Discover our expertise! At Ceiba, we’ve collaborated with diverse companies across various industries, enabling us to pinpoint significant opportunities for enhancement, particularly in team agility. Check this blog to find out more.
Experience Leads to Valuable Lessons
At Ceiba, we have worked with large companies in both the private and public sectors. We have encountered cultures deeply rooted in a sense of belonging, which can create barriers to change and new ways of working. In this context, we want to highlight the challenges we have experienced, accompanied, and transformed the most. Specifically, we have faced agility-related obstacles in large and complex organizations.
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Working With Suppliers: Some Ideas for Overcoming Challenges
We have worked with large companies at Ceiba to provide organizational agility and digital transformation. Through this process, we have witnessed their benefits and challenges.
We have worked to overcome these challenges and achieve successful results.
Some of the actions we implemented that had a positive impact include:
- Unifying business language among different suppliers.
- Establishing standardized practices to improve efficiency.
- Exploring and sharing knowledge on the use of tools.
- Distributing different suppliers in a team ensures a single supplier takes all the business knowledge due to high turnover.
These actions have helped to improve and organize our work with our strategic allies and suppliers. As a result, we have improved their efficiency and productivity, resulting in better overall outcomes.
How to set up agility in teams?
As we began improving organizational agility, we realized the need for a maturity model to measure and enhance the evolution of these processes.
The following paragraphs will outline our experience implementing agility in teams, including technological and non-technical areas, in large organizations and complex contexts.
Identify and prioritize teams.
In collaboration with team leaders, we identified the teams that were ideal candidates to deliver value early and continuously, considering critical factors for the business and the company. To achieve this, we worked closely with Technology management, conducting regular meetings and prioritization exercises considering criticality and business value.
Establish frameworks
Considering the specific context, we identified the types of agile frameworks that could be implemented with the teams.
Team building
We created training plans to share knowledge and promote teamwork. One of our main challenges was to engage our organization’s members and suppliers, who play a crucial role in maintaining these practices. It’s worth noting that initially, these suppliers didn’t have subject matter experts or contractual obligations to do so.
Establish a collaboration process
The original team of experts that accompanied the teams needed sufficient to meet the organization’s demands. Therefore, we developed a strategy of creating ambassadors who were members of the organization and became the extended arms of the experts. These ambassadors were empowered with agile practices and mentored to help spread, nurture, and maintain them. Unfortunately, this strategy did not yield the expected results initially because team members were frequently reassigned to other tasks, making it difficult to maintain continuity. However, we persevered with the strategy to facilitate knowledge sharing and training support. As a result, we established communities of knowledge and practice to promote collaborative learning.
Devise artifacts to help the teams
After providing training, we gave the teams essential agile practice guides. These guides proved to be very helpful in implementing agile practices, especially when immediate support was unavailable.
Measure and maintain the practice
Teams that received support from agile experts or ambassadors had the opportunity to experience this support for approximately three months. At the end of this period, the team’s agility was evaluated using an internally created model to establish different levels the team had to pass.
The measurement results identified improvement areas, enabling the team to develop specific action plans. This encouraged continuous improvement and provided a mentor to help the team advance on their path to mastery (Shu-Ha-Ri).
Additionally, using this model to measure agile maturity gave the organization a diagnostic of agility-related technology areas.
One valuable lesson we learned while serving as suppliers to implement agile teams in operations was the significance of collaborating closely with the customer or business involved in this agile dynamic.
Agile Contracts: How to Improve Contract Management
When companies adopt agile methodologies to enhance their value delivery, they often realize the importance of improving contract management. Traditional contracts can hinder collaboration between customers and suppliers, so revising them to promote teamwork is crucial.
For this reason, they recognized the need to improve their collaborative approach by modifying contracts to clarify roles and responsibilities, forming semi-permanent teams instead of just making requests and waiting for delivery, and simplifying the SLA for non-compliance. Agility allows us to view changes as natural amid uncertainty through learning rather than just assigning blame.
Below, we will discuss some aspects we promote and support organizations in achieving.
Identify new forms of work:
Identify the framework to be used, the relevant aspects that modify the traditional contract, and the roles or actors involved in knowing and executing the agreement.
Hold regular meetings:
We create a core team of leaders from our suppliers, legal department, and organization to facilitate the agile transformation. We then hold regular meetings to identify operational midpoints, work methods, terms and conditions, service levels, and other relevant factors.
Identify operational conditions:
Based on the new working methods, we identified operational aspects that must be considered between the client and supplier. We followed the agile guide for making changes and agreed on the specific terms for each point.
Contract Types: How to Deal with Challenges and Constantly Changing Requests
It is necessary to use framework contracts to enable organizations to adapt to the constant changes in scope that may arise in each project, requirement, or development that promotes agility. Framework contracts facilitate this work by including general terms for different projects and providing flexibility to execute different scopes within a given budget and period.
At Ceiba, we have successfully tackled two significant challenges in this type of organization based on our experiences:
- Culture: In hierarchical organizations, changing the mentality and culture can be challenging due to established structures and processes. However, Ceiba’s experience has shown that starting in specific areas and measuring results can give visibility and expand through evidence. Similarly, we have found that utilizing management decisions is also crucial in achieving widespread cultural change.
- Resistance to change: implementing agile practices in these organizations requires adjustments and alterations to their long-standing methods. Creating strategies to support employees along this path, such as training and addressing specific concerns of the organization, is crucial to promoting openness to new ways of doing things.
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This exemplifies our expertise in working with agile teams and facilitating organizational transformations. If you’re seeking to enhance the digital and technological dynamics of your company, Ceiba can serve as your strategic partner, providing guidance and expertise in agile frameworks.
