you know like that level of maturity operationally in in an HR Services environment then you pretty much you know like are just stuck in that limbo of of firefighting and dealing you know like with things that are overwhelming you rather than being able to be a little bit more proactive and plan uh plan further so while I guess you know like the process of getting to that level of maturity from um operation and yeah kind of lean perspective is not easy and it’s not like a pill you take in the morning and by lunchtime you are lean it is a lengthy time and it takes commitment and consistency from all the layers in the organization I think one once implemented you know like you really can um yeah you kind of build that trust and reliability on the services that you are delivering and you all benefit at the end so um I’m a big advocate of using kind of you know lean principles um and processes within HR operations environment um for all of the reasons I mentioned and I I’m I couldn’t be more excited about you know like the introduction of agile as well because I think that brings you know like continuously that voice of the um employees and that ability you know like to to iterate and to experiment and to give yourself the right to experiment to learn and to kind of you know like constantly adapt your processes to the needs of the of the users very very good I I’ve thought about um lean and agile in this way I think about lean as we already know what we aim to do we have the right answer here’s the right answer this is what we aim to do we have a process getting us to the end point we want to get from A to B and we know both A and B and we know what happens in between and now we can start improving that with lean tools cutting waste continuous Improvement looking at kpis having numbers so that we can get from A to B in a more efficient more better way and that’s that’s lean for me practically agile for me is we are not quite sure where we are we don’t maybe know exactly what the right thing to do is an agile helps us do that Discovery development that Journey step by step so this is one way of of me trying to make a difference between lean can be used in lean tools can be used in such a great way when you have the right answer but agile is super powerful when you need to create something the creativity the voice of the user to understand how can we better how what what would a new Performance Management process or practice look like well you don’t you don’t go into your HR bunker and decide yourself oh here here is a new Performance Management process let’s Implement that and see how our users are experiencing that no you don’t do that if you’re an agilist you’re like okay what do we want out of a performance management system what’s the value that we want to create you go and start speaking with a lot of stakeholders and users if you’re an agileist you create different Alternatives prototypes testing these prototypes you start doing that incremental development getting to the right answer through feedback loops and incremental um testing learning which isn’t lean it’s more the creative creativity of agile there what are your thoughts about this I think you’re you’re spot on the right and um you know like we’ve done this session uh yeah a few weeks ago for the US team and in the audience there was my very first lean Six Sigma teacher scary I was I was I was a little bit scared so that’s just you know like a little yeah a little um yeah informal uh element there but I remember you know we were chatting afterwards you know like and uh and you know like we had this discussion around um well actually you know like when you think about lean um if you get a bicycle right you would always just get a better bicycle if if you know everything we had was a bicycle if you use continuous Improvement you will always get you know like a faster nicer more beautiful bicycle basically you would never get a car it takes Innovation and kind of you know like thinking from you know creating something different and and totally different you know like to get to a totally different product um and you know like I for a very long time I was not in agreement with that and I said no continuous Improvement actually is that tool um and you know you can get a lot out of it and yes Innovation can come out of it but actually you know like um I do agree with you that um agile gives you kind of you know like that um warrant that ability right to give you a broader exactly go and experiment go and experiment go and ask the questions you know like because you start from this you know like um you know reframing problems and thinking about you know like problems from a totally different uh perspective in ways that it invites for multiple Solutions rather just that just one solution so I feel like sometimes you know like lean it’s you know like and a lot of the problem solving techniques from lean you know like they are um excellent and you know like great creates uh ways of you know like tackling problems but sometimes you know like you can combine you know like ways of reflaming problem statements so that you can get to that Innovation and that’s how why I love the combination combination of these yeah yeah I want to share an example with the with the listeners is if you think about HR Services we are maintaining people products or processes that have been created about 20 25 years ago many of us we haven’t been gone through radical Innovation but we think about onboarding the same way in all companies most common okay 90 of companies have the same types of onwarding processes 90 of companies go through the same kind of talent attraction and talent um um acquisition processes if you look at employee surveys I think that’s the most unuseful process on on Earth currently to ask people twice every second year with 200 questions what’s going on you can’t really use that for anything because the the the frequency is so so slow so why do we hold on to these processes does it matter if we improve the employee survey process any longer with lean no in my opinion no we need to go and ask ourselves new questions we need to move towards the agile Innovation part and ask ourselves what does our organization need what’s the what was the kind of ground driver for having an employee survey overall is it just to understand how metrics on something or do we want to use it for the benefit of our employees teams or organizational managers if we want to use it for the benefit of them can we do it in a different way and how could that be then we come to people thinking that oh we can just change the frequency let’s do pulsing let’s ask people 50 questions every month and do the same exact thing not do anything about it just how kpis that is not Innovation my friends that is just wasting time of people to answer questions and not seeing any results so I think the interplay of lean becomes important when you have processes that work if you have processes that are not working not bringing value not really liked you’re just becoming better at doing things which isn’t working which is not very helpful right all right let’s move into practical examples practical examples of using lean in HR services so let’s get into really concrete things what what do you have your top two um I talked to I guess um I mean we talked last time about Inventory management so I will bring it up here as well because I think you know like I’m a big fan of yeah just kind of knowing what is on our plate to do and having you know like proper ways to prioritize the level of work and kind of you know like project you know like where do we want to be within one month two months three months and so on operationally so I think you know like inventory management is um yeah it’s it’s it’s a very strong one and it’s one of the foundational kind of you know like elements within uh within lean and uh it’s one of the the tools probably like that has the biggest resemblance to manufacturing environments so whenever I was visiting factories you know like I could imagine all of the tickets that we have in HR you know like going through the production line and you know like just making sure you know that we have a way to spot when things are not working right visually and and so on so when you speak I just wanted to make sure for those who those of you who are not understanding what inventory management means it means that all the work coming into our teams what types of work are there how long does it take where are the tickets moving uh lead times just getting the understanding of the full workflow is that correct exactly that’s absolutely right and um yeah making sense you know like kind of up that flow and understanding you know like how to how to work with it and how to um stay ahead of that Demand right I think that’s the that’s the key the key element um I think also in in the same way you know like um identifying way Stripes is also kind of you know like waste management is also something you know that sounds very manufacturing uh also kind of you know way of looking at it and in lean you know we we talk about um seven eight now they’re now eight waste types uh oh really I have only learned seven waste ways yeah so so they they’ve added you know like kind of uh an eighth one which is more related to extra processing so basically waste that are related to um work that is being delivered by um higher you know kind of delivering in a higher quality than what is required or with uh resources that have higher skills and what is required for and it’s quite interesting right I really love that um that transformation but basically you know like if you learn about those seven eight type of wastes um then you can start you know like kind of spotting what is uh potential for improvement right within so let’s let’s do a couple of examples can you give me two examples of waste and HR example yeah for example I would say you know like kind of uh tracking defects right uh understanding you know like how many service failures you know you have you have had how many times have you delivered uh poor you know like a bad quality of contracts to new hires and what are the what is the data right that went wrong in the same way you can look at uh waiting times so for example in like how much time you know like you take to approve something or you know like a number number of approvals right in the process are they really required or not and what I’ll give you an example of that waiting time it’s it’s a recruitment process where one of the people we worked with or teams that we work with realize that the approvals for a recruitment process sat a medium time of three weeks in the two above you kind of approval box and three weeks waiting time for getting our recruitment up and running is a long time for those who are waiting for that person to come and help them so just understanding where those waiting times are in your process and starting to cut those waiting times with different ways is super important yeah I guess it’s it’s also kind of goes hand in hand with essay that if you don’t measure it you know like kind of you don’t control it it’s you know kind of out of out of sight out of mind so starting you know to map those waiting times um it’s always a fun exercise you know like if you if you go into a new organization and you want to understand you know like how you know how can you make impact quickly and what are you know like kind of those yeah relatively quick fixes you know you start looking into waiting times and then come up you know with proposals of you know hey how can you how can you cut some of those unnecessary steps it’s also brutal sometimes it is indeed um so besides you know defects and waiting times um I guess also uh you know like one one nice one you know like it’s the motion right um kind of how many times you know like a process is being touched by multiple people so very often you know like um you see especially in siled organization you know like that someone approvals oh my God the level of approval it’s also passing of the data right like you know um people operations touches something for um you know the employee details for the sake of um creating a contract but then you know like the same information is being moved to another team and then to another team and then you know you figure out that every single of these teams you know like have their own way of tracking the same data with their own spreadsheets and mechanisms and so on simply because you know like there is not a smooth kind of you know like um handing over process between the different functions or you don’t have a you know like kind of a system of record that allows you to do that um and I guess that’s one of the you know that’s one of the classics um The Silo thinking and the fact you know like that’s things are you know like every team is creating their own ways of