EX 2020 Trend #3 - 'Agile is Here to Stay'

Going along with the idea of bringing in a wide variety of new skills e.g. marketing, UX, product owners, storytellers, and workplace designers, etc. to help create EX, is organizing these people into Agile teams.

Agile is something that can be implemented in any size of organization, reducing layers of management and erasing boundaries between silos. These teams respond in an EX context to “problems to solve” and “Moments that Matter” in EX Journey Maps, co-creating with internal customers new product portfolios. In the scheme of Design Thinking frameworks, Agile teams come into play ideally in the “Ideating”, “Prototyping” and “Testing” phases, after we have “Empathized” and “Defined” employee needs.

In companies we work with who are using Agile frameworks, they are organizing their people in “squads” or “clusters” – teams of ideally 7 people, headed by a Product Owner. These teams decide which processes or programs they want to define as “Products” and create a “Product Backlog”. They consist of a Product Owner and a rich mix of experts from different functions e.g. designers, storytellers, facilities, communications, digital, learning, etc. and an Agile Coach (or Scrum Master) who acts as both coach and the gatekeeper, helping them follow the Agile framework, and removing roadblocks.

These teams will use Agile frameworks such as Scrum and Sprint, which each focus on rapid prototyping of minimum viable products (MVP’s) in a product portfolio (Sprint referring to time box iterations within Scrum). Design Sprints are a five or ten-day process for responding to critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.

For example, Olivier Dubuisson at BP set up squads to design prototypes and turn problems into “Products” and decide priority, etc. They used the inputs they gathered on “Moments that Matter” and drivers in the problem definition stage to zero in on success drivers to be measured. An Agile “Onboarding Team” at BP consisted of 7 people - from Facilities, Communications, IT, Recruiting, and an Agile Coach.

Sander de Bruijn, Head of Global Employee Experience at ING, which is known for being an Agile organization, talks about starting out from the beginning with that mindset, as they analyzed and built journeys.

Sander says: “If you are just getting started with employee experience management, then approach it Journey by Journey, like onboarding or getting paid or leaving the company, anything along the employee lifecycle. Then, start designing the team from the journey, deductively.” Sander says they organized Agile teams, in squads, around each journey, where an EX expert lead works with an Agile Coach to make sure everyone follows the same methodology.”

Sander talks about integrating Agile with EX: “With Agile-based methodology it is actually simple: you start with exploration, identify a potential problem and then you start digging out everything that is connected to the problem. That really helps to validate the problem, creating certainty. Then you go into a solution phase, and afterwards go into a market phase and scale up.”

As part of their goal to build a “Future-proof Bank”, ABN AMRO incorporated EX into one of the pillars of their banking strategy with monthly and quarterly portfolio reviews. As part of their own Agile HR transformation, they asked “What does Agile mean in our setting?” They did extensive training across their HR organization on how to run Design Sprints and built new roles and skills around Agile, Digital and Service Design.

Roughly 6,000 people at ABN AMRO now work in an Agile work environment. Beginning with all their IT-related HR activities, ABN AMRO started back in 2017 working in an Agile set up - called the “HR grid”. Frank van den Brink, Chief EX Officer at ABN AMRO says, “Then we started to look at leveraging Agile towards non-traditional, non-IT departments, within HR.”

“Our goal was to have a multidisciplinary grid of end-to- end teams, with backlog and definition of epics and user stories like talent acquisition or learning programs. And that’s when we transitioned people from CoE specialist roles, into Product Owners, with new ways of working around Agile in 2-week Sprints, and collectively driving the new strategy in those new Agile infrastructures.”

Frank says, “We are now actually busy creating an HR Business Partner pool to make HR business and HR consultancy more Agile, unlike the dedicated “trusted advisor” role which we used to have in the Ulrich model.” Read more about ABN AMRO’s Agile Transformation in our cases.”

What impresses me most in seeing how ABN AMRO does Agile, is that it is through the interaction they have with employees and business stakeholders that they set priorities and define value.

Agile helps HR talk and act like the rest of the business, with the same kinds of success criteria and measurements for success.

• What journeys have you identified where Agile teams could best help you prototype new products?
• Who could serve as your Product Owners Agile, Coaches and your other team members?
• Which new Agile skills would you want to teach and scale in your HR organization?

For more insights on how Walmart, KBC Group, and others are building new capabilities, download our full report here:

https://www.exleadersnetwork.com/2020-ex-report/

For more information on the EX Leaders Network, go to: www.exleadersnetwork.com. To become a member or to share your EX Story in a future report, write us at: [email protected]

Elliott Nelson leads the EX practice at KennedyFitch. He researches, writes and coaches leaders and organizations in EX-Centric Transformations and building new Agile ways of working.