Client: Software development house, start-up company growing up
Initial situation:
The roots of the company (approx. 250 employees) lie in the project business, where time and material was used to work with and invoice the customer. Agile working methods were adapted early on, the customer provides the product owner. He leads the team professionally, the team is provided by the start-up. People work together with great motivation and discover the potential for their own project in one of these projects. This will be an independently acting team. Due to the many small uncoordinated decisions in the teams, there are unpleasant effects: High technical diversity in the product, side effects and surprises in further development, high error rate, etc. The employees are terribly demotivated and instead of agile improvements, there is fatalism and mutual recrimination. The customers are disappointed. There is a high internal pressure, too many customer promises result in an additional overload.
The goal is to find a way of working that on the one hand strengthens the product, on the other hand preserves the freedom of the teams as much as possible and fits the rather cool and lean company culture.
The KEGON solution:
First of all, a structure is found for the content alignment of the teams, a kind of product management with the product owners of the teams and a product manager. This work is done relatively quickly. An alignment in terms of content and quantities is established with the management.
In addition to the technical alignment, an RTE (Release Train Engineer) is found, who introduces the overall scaled agile ceremonies with a lot of expertise. Later a product architect will also be found. This team, product manager, RTE and architect, together ensure that the teams jointly drive the development towards standardization in the product, solve problems resulting from earlier decisions, and strengthen the whole structure to such an extent that the motivation of the employees is also released again.
KEGON accompanies these changes to ensure that these structures are installed appropriately and that the focus can gradually move away from technical preferences and technical experiments towards customer value and usability of the product.
The aim was also to initiate a lively improvisation process in which employees really contribute to the quality of their own work processes and their own work results.
This was so successful that when the Corona crisis broke out, employees actively participated in the mitigation of the crisis for the company.