Case Study

Summary

Scrum@Scale Trainer Thoralf Klatt and his team set out to design a nimble, effective organization when their telecommunications client approached them with the desire to remove silos, reduce waste, and increase efficiency. At the time, accountability was vague. Work and available skills were distributed across regions, and numerous obstacles slowed teams down. The worst part? Teams were unhappy. They expressed frustration at the uneven workflow, confusing structure, and abundance of lengthy, unnecessary meetings.

Thoralf and his team set out with a plan: to implement key parts of the Scrum@Scale framework to help this telecommunications company compete in the market. The team decided to build a plan for the organization as if it were a product; They would design and develop the transformation in an Agile, iterative, incremental way. They founded a leadership team, or Executive Action Team (EAT), to own the transition and work from a transformation backlog. 

The first teams began by setting a goal to find the best places to involve their people team (HR) and the organization’s “worker’s council” early, and to bring them in as a guiding coalition. Together, the coalition supported a collaborative re-design of the teams from working in silos to working as cross-functional, autonomous development teams. The ultimate goal was to reduce and simplify work handled by various groups working on separate contracts; the coalition focused on creating a unified product backlog and hosting joint retrospectives for improving collaboration 26x per year.

In the second phase of the organizational transition they implemented a plan to provide full autonomy for the remote teams-of-teams and autonomy of separate value streams.  This allowed the organization to manage their portfolio with the development of seamless leadership collaboration in a virtual product management group (an Executive MetaScrum).

They addressed process improvements upstream, such as regular time-boxed meetings, they improved focused business value estimation with key stakeholders, and increased the flow of work for teams by running regular refinement after meetings to increase understanding and reduce interruptions.

Key Results:

• Streamlined Contracts, Moving from 3 to 1 meant less time spent negotiating between contracts
• Established better flow, reduced work in Progress
• Internal stakeholder motivation rose rapidly
• Organization was able to react more quickly to market changes while improving their competitive advantage in their global market.

Who Is Thoralf J Klatt

Thoralf works as an Expert Enterprise Coach for https://mbition.io – a Mercedes Benz subsidiary – coaching leadership and teams to build sustainable automotive transport for horizons 2 and 3. He started his career developing medical devices like CT scanners and became a Certified Scrum Master in 2007 w/ Bas Vodde as his trainer and Craig Larman as a coach in Berlin shaping the early days of LeSS. Based on many years of experience in diverse domains like Banking, E-commerce, Security, Thoralf qualified as SPC in 2016, as Scrum@Scale and Scrum Trainer by Scrum Inc. with Jeff Sutherland in 2019, and as Mobius Navigator Coach with Gabrielle Benefield in 2020. During the pandemic Thoralf pivoted his training to full online training using Mobius Navigator as a Design Principle. In September 2020 he founded the Business Agility Meetup Berlin which grew by 600+ members in a few months. Details: bit.ly/tjklabs You can connect to him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjklatt/