Delivering an Agile Awareness Seminar in the Supply Chain Optimisation Industry
Wavestone were appointed to consult for a client with the objective of raising awareness and expertise of leading with an agile mindset while adopting the necessary values, techniques and methods.
Wavestone have a long-standing relationship with this client, who is among the top European supply chain optimisation companies in the industry across the world. They are part of a French transport conglomerate that is ranked number one in transport and logistics in France and number four in Europe.
How did Wavestone help?
Agile Strategy & Leadership Seminar
For this project, the IT leadership team appointed Wavestone to prepare an offsite session for their top 10 employees within their IT function. Wavestone collaborated with their leadership team to create an interactive, full-day workshop covering the Agile/SAFe approach and Scrum method and framework.
Participants discussed implications, challenges and benefits of federated versus collective businesses and how to leverage value by implementing agile techniques. They also debated how the client could better engage their employees through innovation and creativity, and how they could apply agile techniques to make their product development and customer implementation processes more agile.
SAFe, Scrum, Lean, Kanban Theory & Application
Furthermore, the group discussed market leading theories and concepts across SAFe, Lean, Scrum, DevOps and Kanban, debating through the literature and providing relevant examples of how the client could apply them to their wider organisation. The participants also undertook an interactive brainstorming and strategising workshop, with the purpose of not only demonstrating how they could apply the learnings, but also how to build maturity and confidence across the group.
Practical Implementation
The chief activity of the day was a “Lego for Scrum” exercise, where the group broke into two teams and were tasked with building a miniature Lego city. During this exercise, they created user stories, a Kanban board, used Poker Planning to estimate effort, and completed their first sprint, sprint demo and retrospective, all while receiving feedback from Wavestone’s Agile Coaches. This allowed the client to put into practice the theories and frameworks learned earlier in the day to truly ingrain what was taught.
The Relationship with the Client
Wavestone has worked with the client across their five business areas for many years, so understand and appreciate their current challenges and continue to help solve them. For this engagement, the Wavestone team consisted of two experienced consultants (Agile SMEs) who led the preparation of the offsite session. This involved several structured calls with the client to align and establish what should be delivered on the day to maximise impact, with the two consultants delivering the workshop on the day. Due to the success of the session, the relationship with the client continues with the ambition to scale agile awareness and expertise to other teams across the client organisation.
Our Unique Approach
Wavestone demonstrated a positive attitude during the preparation and execution phases of this client mission by collaborating with client IT leaders about topics relevant to their business whilst displaying high levels of energy to motivate and inspire participants during the seminar. Wavestone remained flexible and transparent through revising the topics during preparation to build sufficient time in the day to debate and challenge agile theories. This allowed the group to embed what was taught both through interactive play and aligning with their current role.
The Results
The desired outcomes and objectives were to educate the client participants on SAFe, Lean, Scrum, DevOps and Kanban, all of which were achieved. The aim of allowing senior participants to interact effectively with each other, who are usually situated in a traditionally siloed environment was also met, as IT leadership from different business functions came together in an interactive and constructive dynamic. The feedback received from participants described a motivating and enjoyable experience, allowing them to brainstorm, participate in collaborative activities, and further understand the delivery of various agile methods and frameworks.
In summary, post-event, the client reported a motivating, fun, professional and interactive session which covered all relevant agile topics requested and aligned to their business strategy. Wavestone continue to advise this client across agile topics and other business and digital transformation problems they face.