working and that’s why I’m stressing you know like the fact that you know like lean allows when you implement lean across you know like HR function it allows you to have that conversation across the functions and enables you to decrease a little bit the The Silo thinking it will not take it’s the end-to-end view it’s good value delivery it’s from the beginning to the value delivery and that’s the end to NV and you start having metrics around that and that’s the brutal thing in my opinion when you get to the metrics and understand you know what here in between us we have a Handover that usually takes X days or X weeks and that’s not acceptable so really really good what about the it’s I’ve heard a lovely um metaphor to say we need to start aiming to build minimum viable bureaucracy in agile organizations yeah and that means the bureaucracy that is just enough to be compliant and to be needed but nothing on top of that and I think that’s a good um good Mantra to keep in mind yeah yeah it is it is true and I guess it’s also kind of you know like um Reinventing a little bit our roles right that the value that we bring as HR professional is nothing in the amount of documents we sign approve and where you know like we say yeah okay this can go further so it’s not about you know like kind of that part of the ego um but it’s it’s a lot about you know like kind of how do you uh deliver you know like a product or a service that is you know like kind of um appealing to the users and that I’ll give you a practical example like um we’ve been working um a few months ago in simplifying you know kind of um sabbatical leave process which required uh not less than six or seven approvals um at the different chains in the organization and we just did this mapping you know like this motion kind of you know like mapping and understanding where it goes and how long it takes and um and we totally reinvented it basically it’s just the employee logging their sabbatical and that’s it so it went from you know like kind of six or seven approval chains to you know like just a logging a registration um of a sabbatical living assistant and that’s it and it requires you know like kind of that way of starting with the needs and the pain of the user in mind rather starting from the policy standpoint right because very often I hear the example of hey yeah but our policy yes and the policy says this and this is how we’ve always done it um but the policy is created by us right and and that’s something that we can change uh I agree I I want to share the the story that I was I was entering hey Charlie a similar One internal HR leader coming into consultancy and they had a horrible travel expense process with the managers doing some expense checking and signing and sending by post that took ages for people to get their money when they wanted to have travel expenses back to themselves and I said why don’t we just change it and everybody went like no we can’t because there’s a law saying that managers need to check the the expenses and I said Is there show me that law you know I went to legal and finance and said Is there a law that says that managers need to check and they said no there’s not a law it’s a policy and I said let’s change the policy let’s just make a bookkeeping check it and pay it directly so we cut managers out of the process and everybody went like no because we can’t why can’t we because what listen to this what if our employees will trick us and ask us for travel expenses that are are not real and I went like Okay so we have two options here either we have a bureaucracy High bureaucracy where we check everything because we can’t trust our employees or we can trust our very very capable very very skilled employees to ask for their hotel and taxi and and flight bills back perhaps we’ll choose the trusting approach for this and not that bureaucracy approach so this is also a cultural thing of course but remembering that sometimes it’s not even about the process sometimes it’s about the human view of how we think about the users yeah no I I yeah I agree with you and I guess you know like the other aspect that we we haven’t touched so far in in our discussion is you know like kind of what happens outside of the HR team and what are the goals and strategies of the business like what I’ve seen in like kind of influencing very strongly the um adoption of lean or kind of you know like employee experience or yeah customer centricities yeah it’s very often you know a kind of the mission and the vision of the company right like how often you know like do we talk about that and you know like because if you think about it if you want to deliver you know like customer-centric services to your end customers then you know like he was an employee you expect that internally and and you want to kind of preach what you are saying right so I see a lot more um strengths you know like kind of in looking for um those examples outside of HR and using them for the benefit of influencing change within HR processes and one good example is to say Hey you know like how does our HR strategy and the way we approach processes and services align with how do we deliver value to our end customers and how can we learn from that and how can we deliver these things you know like kind of differently um and you know like kind of don’t be afraid to go outside of HR and talk to people from the business um I think nowadays in a lot of environments we know outside of HR we have lots of functions that do user experience design and that work with agile and so on and you can you can go and spend time with them and you would be astonished you know like how happy they are to share yes experiences advice and just learn from how you know like how they are how they are working basically so now we’re kind of moving into the agile part so agile in HR let’s talk about a couple of examples around that and one of the key things that we started with was the experience based design to so when we work with agile just some background we are very keen on understanding touch points from the user towards our product or process or service and in those touch points um is it helpful is it valuable is it useful what is the emotion so we really want to understand that user Journey throughout the whole experience and to be able to start designing this we do a lot of co-creation and you mentioned go and talk with people don’t sit in your bunker thinking that you have the right answers uh can you elaborate on that yeah I guess you know like um we we talked in the beginning right about you know kind of surveys and yeah deaths by surveys I I would call it because we over survey everyone um and I think what agile does you know like kind of at first is you to get outside of your chair and outside of your little cubicle or you know kind of bubble within your team and go out and talk to uh users um of your services and you know I love doing empathy interviews and you know like I’m always um advocating for everyone within my operational teams to to do that on a regular basis to pick processes and just go to talk to people that have used our processes um a very interesting interesting powerful way of doing that is also to write down your preconceptions before you do that oh yes very interesting uh you get lots of aha moments because you know like you we are humans right so we go in with some thinking oh I know we have a bias we have a Bible I know exactly what they’re going to complain about this is what it is you know like please do that exercise and write down all your preconceived ideas before you go into the interviews um you know like take a piece of paper you know and write them on the right side and on the left side write what you have heard from the from the users and then do the comparison uh it is mind-blowing uh it has been mind-blowing to me uh very often and it’s a very humbling exercise as well to to be in front of you know like kind of this um yeah this differentiation but it also kind of you know like um allows you to understand you know like that’s maybe you know like what the solution that you have in mind is not a solution that is wanted for the for the users right exactly features or you know like the way you are thinking of Designing a new process you know or improving a new process may seem important to you and you think from Word of Mouth that yeah this is a pain but actually when you go in and talk to people you realize that you know actually that’s not the pain and there is another pain that you can uh that you can tackle and that is I think the power of um of agile um and it will definitely you know like kind of um yeah it will definitely change in like the way you are thinking uh and also the level of energy you have within the HR organization because it brings a lot of great creative energy to go into people and hear about you know like things and it it gets you into that you know like kind of groove of things where you uh you get excited about oh okay so this is what actually you know like what what actually needs to be fixed and it brings that motivation um and Alignment between between multiple uh multiple team members so I encourage you know like using uh empathy interviews um on a regular basis I think very often when we have a process to improve we tend to go fast fast fast fast and we start cutting from yes yes exactly exercises and empathy interviews yeah they take some time and they need planning and so on so um very often you probably you know like cut down on the amount of time you spent understanding you know like the uh users experience so doing this on a regular basis I think it takes away that pain and you constantly get you know like a flow of um yeah a flow of feedback uh that is coming directly from the users that are using your services excellent I know a couple of companies who’ve already um must who will remastered this on a level that when they develop Global new products processes services they have what they call the science team coming in to run a design Sprint and Netflix has gone down to I think two or three days now with the design path so in three days they have gone through the interviews understanding what the needs are building prototypes getting feedback of the prototypes building the final requirements features and testing those out with some users and stakeholders three days they’ve done this then they can move into delivering a global product 10 000 people I have another company who who has also this team they do it in four or five days enough of design thinking enough of understanding the users to be able to create greater products um some others I know one company who has a policy of never ever released anything to the users if you don’t know how it’s going to work so you have to do some testing some validation before and I think these are great examples of how to really bring agility into HR is to put the user and the value in the center and start from there and there are so many tools to do that we don’t wouldn’t go through that I have another story that I shared last time and really resonated with many people online is the person who went through our training on gel training and she went back this was in Chile I think or Peru either or Peru I think she worked for a factory and they had a recognition process where anybody who come up with good ideas for improving the factories efficiency were were awarded with a hundred US Dollars gift card to a restaurant and and when she went back to starting redesigning this process she went to speak the interview ex the empathy interviews and people who said I I feel bad at getting a hundred percent gift card to a restaurant I would never spend 100 US dollars on a restaurant I need that to other stuff you know so it’s not feeling good to go to a restaurant to spend 100 for people who are working in the factory so they decided to redesign it totally they they in the empathy interviews they came up with what is important for these people family is important uh getting recognition for peers is important and being together is important so they they remodel the recognition around these important values and anytime the factory now has a maintenance break they have a family day where they bring all the families of the new workers uh have some food available and anybody who could come up with an idea uh is can talk about their idea to everyone and how they are awarded is with these kind of consumer products that the factory is producing so own products taking home to their families so they can share the products with their families in a totally you’d go going from 100 euro 100 US dollars gift cards to a recognition with your family a lunch recognition or something totally different but this agile way of understanding uh things helped help with really redesigning that yeah um do you have more examples of agile and HR Services uh one more example

um I guess you know like that um you know understanding the yeah that the journey the user goes through like we were talking previously about um you know siled thinking and so on and one um one kind of you know like nice tool or exercise you know like that can be done for for a lot of processes it will actually kind of you know like uh walk the Journey of the employee through the different phases and functions for the same process and um that’s very powerful right because you you understand you know like kind of decisions that you have taken knowingly um and the effect it has overall right uh on on the process um many years ago you know we’ve done this um kind of you know like Journey mapping exercise for our onboarding process and we realized that in the process we knowingly with intention you know like um designs not more than uh 15 notifications that were going to the new hire within the span of the first week all of them were decided designed intentionally by various teams and they were all going at the same time to the same user so imagine you like that poor new hire you know like being bombarded with notifications and reminders within the first five days from a lot of places um and we wouldn’t have managed to kind of you know figure that out if it wasn’t you know for that you know kind of employee Journey map and kind of you know like understanding Hey what how it actually looks like um that was a big aha moment we love that example a little bit embarrassed uh as well about it um so I remember sitting in that uh in that room and you know like we were counting the number of notifications and they’re like oh okay that’s really shameful right that’s that that it took us so long really good example um but I think this is kind of you know reality of a lot of you know like kind of siled or you know you have a big big organizations right so think about um doing these exercises yes it is taking you out of your comfort zone out of your top responsibility right to Define undefined but it is goes in hand in hand right with the spirit of agile and and in general kind of the human centered yeah co-creation I think it’s excellent it really follows those those principles I’ve got one which I would like to add that is a beautiful example for for walking the user’s path another really different example about using agility in HR Services how the prioritization methods are used in agile because the HR Services also have very many conflicting priorities it’s too much on your table so you can learn a lot about how agile teams are prioritizing different methods effort value or Moscow are the two methods that I would look into which are very helpful for having team discussions about where should we use our effort and energy we are on time we could talk about this forever so I want to say a big thank you to Monica for sharing uh your expertise your tips tricks and stories around lean and agile in HR Services um do you want to say a couple of words for the for the listeners before we uh um no it was um it was definitely kind of I had a great experience and I would say you know like kind of take the courage to experiment uh with with some of these examples uh on the little scale right like you don’t need to think about um you know a revolution you can start you know really small playing you know like with with a with a tool seeing the value that it that it gives you and then kind of you know like maybe expand it with other with other team members so I would say just take the courage right and um and test it out and uh if you know like at least you know a couple of you have are going out inspired to go and uh do an empathy interview with users of our services then our mission is is complete today very very good thank you Monica have a fantastic day everyone if you want to get in touch with agile HR Community regarding our trainings our consultancy our services we’re happy to help you so see you around in our next Meetup maybe have a fantastic spring bye time

