Together towards a future-proof organisation
Challenge
The research department of a multinational food company wanted to future-proof its organisation by developing a new way of working that allowed teams to make more impact. Their goal was to make faster progress on strategic priorities. However, they faced challenges: teams spent most of their time on ad hoc requests, leaving little room for strategic projects. This limited their ability to innovate their services and processes. In addition, they wanted to implement an agile way of working to ensure more efficient collaboration and flexibility.
Approach
Our approach had two main components:
Designing a new governance structure:
We created a governance framework that allowed the organisation to set and prioritise strategic goals on a short-cycle basis. This included a quarterly rhythm in which key projects were identified and achievable targets were set, broken down into smaller tasks assigned to team members. Weekly sessions ensured monitoring of progress. We designed a structure that matched the needs of the organisation and coached the team to maintain it independently according to our ""show-do-learn"" approach.
Launching an agile project team:
We launched a pilot project with a multidisciplinary team to experiment with a new way of working. The team set goals for both content and process, divided roles and established an agile rhythm using Scrum methodologies. They worked with three-week sprint goals, regularly presenting their work to stakeholders for feedback. This ensured that ongoing development remained in line with stakeholder needs.
Result
After three months of collaboration, the organisation achieved the following results:
- Teams learned to break down big goals into smaller, doable steps and start implementing quickly, making continuous progress towards bigger goals.
- Long, unproductive meetings were replaced by effective work sessions, where teams worked in smaller groups on their sprint actions, resulting in higher productivity.
- Stakeholders became more involved through regular review and validation sessions, where the team presented small results to gather feedback for the next steps.
- The team learned to improve their product incrementally by quickly launching new features without waiting for perfection, which provided immediate value.
- The team became a role model for agile project management within the organisation and provided valuable insights on what worked and what didn't, which could be scaled up to other teams.
With this approach, the organisation became more future-proof, and the team became an example for other departments in implementing agile practices.