Incumbent Firm's sensing, seizing, and transforming activities
Activity | Description | Who and what |
---|---|---|
Sensing | Top management reviewed the environment for threats and opportunities The incumbent firm incorporated internal and external experts for search activities and subordinate scenario analyses Strategy shifted toward an agile transformation agenda | Top management Constant research activities, continuous learning, and interpretation |
Seizing | Top Management allocated €700 million to fund the agile transformation Top management introduced the ACC for employees to commence working in projects in an agile environment | Initiative on a divisional level Employees as key driver Importance of management in making informed decisions, operationalizing, and communicating goals |
Transforming | Activation of internal and external change agents Repeated entrenchment of best practices and key learning in organizational structures Holistic transformation |
Agility-related terms
Term | Description | Source |
---|---|---|
Agile | “An umbrella term for a set of management practices—including Scrum, Kanban, and Lean—which enable offering requirements and solutions to evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams” | , p. 11) |
Agility | “The ability of organizations to be quick and to have an effective response to unexpected variations in market demand” | , p. 3) |
Organizational agility | “The ability to function and compete within a state of dynamic, continuous and often unanticipated change” | (2017, p. 7) |
Organizational agility | “A firm's capacity to respond with speed to environmental changes and opportunities and define it in terms of three dimensions: customer responsiveness, operational flexibility and strategic flexibility” | , p. 25) |
Organizational agility | “The capacity of an organization to efficiently and effectively redeploy and redirect its resources to value-creating (and capturing) higher-yield activities as internal and external circumstances warrant” | (2016, p. 17) |
Organizational agility | “A core competency, competitive advantage, and differentiator that requires strategic thinking, an innovative mindset, exploitation of change and an unrelenting need to be adaptable and proactive” | (2015, p. 675) |
Strategic agility | “A meta-capability that comprises the allocation of sufficient resources to the development and deployment of all specific capabilities, and further refers to the ability to stay agile through balancing those capabilities dynamically over time” | (2020, p. 2) |
Strategic agility | “The ability to remain flexible in facing new developments, to continuously adjust the company's strategic direction, and to develop innovative ways to create value” | , p. 5) |
Strategic agility | “The ability to continuously adjust and adapt strategic direction in core business, as a function of strategic ambitions and changing circumstances, and create not just new product and services, but also new business models and innovative ways to create value for a company” | , p. 29) |
Enterprise agility | “The ability to adjust and respond to change” | (2007, p. 445) |
Corporate agility | “The capacity to react quickly to rapidly changing circumstances” | , p. 29) |
Demographics of the Interviewees
Interview ID | Position | Age | Experience with agile practices | Education | Date of interview | Gender | Duration of interview |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
(years) | (years) | (minutes) | |||||
(1) | Agile master | 29 | 6 | Master's degree | 05/04/2018 | Woman | 34 |
(2) | Line manager | n/a | 3 | Master's degree | 05/04/2018 | Man | 34 |
(3) | Product owner | 43 | 2 | Apprenticeship | 10/04/2018 | Man | 51 |
(4) | Product owner | 33 | 1,5 | Master's degree | 10/04/2018 | Man | 51 |
(5) | Agile master | n/a | n/a | n/a | 10/04/2018 | Man | |
(6) | Project lead | n/a | n/a | Master's degree | 12/04/2018 | Man | 21 |
(7) | Agile master | n/a | 5 | Apprenticeship | 12/04/2018 | Woman | 20 |
(8) | Project lead | 48 | 2 | Apprenticeship | 12/04/2018 | Man | 33 |
(9) | Line manager | 39 | 0 | Master's degree | 17/04/2018 | Man | 34 |
(10) | Product owner | 43 | 11 | Master's degree | 18/04/2018 | Woman | 97 |
(11) | Head of ACC | 46 | 13 | Master's degree | 20/04/2018 | Man | 31 |
(12) | Product owner | n/a | 0 | Master's degree | 20/04/2018 | Woman | 36 |
(13) | Product owner | n/a | 1 | Master's degree | 23/04/2018 | Man | 27 |
(14) | Department lead | 42 | 2 | Master's degree | 13/03/2019 | Man | 58 |
(15) | Product owner | 34 | 0,5 | Doctoral degree | 15/03/2019 | Man | 46 |
(16) | Agile master | 32 | 5 | Master's degree | 19/03/2019 | Man | 64 |
(17) | Product owner | 28 | 2,5 | Master's degree | 19/03/2019 | Woman | 46 |
(18) | Agile master | 30 | 3 | Master's degree | 19/03/2019 | Man | 53 |
(19) | Software developer | 25 | 1,5 | Master's degree | 20/03/2019 | Woman | 68 |
(20) | Business analyst | 30 | 2 | Master's degree | 20/03/2019 | Man | |
(21) | Software developer | 34 | 7 | Master's degree | 20/03/2019 | Man | 49 |
(22) | IT consultant | 35 | 2 | First diploma | 27/03/2019 | Man | 51 |
(23) | Agile master | 59 | 12 | Apprenticeship | 28/03/2019 | Man | 70 |
(24) | Agile master | 29 | 3 | Master's degree | 03/04/2019 | Man | 46 |
(25) | Division lead | 36 | 3 | Bachelor's degree | 03/04/2019 | Woman | 54 |
(26) | Department lead | 45 | 2 | Master's degree | 04/04/2019 | Man | 48 |
(27) | Head of change initiative | 56 | 4 | Master's degree | 09/04/2019 | Woman | 39 |
(28) | Product owner | 52 | 6 | Master's degree | 12/04/2019 | Man | 44 |
(29) | Project lead | 34 | 3 | Doctoral degree | 18/04/2019 | Woman | 27 |
(30) | Product owner | 45 | 13 | Master's degree | 13/10/2021 | Woman | 41 |
(31) | Product owner | 52 | 5 | Master's degree | 15/10/2021 | Man | 48 |
(32) | Agile master | 31 | 2 | Master's degree | 15/10/2021 | Woman | 42 |
(33) | Agile master | 56 | 9 | Master's degree | 22/10/2021 | Man | 56 |
(34) | Head of ACC | 48 | 15 | Master's degree | 22/10/2021 | Man | 45 |
(35) | Agile master | 52 | 4 | Master's degree | 27/10/2021 | Woman | 39 |
(36) | Agile master | 61 | 14 | Apprenticeship | 29/10/2021 | Man | 63 |
Interview guide
: Understanding agility (inquiries, 2018, 2019, and 2021) |
---|
: Agile center of competence (inquiries, 2018, 2019, and 2021) |
---|
: Objectives of agile organizations (inquiries, 2019 and 2021) |
---|
mean to you? |
: Agile transformations (inquiries, 2019 and 2021) |
---|
What steps are needed for your firm to become agile? |
What cultural barriers within your firm in the way of its becoming an agile organization? |
: The agile transformation process (inquiries, 2019 and 2021) |
---|
Additional quotes from findings
Phase | Quote | Interview ID |
---|---|---|
Sensing: exploring opportunities and threats | “For a while, we had discussions about whether you can only apply agile practices in the front end or also back-end applications such as inventory systems, and so on. I'm more of the opinion that you have to apply agile practices in the entire specs and shouldn't just do half of it, because we also need the interplay between front-end and back-end in the interaction of the products.” | |
“Up to now, companies have only lost their way since individual decisions were made somewhere at the very top, and then were rigorously implemented top bottom, completely bypassing customer benefits and needs. Boom. And then no one needed Nokia anymore, hmm (laughs).” | ||
“Why is this necessary? (…) What I do notice is that a lot of colleagues, especially at a higher strategic level, are talking about the fact that the market is changing at high speed, which is something that we, as end users, are very much aware of. This means that there are new products developed considerably faster. Many more suppliers are entering the market quicker, simply because of digitization. This means that no matter how large or small my company is, and this organization is no exception as the market leader, I must try to adapt to new conditions very quickly.” | ||
“So greatest benefit that agile practices can bring, is just to create the end-to-end responsibility and, just make that possible, that across departments, maybe across companies, if it's about technology, to work better with each other and not against each other.” | ||
“Our management then went to America to Silicon Valley, and they came back talking about test-driven development and agility." | ||
Seizing: scaling agility with an agile center of competence (ACC) | “I think that is the biggest success factor of the ACC, because we started in small steps with product increments (…) and we have teams creating something valuable after half a year and with each further release.” | ID16 |
“A current barrier is creating physical space for the teams. Our current infrastructure is bursting at the seams. Everyone wants and needs space.” | ID19 | |
“And you are not used to it in this organization, because everyone has their silo (…) you have to break up (the silo structure), to really become a team that interacts with each other. That was the biggest challenge we had to learn. It sounds totally banal, but it was truly hard.” | ID23 | |
“So, that we've already got the basic right, and agile teams have learned a lot of methodology and mindset (…) and yet, agile scaling is still ahead of us. But I still lack the scaling framework with fixed architectures, with program views on several agile teams.” | ID25 | |