Riina Hellström: It is my absolute pleasure to introduce Sarah Bullock to you. Sarah, we’ve been working with Sarah for a year now, and it just blows my mind when I’m hearing what their team has started doing and specifically how they approached agility, starting in a very lightweight mindset manner. So, before I go into the content, I’d love to have you, Sarah, introduce yourself. Warmly welcome, I’m honored to have you here, and I’m looking very much forward to our talk.

Sarah Bullock: Thank you, and hi, everybody! It’s great to be here this afternoon, or this morning, wherever you are in the world, and thank you, Riina, for inviting me along. So, as Riina might have mentioned, I’m currently at Experian where I am just about excitingly to start a new role as Agile Delivery Lead within the Global Talent and Learning space. I’ve been with Experian for the last couple of years, with a particular focus in the last 12 months around agile. But prior to that, probably a decade and a half in generalist HR and HRD roles, and then more recently in the Talent and Learning space. I’m an interim by background, but because I’ve had such a great time in the agile space in the last 12 months, I’ve kind of been finally pulled back into an organization which I’m really excited to do and to share with you a little bit about how we’ve got on in our first year and hopefully give you some practical examples of actually what it’s like going on this journey. So, shall we jump in, Riina?

Riina Hellström: Yes, we will jump in. I’ll just tell the people how we’re working today. So today, you’re going to see a bit of a presentation from Sarah, pictures, and storylines. We’re going to stop at certain points to have some discussions. I’m going to ask a couple of questions, interrogate Sarah around this. So that’s how we’re going to work today, and we’re really glad that you can spend some time with us because I think this will be a very energizing session. So you go ahead, Sarah.

Sarah Bullock: Right, okay, we’re on. I’m going to share my screen. I’m going to talk us through really where we started, and I’m anticipating that some of the things that I share in terms of where we started will be quite recognizable for many of you on this call. There was nothing unique or special about where we were at. I’ll talk to you about some of the things that we’ve tried and also lots of the things that we’ve learned along the way.

Sarah Bullock: So, when I mentioned at the start that it would sound quite familiar to you, we’ve got an organization that’s had rapid growth in the last couple of years, with about 20,000 employees globally with a very decentralized operating model, so real focus within the regions. And as part of that, as you’d expect, we’ve started to have bubbling up pockets of agile practice, but primarily in the tech and the product space. So, as we started to think about agile, we knew there were a few people out there that we could start talking to.

Sarah Bullock: And the drive towards agile was largely driven by my boss, Leslie Wilkinson, who joined Experian probably about 18 months ago from a deep agile background with ING out in the Netherlands. So, we had Leslie talking to us about agile. Frankly, I didn’t know what it was or what she was really talking about at the start, but we were an organization and an HR team and a Talent and Learning team where I sat that was very busy—loads of really great stuff, delivering loads, landing loads more than we could handle. And there were varying levels of knowledge within the team about agile, from deep experts like Leslie through to zero, like me, and a handful of people in between.

Sarah Bullock: And there’s a Talent and Learning team that’s a team of Leslie’s DRS of probably about nine of us, a real mix of regional and local focus. Some of us just worried about global stuff, and then talent leads who had a real focus on their regions. And typically that was how we developed projects—some global stuff and then talent leads working in their regions as well, and everything was done through a waterfall, which, because frankly, that’s all that we knew.

Sarah Bullock: So these are questions that we started to ask ourselves, and I may be claiming that everybody was asking these, but I know it was certainly me as I started to find out more about this. I spoke to some of the people within the tech and the product team, and they said things to me like, “Well, it’s all—it’s not really about the processes; it’s all about the agile mindset.” And I’m like, “I don’t really know what you’re talking about. What is this agile mindset, and just through having a mindset, how can you start to change things?” I couldn’t really grasp what agile was, and when it was spoken about in the tech and product space, it didn’t really feel relevant to how we were operating in the HR world.

Sarah Bullock: And then when people started to talk about, “Well, it’s about testing with the customer and being prepared to change,” you start to kind of think, “Well, we’re kind of doing that already, surely, aren’t we? We always kind of know what our customers need, and we always do a pilot, so what’s so special about this agile approach?” So we really started to scratch our heads, and then the big question, of course, was, “Where do we start?” Because as soon as you start lifting the lid on all of the tools, it’s like, gosh, do we have to, from Monday, start using all of these things at the same time? So these were the questions we had, and for those of you giving yourselves ones and twos, I’m anticipating these might be some of the things that you’re starting to think about as well.

Sarah Bullock: So, what we started—so we actually did end up starting with changing our mindset, and we were lucky enough to meet Riina about 12 months ago as we started to think, actually, how do we make this relevant for an HR organization? And so the key thing that we did was we started small. So this wasn’t about transforming the organization or transforming HR or even transforming Global Talent. It was just about working in our team of seven or eight people in a slightly different way, and we committed to thinking about three things just for starters. So really thinking customer, and really having the customer at the heart of what we did, which was not just about delivering a great solution to them but understanding what the problem was that they actually had in the first place.

Sarah Bullock: We’ve done a lot of work in prioritizing as a team as opposed to going, “Well, I’ve actually got this long list of priorities myself, and that’s prioritization.” It isn’t really working as a team and being really transparent so that we ended up with a team set of priorities. And then thinking much more about incremental delivery and the concept of release thinking, and I’ll talk you through a bit about what that change meant for us and hopefully a couple of live examples of lessons learned along the way.

Riina Hellström: Could I stop you just here, because I think there is one thing which is extremely interesting about you being here speaking? Can you remember yourself, Sarah, as being a real newbie to agile, what it felt like to start hearing about this? What was your first kind of thinking? If you’re a person who is in this call and you need to start bringing agility into an organization with people who know zero about agile, can you try to help us kind of put ourselves in their shoes? What’s their reaction? What are they hearing?

Sarah Bullock: I think the things that I think we struggled with a little bit were, “Aren’t we doing this already?” Because people do think, “Well, it’s about having a disciplined project plan or about really understanding the customer.” And I think, for us, one of the big changes that we had to start making was thinking, “We’ve got to let go of our expertise,” which is hard when, after decades of being in HR, your trade is your expertise and your knowledge of people practices and processes, and learning how to surrender that and going, “Well, actually, the customers kind of know best. All our colleagues know best about what they need,” and that was a big change for us.

Sarah Bullock: I think the other thing that felt slightly daunting was learning about lots of things like scrums and kanbans and tech tables, and that can feel really quite daunting. And I think we might come on and talk about this a little later, but actually starting small or just starting with one or two things made it feel easier for us, not pouring the full agile language on everybody at stage one.

Riina Hellström: Yeah, excellent, thank you. So start small has been our mantra through all of this, and we have to keep pulling ourselves back to it at the points we get really excited and go, “Oh, let’s do more,” and we go, “No, let’s just do a little bit.”

Riina Hellström: Excellent, you can continue.

Sarah Bullock: So, customer centricity, and the key thing here was we really have been pushing ourselves to work out what the problem is for the customer and making this transition from believing that we are the experts into believing that it’s actually our colleagues who are the experts. And changing our approach from asking for feedback on, “Oh, we’ve built this lovely thing here, what do you think?” to actually, upfront, going, “How might we design something that is going to work best for you and meet your needs?” So, being much more proactive upfront in the diagnostic phase and moving from rolling out really great things that we think they need to asking what the need really is.

Sarah Bullock: And that’s been fascinating, and I know, personally, I get a huge burst from speaking to our leaders and our colleagues about what’s going on in their world. And actually, quite a lot of the time, we get it really wrong. And I can give you a few amusing examples along the way, but one was we did a big launch, and I’ll talk about the Leadership Exchange in a little while, but the launch of a huge global portal with a great big message from our CEO, and we thought, “Well, this is great. This is going to be really motivating for people; they know this is driven from the top.” And then I spoke to a couple of guys saying, “Well, what do you think?” And they said, “Well, you get like a big, standard message from the CEO, you know he hasn’t written it, you know it’s been written by somebody in internal comms. What would really have made the difference for me is my manager talking to me about this tool.” Then you go, “Okay, that’s interesting. We hadn’t thought about it like that.” So all the time, those things that, as HR people, we believe are really obvious, I’d go back and check with your end users because you might be surprised.

Sarah Bullock: So, prioritization and transparency have been a really key change for us as Leslie’s leadership team. Historically, we’ve agreed a set of big annual objectives, we’ve set personal goals on an individual basis based upon the products and solutions we’re going to develop over the course of the next 12 months, we’ve each had individual one-to-ones with our leader, I’m sure, checking about progress on those annual goals and prioritizing everything—everything on the list is stuff that’s really important and needs to be developed.

Sarah Bullock: And moving into quarterly prioritization as a team has meant us, as Leslie’s leaders, agreeing on a shared set of priorities, which is not about presenting your objectives for everybody else just for them to nod and go, “They look great,” but for us to work together and go, “As a team, in the next 12 weeks, what are the things that we believe meet the biggest needs in our business and what are the problems that we’re seeking to address?” And we’ve now got a quarterly cycle of regrouping once a quarter to revisit those and understand as a team what we’ve delivered in the quarter, what might we need to carry forward, and what are the priorities for the next quarter.

Sarah Bullock: And this has started to bring some real immediate benefits. I mean, the first couple of sessions were really hard work, and we were all kind of scratching our heads and going, “Well, I’ve got 12 priorities I need to bring to this meeting.” So we were really strict, and we said each person can only bring two, and it’s your top two, and we will devote our time to those. That long tail of other things that you really believe you have to get done, we’re not talking about today, and that may feel some space, but it’s the top two.

Sarah Bullock: And here’s a really live example of the benefits that that starts to bring. So, we had three team members, one of the talent leads saying, “I’ve got to build a regional career framework in my business area. This is really hard; there’s only one of me, I’ve got a small team, we’re really busy. How am I going to find the space to do this?” I had another person who was looking at how we build globally a personalized learning offer, and another member of the global team looking at how we introduce strategic workforce planning and how we understand what skills we have and how we develop those skills. So, hopefully, what you’re starting to see, we’ve got three people here sort of examining similar parts of the same problem, and through this discussion, what we started to realize was these three different perspectives feed into a single problem. And lo and behold, what happened then was we ended up with one value canvas as opposed to three, and we ended up with three really talented people working together on the same problem to build something that’s initially going to be a regional solution but is then genuinely globally scalable. And that was a bit of an eye-opener for all of us to watch that in play in our second session.

Riina Hellström: Could I stop you here for a while? I’ve got one thing because when we—if you go back to the previous slide, two slides back before this prioritization slide.

Sarah Bullock: This one?

Riina Hellström: Yeah, this is the one thing that is most difficult for teams that are moving towards agile on scale. So, if you’ve got more teams than one, if you’ve got more items than, what, five on your list, you’ve got like 30, 40, 50 items that you need to deliver on, to start really doing this prioritization in a different way. And this doesn’t mean that you prioritize the things, and that’s your list. It means that you’re actively leading what your people are using their time and capacity on, and that means quite a lot of trade-offs, and it’s one of the toughest things that I’m working with with many customers, so it’s hard. What are your thoughts on this? Can you elaborate a little bit on what the journey is for a person moving from the usual prioritization and annual goals to this cadence of quarterly looking into what are we going to spend time, money, capacity, capabilities on?

Sarah Bullock: It can feel really hard, and you spend your time and your capability and your capacity on thinking and getting really clear on what the problems are that you’re trying to address and making sure, in many cases at the start, most of the problem statements we had were just, “How do I produce this solution, or how do I get this tool I’ve got out there?” And we really spent some time trying to work on, well, actually, let’s go right back to why we even need this tool in the first place and then think about how we’re addressing it. It takes time, it takes practice, and we’ve gone into this process with the mentality of, “We’re not going to get it right the first time; we’re just going to keep on getting better ourselves.” So, we’ve taken the agile mindset into our own learning about how we evolve through the quarterly prioritization place.

Sarah Bullock: The very fact of prioritization, though, means that things are going to get deprioritized, and so that can feel a bit uncomfortable sometimes because I know, personally, I had a lovely project, I was really excited about it, going to make a real difference to the business, I’d done my value canvas, and actually, when we came together as a team, it became clear quite quickly that there was a huge priority here which we all had to get behind. And if we’re all going to get behind this, something else needs to go. So that project I was working on was deferred, it was put on ice, and we brought it back to the table 12 weeks later. And it can feel a bit hard, but actually, when that’s balanced with, “But we’re going to do a brilliant job on this fantastic thing here,” it becomes really motivating and it really brings the team together. But yeah, it’s a bit disappointing in the moment when you’re like, “But I really wanted to do this pet project.”

Riina Hellström: Yeah, and it’s also very valuable, right? It was also important. So, everything is important on this level that we’re working on, but this leads to really sitting down and thinking about what is the value that we need to get out really now. One of the things that also come up quite often is what I call boomerangs. For those who are new to Agile, I call it portfolio management, managing the portfolio of activities across the capacity that we have. And when people are funneling items, either projects, initiatives, or go-do’s, into this portfolio, we need to have a funnel to say, “Are we ready to start developing this now? Is it clear when it comes into the portfolio?” And you’re speaking about value canvases here, but one thing that I want to mention is sometimes people are bringing in great ideas, but they’re not quite ready and clear on what problem are we solving, what need are we really delivering value to? And that needs to be boomeranged back to say, “Maybe we need a small discovery phase here. Maybe we need to go back to your first slide to say, ‘What’s the customer really needing?’ to get that input to really understand the customer’s environment.” When I say customers, I mean our employees, managers, leaders in the business, the candidates, to really understand what are we delivering here. Maybe it’s not that magical, perfect solution that they actually want or need; maybe it’s just part of it, maybe it’s one tenth of it that would bring the value. So what are your thoughts around handling these boomerangs or things that are kind of brought into the portfolio but are not ready to start, we’re not ready to start working on them because it’s not clear what we’re solving for?

Sarah Bullock: Yeah, I think it requires a change in mentality. So it’s got to be okay for people sometimes to bring half-formed ideas or “I think this might be a problem, but I’m not quite sure what the problem is,” and to create that space to discuss those and then agree there is a piece of work to go away and discover first because the chances are the problem will evolve or you might uncover new stuff. So part of it’s about being open to that, and we’ve got a live example at the moment where we think we want to look at our global early careers. We don’t know if there’s a big problem there; all we know is it’s quite a dispersed approach at the moment, and we don’t know if that’s the right way or not. So, our release for the coming quarter is purely just to go away and do that investigation work—to speak to early careers folk, to speak to HR folk, to speak to leaders, to look externally and understand the landscape and understand what problems there are there, and then decide what it is that we might want to do with that. So, building in time for that and making that okay, as opposed to coming with the answer, is a big and important change for us to go through.

Riina Hellström: That’s excellent. This means that you actually are starting to run two portfolios parallel. You start running the portfolios of the actual deliverables, the actual projects, plus what we call a discovery portfolio or experiments, where you start finding out what really the requirements are, what the features are that you want to need to build. And those are smaller scale discovery projects, if you may call them that. So, those can also be done by the same people, but of course, you need to book some capacity and time for that discovery.

Riina Hellström: If you look at the big picture, when you start running this discovery on a more strategic level to really see where you need to focus your time and effort, what are the features that the people need or the users need, that will lead to savings in cost and time on scale. What are your thoughts around that? That’s my statement—if you do discovery well, you will actually save cost and time on scale.

Sarah Bullock: Absolutely, because you’re confident then that what you’re going to deliver is a value-add for the people that you’re looking at. And I think the other thing that I’ve certainly learned through doing that investigation upfront, A, it gives you greater confidence, but B, it also enables you to try some things out, and when they’re not working, to let them go, as opposed to getting so far down the track with something and having invested so much time and emotion and cash, sometimes it can be hard to let some of those things go. So, yeah, starting small and finding out and being open to that has been a good lesson for us.

Sarah Bullock: So, just really in brief, this is a value canvas that we use internally, and once a quarter, we’ll take our value canvases from the previous quarter, understand what needs to be carried over, and then each team member—and there’s some combined ones, as I’ve mentioned—will come along ready to talk about their value canvases. And the kind of things that we spend a lot of time debating are: what’s the problem, are we really clear on what that problem is, who are the target users, how much effort do we think we’re going to need in this quarter amongst our team to devote to this, and what additional resource might we need and where are we going to get it from? And then down, you see in the bottom left-hand corner, what that minimum viable product is or, practically, what are we expecting to see in the next quarter delivered. And what’s great about that is it stops you from having these big, long, six-month or annual huge goals. You’re accountable and very clear for what you need to come back with in the next 12 weeks, and that’s really motivating as well because you can actually see some quite tangible results quite quickly.

Sarah Bullock: This is our version—we put stuff in, we took stuff out, and so I’d encourage anybody thinking about this not to be a slave to this form but to use something that works for you.

Riina Hellström: If you start going back to just—we introduced the value canvas to your team, right? And the first time around when you do this, it’s very—it’s hard work to get your projects described or initiatives described through a canvas for everybody to see what you’re going to deliver on one page—hard work. But the next time around, those are there, and the new ones are just not that many. So, you start having that frequency and that routine up to have a one-page view of things that you aim to deliver. What’s your view on the value canvas kind of introduction to the team the first time around?

Sarah Bullock: We had two three-and-a-half-hour meetings, plus all of the one-on-one time beforehand to go through with everybody, “Here’s what it looks like, here’s what a good one could look like, let’s think about yours.” And then we had one quite long, intense session where people were trying to explain what was on their canvas, and then we reconvened for another three-and-a-half hours to work through actually what it was that we wanted to focus on. So, it felt like hard work, but we learned a lot, and we learned in some cases that we weren’t quite sure why we were doing things apart from somebody had said they really wanted it. But it enabled us to really strengthen the relationships within the team, challenge each other, tighten the wording, and we’ve now done five quarters, and we did one of these last week and wrapped up the whole thing in three hours. So, we’ve more than halved the time and the efficiency, so it gets better. But the whole point of going into—you have to go into it with the mentality that you want your value canvas challenged and changed. This is really different from just sharing your objectives. This is the group testing and refining together.

Sarah Bullock: It’s really about being open to that feedback and having that mindset of, “I don’t have to have a perfect canvas coming into this meeting; my colleagues will help me because we’re here together,” and it requires that mentality and that psychological safety to do that.

Riina Hellström: Excellent.

Sarah Bullock: And I think not owning that canvas yourself—it’s not you on that canvas. The canvas is for the group to decide if this is a priority or not. There’s nothing personal if yours doesn’t make it through, and that’s a real change as well, I think, for people. We’re all offering in and all refining together.

Riina Hellström: Here’s one thing that I also mentioned to you when we were speaking about this is that if you go to this way of working, you can’t really have your performance management and your bonuses tied to your personal goals, because that’s when you are not ready to give up on your canvases and you want to push them through. If, what, 5,000 pounds are connected to getting those canvases through during this year. So, it also connects very clearly to how we set up our teams, how we build our compensation and benefit programs, how we start acknowledging and rewarding this type of behavior. So, it is really a mindset thing but also connected to the structures around our teams. I just want to mention that that’s really important.

Sarah Bullock: Yeah, and I think it is really important, and—or but—I think we’re not there on that part yet. So, we’re doing quarterly prioritization kind of independent of the annual performance side, so things aren’t in sync, and it’s okay. So, I guess one thing to think about is you don’t have to wait until you’ve got all of your performance and your reward cycles lined up. It’s great when you get there, I imagine, but we have kind of said, “Okay, we know there’s an annual performance cycle, but we’re going to worry about the next 12.”

Riina Hellström: That’s a good input because some people are thinking always that if you start with agile, everything has to be in order, but I love your approach of let’s take it stepwise. We are doing the right things here. Let’s sort this out and sort out the bonuses and whatever in a way that works for us, and be very flexible there as well. Let’s move forward. Oh, this is so good stuff.

Sarah Bullock: Okay. So, release thinking, which is my personal passion, and this is much more around incremental delivery. So, smaller slices of product and delivering value far quicker to our end users, and for us, that required this kind of letting go of perfection or wanting to put this lovely, polished product to our end users. We’ve long had a waterfall approach; it’s an approach I’ve used for decades, and this kind of idea that within HR, we’re the experts, we build the product, we pilot it, and we do big projects. And moving instead towards being much more open to constant iteration, constant learning from our customers, introducing something that’s a minimal lovable product, we call it, and being open to co-creating with your end users as opposed to telling them, “We know this is the best thing that you’re going to get,” or “This is just what you need.”

Sarah Bullock: And this concept of small launch, small investment, and being ready to give up on things if they’re not adding value. It’s good, it’s easy, it’s far less stressful, and actually it’s motivating because you deliver value far quicker to your colleagues. And I just wanted to give a really brief example of this because I’ve been working on a bank of questions for our TA colleagues, and it’s a horrible, ugly-looking Excel sheet with no fancy bits on it. The end goal will be a fully e-enabled database, but at the moment it was looking really quite basic, and I spoke to one of my colleagues and I said, “Hey, how do you fancy trying this out with some of your senior execs?” And this person said, “A bit risky; I’m not really sure they’ll like it. It’s a bit rough and ready. Can you come back when it’s a bit more ready?” And I was like, “Okay, fair enough.”

Sarah Bullock: Spoke to another region and said, “How do you feel about trying this out?” and they said, “Yeah, yeah, let’s give it a go.” And they trialed it with their leaders, and the response that we got from them was remarkable. And it was, “Sarah, I know this looks horrible, but it’s great. It really does the job. It’s helping me hire better people. I look forward to the nice-looking version, but in the meantime, can I carry on using this? Of course I love it, and thank you for asking me at this point for my feedback. I really appreciate that.” So, I would really encourage you, if you’ve got any nervousness about your end users being offended by your basic product, I think you might be surprised because people really embrace having the chance to influence something, and if it’s delivering value, just why not get it out there? We risk missing opportunities to have an impact by holding things back until they’re all lovely. So, big, big lesson for me personally.

Riina Hellström: I’d love to stop there for just a while. I’m working with some companies with global teams. I understand there’s a little bit of a mix between, we might need to have a global launch of something at the same time; on the other hand, we are both challenging that as well. Do we always need to have a global launch of everything? Could we do something stepwise? Could we do something in a slice of value? So, let’s say that we need a global onboarding program. Why can’t we just do a global first week program or pre-boarding as a slice? Let’s do that first and learn from that and then see how we can move on, kind of building on features. Sometimes we can’t launch features globally; we need to kind of build those and launch a bigger package of features. But do we always have to build that elephant and implement the elephant everywhere at the same time? What are your thoughts?

Sarah Bullock: Yeah, I think it’s something which we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in the last 12 months because we are a global organization, and we’re trying hard to get greater alignment across our regions. And I think it can feel really daunting and really complicated to try and roll things out globally, and we’ve started to be much more deliberate and less apologetic about starting small and saying, “We want this to be global, but we’re going to try it out in Italy first, for example. We’re going to try it out with this particular narrow population, and we’re going to learn from that.” And often that can create a bit more pull as well, because as people start to see there’s this really cool stuff happening over here, it can create some further momentum.

Sarah Bullock: So yeah, I’ll come on and talk a little bit about our Leadership Exchange, but that was a great example of starting small with something that ultimately is big and global, and actually the value that that brings, because ultimately it makes your rollout faster because you end up with something that’s going to work.

Riina Hellström: It doesn’t—and you’re also learning about—you think you know how to release things. When we talk about releases, when we adopt or implement things into organizations, we in HR think that we know the best way how to release and how to build comms packages and what managers should do. But the second—there’s a saying that the second the product hits the real customer, there’s failure happening. So, the product will never survive that meeting with the real customer the first time, so why don’t we do that product launch or release as a soft launch, learn from what’s going wrong, iterate on the approach, and then start scaling, is how I think about this. Excellent. Let’s move forward. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Bullock: Better discover things aren’t working with 200 leaders than 2,000, I find, as well. So, to that end, this slide here just shows you the journey that we’ve been on with a leadership portal that we’ve been building at the moment, and this work began, gosh, almost a year ago now. So, what this highlights for you here is the in-depth work, discovery work, that we did with our customer base upfront. So, we ran lots of focus groups, lots of one-on-one interviews to really understand how our leaders learn, what gets in the way of that, how they’re supported in their career development, because all of that was really important for us thinking about, actually, if we develop a portal, is anybody actually going to use it, and if they do, how do we design that in a way that’s going to be exciting and interesting for them?

Sarah Bullock: Over the course of the summer, we then started to filter all that feedback and think about how it could look, and then the bit that’s perhaps most relevant to this team is October, when we started to really build this and test this with our end users. And we went into our first release with about 200 leaders globally, and we gave them a prototype version of Leadership Exchange. It looked okay, but it didn’t look great. It probably had about 30 percent of the functionality, and we actively tested, tried, got them to try and break it, got their feedback, evaluated how they were using it and what they were using, and then that, over the course of the next four to six weeks, really informed ultimately what our first big release looked like when we rolled this out to 4,000 leaders. But I can guarantee we felt a whole lot more comfortable introducing it to 4,000 having done all of this learning and listening upfront.

Sarah Bullock: But even then, with release one, we know there is more to do; we have more releases to come. So, for example, in release one, our 360 isn’t a 360—it’s just a self-assessment. Second release, we’re going to introduce 360 to a slice of our leaders, and we’re going to introduce some extra functionality. So, instead of us spending two years creating a huge thing that people couldn’t possibly digest in one go, we’re breaking it up. It’s easier for us, and actually it’s easier for our end users as well. So, it’s been a good test case for us, I think, in terms of trying out some of this practice.

Riina Hellström: This is so, so good stuff. For you who are listening to this, I mean this is the future of how we’re building our people products. It’s going to be a product organization, so HR is going to be building people products and services. So there’s going to be the product interface, the infrastructure, the service interface, and we’re going to start releasing them as products, features, doing experiments small scale on the side, understanding how the people are using it, and then scaling something that you know works. And I think that is such a beautiful way of just expressing this and showing this example to the audience today. Thank you, Sarah, for that.

Sarah Bullock: Finally, I mean, hopefully you’ve picked up that there’s so much that we’ve learned over the past 12 months, but I think what we’re learning is it’s really hard work trying to actually work out what the problem is, and we’ve spent a lot of time on that and will continue to need to spend a lot of time working out why on Earth we’re doing some of the things that we’re doing. And it can feel difficult to give up some of those projects that are really personally important to us for the greater cause. But the big things we’ve learned is I think, I mean, agile is for everyone. This time last year, I was getting quite frustrated because it was all in tech and products, and I couldn’t work out how to use it in my own work, but the tools and techniques which we’ve found have benefits beyond tech and product into all functions.