“The people there (ACC) were freed from the daily work and could do new digital product developments (…).” | ID 36 | |
Transforming: Disseminating agility across the organization | “C-level management support and an Agile mindset seem to be the crucial factors (…).” | ID10 |
“And since a few days ago [board member] wrote an article where finally, for the first time after twelve years, our highest boss declares what he understands by organizational agility. It coincides quite well for me with what is also in our textbook.” | ID22 | |
“Now with this agile scaling initiative, meaning a clear expansion, we look at what already worked well in the ACC, what we can adapt, but also what we have to change. This is because in the ACC we have a single-team context, i.e. we have one team, one backlog, one Product Owner, and in scaling initiative we will combine several teams into tribes. So for the first time we have a scaled setting and that is of course another level.” | ID28 | |
“You need management commitment, that was also clear learning from the first agile change approach. The management must understand there is a behavioral change, and it starts with themselves. And the second learning embraced, that we only applied agile practices in front-end IT teams, which per se is nonsense, because agility says you need cross-functional teams. Now with the new agile transformation agenda we did it completely different from the very beginning.” | ID30 | |
“So of course, the biggest challenge is, when you introduce new ways of working in a large or structures in an organization you always have a lot of resistance. By now it manifests that there has already been a significant change, especially in the classic hierarchy (…) “There is also a change in employees' mindset (…).” | ID 31 | |
“There are three success factors that have made us strong. First. the setting of incremental, iterative learning development, ultimately applying the agile principles ourselves (in the ACC). Second, then there's the principle of one-some-many, i.e. saying I'll think about an implementation, a pilot, and if it works, I'll try it out in two or three other domains of the company. And if it works there, I proceed with disseminating it further. Building the whole thing up in an evolutionary way. And the third is to look first at processes and then at structures.” | ID34 |
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The authors would like to thank the guest editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions.
About the authors.
Katja Hutter is a Professor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Innsbruck University School of Management and an executive coach. Her research examines the digital transformation of companies and industries, particularly in the areas of the management of innovation, user centralization, crowdsourcing, agile and lean startup methodologies.
Ferry-Michael Brendgens is a Ph.D. candidate at the Innsbruck University School of Management. Ferry-Michael holds a master's degree in strategic management. His research focuses on strategic agility, agile organizations, and large-scale agile settings. He works as an Agile Master Lead in Munich.
Sebastian Peter Gauster is a Ph.D. candidate, research assistant and lecturer at the Innsbruck University School of Management. Sebastian holds a diploma degree in international business and economics. In his research, he puts a focus on agility and management innovations. Further, he is interested in agile transformations and business model innovation.
Kurt Matzler is professor of Strategic Management at the University of Innsbruck, director of the Executive MBA program at MCI in Innsbruck and partner of IMP, an international consulting firm with its headquarters in Innsbruck. His research interests are in Open Strategy, Top Management Teams, and Disruptive Innovation.
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How to select and develop individuals for successful agile teams: a practical guide.
Boston – January 22, 2019– Today, McKinsey & Company , a global management consulting firm, and Scrum.org , the mission-based organization dedicated to improving the profession of software delivery through training, certification assessments and community, released a new research study titled, How to Select and Develop Individuals for Successful Agile Teams: A Practical Guide . This study explores the values and traits that make agile teams successful, helping to guide companies with concepts and ways to better recruit and coach their teams.
“We participated in this study with McKinsey & Company to better understand how organizations can improve their efforts to become more agile,” said Dave West, CEO & Product Owner, Scrum.org. “Agile organizations need to understand how to get, retain and enable the best talent, and this study provides guidance on how they can do so.”
The study looks at the personality traits and work values in two crucial roles for agile teams: The Product Owner and the Team Member, and subsequently covers effective methods of further developing a team’s agility. The findings suggest that the ability to handle ambiguity and agreeableness are most important among personality traits, whereas pride in product outcomes and self-direction are most important among work values. Additionally, the study suggests the importance of customer-centricity as a way to inspire agile teams. It also provides practical questions to support the interview process and good practices for developing agile teams.
“Prior to this study, Scrum.org and McKinsey predicted that the characteristics of types of people that lead to success in an agile team would differ from those in traditional work settings, and wanted to understand how information about how people become successful can help,” said Wouter Aghina, a partner in the McKinsey & Company Amsterdam office. “Understanding how to select and hire for this dynamic, agile future is critical to the team and organization.”
The results and details of the study will be discussed in further detail in a webinar with Dave West, Scrum.org and Wouter Aghina, McKinsey & Company, on February 26, 2019 at 12:00 PM EST. The details to register are here . The report based on the study can be accessed here .
About Scrum.org Based on the values and principles of Scrum and the Agile Manifesto, Scrum.org provides comprehensive training, assessments and certifications to improve the profession of software delivery. Throughout the world, our solutions and community of Professional Scrum Trainers empower people and organizations to achieve agility through Scrum. Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, founded Scrum.org in 2009 as a global organization, dedicating himself to improving the profession of software delivery by reducing the gaps so the work and work products are dependable. Visit Scrum.org for further information on the organization’s Professional Scrum assessments, training and global community; follow us on Twitter @scrumdotorg and read more from our community of experts on the Scrum.org Blog .
About McKinsey & Company McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm, deeply committed to helping institutions in the private, public, and social sectors achieve lasting success. For more than 90 years, our primary objective has been to serve as our clients' most trusted external advisor. With consultants in 129 cities in 65 countries, across industries and functions, we bring unparalleled expertise to clients anywhere in the world. We work closely with teams at all levels of an organization to shape winning strategies, mobilize for change, build capabilities, and drive successful execution.
Media Contact: Lindsay Velecina Marketing Communications Manager Scrum.org [email protected]
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Comprising about 350 nine-person "squads" in 13 so-called tribes, the new approach at ING has already improved time to market, boosted employee engagement, and increased productivity. In this interview with McKinsey's Deepak Mahadevan, ING Netherlands chief information officer Peter Jacobs and Bart Schlatmann, who, until recently, was the ...
5.7K Followers. · Editor for. Building The Agile Business. Author of 'Building the Agile Business', 'Agile Transformation' and 'Agile Marketing'. Founder of Only Dead Fish. Curator of ...
Bringing agile to IT infrastructure: ING Netherlands' agile transformation ING Netherlands, the Dutch bank within the global financial group, began introducing agile ways of working at its headquarters in June 2015. One year later, the bank extended the effort to a domain where agile methods are far less common: IT infrastructure and operations.
One Bank's Agile Team Experiment. When web and mobile technologies disrupted the banking industry, consumers became more and more aware of what they could do for themselves. They quickly ...
Undaunted by global disruption, a logistics company embraces bold transformation. December 2, 2022 -. ECU Worldwide, one of the largest less-than-container-load shipping companies in the world, chose to innovate during the COVID-19 pandemic, working with McKinsey to become tech enabled and revamp its organizational structure.
2016. Strategy. Set in 2016, this case describes ING Bank's implementation of a radical new way of working using agile principles. ING's agile way of working has been written up in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and McKinsey Quarterly. This case provides a detailed account of how the new structure was developed and ...
Case Study: ING. The challenge. In 2018, ING embarked on a significant transformation toward Agile methodologies, opting the Spotify model after thorough consultation with McKinsey & Co. This decision was driven by the Unite 2020 vision, aimed at integrating the BE and NL banks into a single, more efficient entity.
In December 2017, Vincent van den Boogert, CEO of ING in the Netherlands, was reflecting upon the company's "agile" transformation, a reorganization of work that had been critical to respond to and exceed rapidly changing customer expectations. Launched in 2015 at the head office, agile had spread to the rest of the Dutch organization ...
Comprising about 350 nine-person "squads" in 13 so-called tribes, the new approach at ING has already improved time to market, boosted employee engagement, and increased productivity. In this interview with McKinsey's Deepak Mahadevan, ING Netherlands chief information officer Peter Jacobs and Bart Schlatmann, who, until recently, was the ...
In December 2017, Vincent van den Boogert, CEO of ING in the Netherlands, was reflecting upon the company's "agile" transformation, a reorganization of work which had been critical to respond to and exceed rapidly changing customer expectations. Launched in 2015 at the head office, agile had spread to the rest of the Dutch organization, from client services to the branch network, and permeated ...
Request PDF | ING's Agile Transformation—Teaching an Elephant to Race | The present article is a practitioner case study of an ongoing event for the period from 2010 to 2018. It examines a key ...
First, successful transformations start with an effort to aspire, design, and pilot the new agile operating model. These elements can occur in any order and often happen in parallel. Second, the impetus to scale and improve involves increasing the number of agile cells. However, this involves much more than simply rolling out more pilots.
She joined forces with Aga Gajownik, Agile Coach and Social Entrepreneur, to create and implement the strategy around running innovation projects across the organisation. Aga brought her experience in agile methodologies, programme development and experiential learning. ING Case study: Make Innovation "Business as Usual"
McKinsey's embrace of Agile isn't simply following a fad. It flows from hard-headed financial reasons. In a related McKinsey report, we learn that "Agile units are over 1.5 times more likely ...
4 A McKinsey survey found that agile performance units are 2.2 times more likely than other performance units to maintain "performance orientation." For more, see "How to create an agile organization," October 2017, McKinsey.com. 5 Ibid. organization might do in a zero-based-budgeting approach), but to make reasonable adjustments to the ...
Finally, to set up its from-tos as more than words on paper, Spark made culture one of the agile transformation's work streams, sponsored by a top team member and discussed weekly in transformation sessions. The work stream brought culture to life through action. The from-to changes were incorporated in all major design choices, events, and capability-building activities.
Likewise, a global study by McKinsey & Company involving more than 2,000 organizations revealed that only approximately 10% of the ones that had recently undergone an agile transformation characterized it as having been highly successful (Aghina et al., 2020). When executed poorly, agile transformations can cause not only frustration but also ...
The agile workplace is becoming increasingly common. In a McKinsey survey of more than 2,500 people across company sizes, functional specialties, industries, regions, and tenures, 37 percent of respondents said their organizations are carrying out company-wide agile transformations,
The results and details of the study will be discussed in further detail in a webinar with Dave West, Scrum.org and Wouter Aghina, McKinsey & Company, on February 26, 2019 at 12:00 PM EST. The details to register are here. The report based on the study can be accessed here. Based on the values and principles of Scrum and the Agile Manifesto ...
While individual case studies and agile success stories have been plentiful, having quantifiable results and a larger sample allowed us to go beyond anecdotes for the first time. Two major findings emerged. 1. Agility results in a step change in performance and makes it possible to overtake born-agile organizations.
Adopting Business Agility at Moonpig: A Case Study INTRODUCTION In 2017 I had the exciting opportunity to introduce business agility at Moonpig, one of the UK's best known start-ups. Having achieved a measure of success adopting agile practices within our product engineering team, Moonpig's
To create the 'agile impact engine,' we collected outcome data on 22 companies across six sectors that completed agile transformations at the business-unit or enterprise level (excluding organizations that implemented agility solely at the team or squad level or within just one function). We measured the level of agile maturity (the extent to which a company operates in an agile manner ...