Sarah Bullock: We have started really small. I’ve only shown you today the value canvas, and whilst our mindset has changed, the amount of tools we’re using is basically that—we haven’t used lots of things like Kanban boards yet or other project solutions, and that’s okay. Work out what works for you. We’re getting stuff faster to market, we’re making connections between projects that wouldn’t otherwise have been made, we’re focusing our resource whilst it matters, and yeah, the reminder—we can be our own worst enemies. We like to shield our customers from the workings out, but they really like getting involved. So, I would encourage you to engage with the end users, and actually, these nice quarterly prioritization sessions help us achieve more, and that always feels great, I think. So, yes, so thank you. I mean, that’s probably our story to date. We’re going to continue to do more of this small, incremental changes, and we’re just going to keep on learning.

Riina Hellström: This is excellent. Thank you so much, Sarah. I’d love to have a couple of questions still before we all go. One of the things that is—is what I’ve noticed is people are not going to pick this up by themselves. They are going to need some support. So, both you and your colleague have been professionally trained into understanding this on a deeper level and how to coach people and understanding. We did a bit of mindset training for people just to open up their kind of—bring the openness to try things in a different way, and it’s an investment that you did, and it seems to pay off. What are your thoughts around starting to understand the agile mindset and starting to try this way of working? What does a person in HR need to be best equipped for that?

Sarah Bullock: The best thing I think you can equip yourself with is an open mind, which feels a little bit intangible, but I think having the opportunity to try some of these things and certainly speaking to the wider HR team, encouraging people just to start individually and say, “Well, actually, we don’t have to change our whole team to agile practices from next Monday, but actually on this next project, I’m going to make sure that I am really clear upfront on what the problem statement is, and that’s all. I’m going to sit down and I’m going to interview five employees about what’s going on for them before I start building my next learning course, for example.” So, there’s very small things that individuals can do even before the organization might be ready to transform into an agile organization, and that’s very much the kind of mentality that we’re just trying to roll out or introduce into our HR.

Riina Hellström: You started with a couple of questions that you wanted everybody to start thinking around. One was, “What’s the problem that I’m solving for?” right? The second was you started having what we call retrospectives, kind of improvement discussions, either with yourself, with your team, across teams, and you asked a couple of questions. Can you share those with those who were…

Sarah Bullock: Yeah, sure. We have a kind of really simple model to reflect learnings, which is, “What have I tried? What have I learned? And what am I going to do next?” And they’re just so simple, and you can use them by yourself, you can use them with a couple of teammates, and they’re just a great way of just encouraging that mindset of it’s okay not to be perfect; we’ve just got to keep on getting better.

Riina Hellström: And that’s a fantastic way to end this call as well. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart, Sarah. It’s so nice to have you sharing this. You’ve done a brilliant job. Not many teams are where you are in just one year, but you’ve now started—if you look at how you deliver products in a more agile, incremental—I love how you said you bring them in to bring input, not just feedback. And there is a difference between experimenting and piloting the last version of the product. So, a big thank you, and I can hear from the audience as well that they are really happy and have learned a lot today.

Riina Hellström: So, I was asking for questions. There is Katarina asking, “Sarah, thank you very much for sharing. Really impressive progress you’ve made in just one year. Would you please advise what helped you to progress? Is it learning, coaching, leadership support?”

Sarah Bullock: What helped us to progress? I think a lot of credit goes to Leslie, our boss, for creating a real climate in which it was okay to try new things. So, if you’re thinking about leading your own team through this, I would really encourage creating that climate where it’s okay for people to experiment, to learn, to have a go, and remember to keep it small. And then we coached each other, so part leadership and part coaching, I would say.

Riina Hellström: Excellent. There is another question: “Very curious, has your L&D team adopted agile, and any specific lessons to share from them?”

Sarah Bullock: Yeah, so our L&D team is arguably part of our global talent and learning team. So, we have teams within each of the regions, but then my teammates at a global level as well have a focus on talent and learning, and my colleague is a real expert in agile as well. So, very much so. We’ve got quite a lot of online learning internally, and we’re spending time this week and next week speaking one-on-one with colleagues about how they learn, what they think of their career, what does career even mean to them, and how can we support them in their development so that we start to refine our learning offerings.

Riina Hellström: L&D is, in my opinion, one of the key areas where you really quickly can start adopting agile ways of working in your mindset immediately because there is not that much—so, I wouldn’t start in payroll or compensation, somewhere where there is very heavy compliance and structures around that are long-term structures that need to go all the way to the board. But L&D, talent, performance, onboarding, different process development, services, culture, D&I, all of these are very well kind of set for the agile mindset and agile approach.

Sarah Bullock: Absolutely, and I think the other thing that I would encourage people to think about is, how can we make things as simple and as basic as possible? Because it’s one of the things that we’re tripping ourselves up on even now within our own team, when we go, “Hang on, wouldn’t it be great if it could do X, Y, Z?” And then we’re going, “It doesn’t matter. We don’t need X, Y, and Z. It’s working as it is. Unless our clients say they need it, let’s not embellish things ourselves.” So, yeah.

Riina Hellström: One last question: Kelly asks, “How far advanced is the rest of the Experian business in agile, for example, in IT or operations?”

Sarah Bullock: I think it’s probably patchy. I hope I’m not doing my colleagues a disservice. We’ve got a fantastic global agile team who are looking at how we start to evolve our practices internally. We’ve got some really good practice in our tech space, in our product space. We’ve got a fantastic team to support people in building agile tools, but some areas are doing it really well; some areas haven’t even started. So, there’s not a big coordinated effort to move towards agile—it’s a bit different wherever you go.

Riina Hellström: Wasn’t it so that you also have a dedicated discovery design thinking team that can come in and help you doing the discovery phase, understanding the users, and doing that in really quick manner, kind of in days, weeks?

Sarah Bullock: Yeah, I know. We’re lucky enough that we’ve got a fantastic team that supports us with design thinking. So, we can do a design sprint, which is four days locked in a room listening to end users at the start and the end and building prototypes and working together in a really intense way in between, and it’s great. So, we’re really lucky to have that, but you don’t need that to get started.

Riina Hellström: Thank you so much, and for those of you who are listening, I hope that you got a lot of things to think about and maybe one or two practical ideas from today. Sarah, I’m looking forward to hearing where this is all taking you as well, personally going from knowing zero to being the agile lead in T&L for your company. Looking forward to connecting with you again. Thank you, everyone, for spending the 50 minutes with us today. Hope you enjoyed that.

Sarah Bullock: Thank you, thank you, everyone. Bye.