A home port for employees. The evolution of #NewWork at Swisscom – part 3

In my third and final article on #NewWork, I'd like to shine a light on another important aspect of agile organisation. After having discussed the principles (article 1) and value streams (article 2) from a Swisscom perspective in my previous articles, I would now like to turn to the organisational structure of teams.

The advantages of agile setups are plain to see. However, humans are inclined to identify with a social reference group or, within a company, with an organisation. This now plays a slightly different role in the agile company than before.

From organisational unit to home port

What used to be called, somewhat bureaucratically, an "organisational unit", was renamed during the agile transformation: at Swisscom, employees are now grouped together in Home Base Units (HBU) – a home port. But there is more to this than just a mere name change.

"We bring employees with the same skills together to help them develop faster"

People with similar competencies and skills relating to a specific topic come together in an HBU; it has a flat hierarchy to ensure short communication and decision-making paths.

Such a focus makes it easier to plan and implement further education and development for skilled workers in particular. This is because an HBU deploys its employees to numerous virtual setups or 'value streams'. They can only create the most added value there if they posses cutting-edge skills in their specialist area.

At Swisscom, for example, we have established a Network HBU that covers all skills ranging from optical and copper network construction, to the optical transport network, all the way to the IP network – or a Cloud HBU covering skills from the areas storage, compute, virtualisation, operating system and databases.

The second aspect of an HBU is its flat hierarchy. If we as a company want to react more quickly and efficiently to changes in the environment, we need short communication and decision-making paths. This is the only way to ensure that employees have their finger on the pulse and can better understand decisions, for example, at the Group Executive Board level. After all, we all know how it is when each additional hierarchical level acts as a kind of filter.

"With flat hierarchies and short communication paths, we ensure that employees receive decisions in unfiltered form and can therefore understand them better"

Clear and uniform design principles for HBUs

Ideally, an HBU should comprise 250 to a maximum of 1000 employees, who are organised exclusively in tribes.

These tribes in turn comprise 40 to a maximum of 150 employees. In larger HBUs with many tribes, we have introduced an additional order level in which several tribes are combined; we refer to these as 'tribe clusters' This step is optional and is only used in two of eight HBUs. In the medium to long term, we also want to dissolve these in order to meet our stated goal of short communication and decision-making paths and highly flexible structures.

By the end of 2020, there will only be two or three levels between me as a member of the Group Executive Board and the employees in the technology area. Considering that this unit comprises a little over 3,500 employees and still had up to five hierarchical levels in 2018, this is a Herculean transformation task. This change will greatly increase our company's agility, which will enhance our ability to act and adapt to the market.

New understanding of line management in an HBU

Our experience with a dual system (strong line organisation next to new agile setups) in recent years has shown that a clearer distinction between leadership roles in line organisation and in agile setups is absolutely necessary. Conflicts of objectives and silo thinking occurred far too often, and this slowed down important projects.

This is why the classic line management role changes in the transformation to an HBU. This role used to have decision-making powers for a specific aspect of a topic or project, but here it consistently becomes a coach and includes the following tasks:

1. Personnel strategy to ensure capacity and the right balance between internal and external resources
2. Further development of soft skills (e.g. lean agile mindset) and expertise
3. Continuous development of culture and working methods
4. EPIC responsibility (requirements management) for transversal topics that affect many value streams (e.g. cloudification, introduction of DevOps techniques, real-time monitoring, etc.) or where the implementation of certain HBU-wide "Objectives & Key Results" is necessary

However, considering that the management span can reach up to 150 employees in one tribe, line management cannot provide individual training plans. It's rather a matter of defining skills development from a strategic perspective – always in coordination with the corporate strategy, the planned projects and technological developments. The responsibility for actually taking the necessary development steps lies with the employees themselves, the keyword here being "Be Your Own Brand".

"In an agile company, the line manager becomes a coach; however, Swisscom employees have to take possible development steps themselves to develop their personal brand"

Self-organisation and feedback culture in the agile setup

Employees leave their HBU or home port for a project that requires their skills and become part of a value stream. There, they work with colleagues from across the company in lean agile teams – you can find detailed information about value streams at Swisscom in my already published article (article 2).

Planning in the value streams is carried out using a backlog, which is prioritised by the product owner. Decisions are made as equals in an interdisciplinary team. For this to work, two aspects are required that must be embodied consistently:

1. Regular lean agile ceremonies such as planning, demos and retrospectives
2. An honest and open feedback culture

I believe that feedback culture in particular represents one of the biggest changes for employees. It must be learned, practised and continuously developed. This is because in an agile company, which is set up according to corresponding principles, decisions should be made autonomously within the agile setup. Feedback loops form the basis for learning together.

This is the only way that lets us take full advantage of agile collaboration and, thanks to the greatest possible agility, keep Swisscom successful in the market – in other words: To continuously deliver, learn, transform and reap. One cycle at a time.

Here's a summary of the most important findings:

• The line organisation in an agile company must have as flat a hierarchical structure as possible and ideally include employees with similar competencies and skills around a specific topic.
• In the technology area IT, Network & Infrastructure, we refer to the line organisation as a Home Base Unit (HBU) – an HBU ideally comprises between 250 and 1000 employees.
• In an agile company, the line manager becomes a coach, develops employees further and does their best to keep away from content-related issues.
• Employees are responsible for really pursuing further development steps themselves.
• An HBU deploys its employees to "value streams", where they contribute their skills to interdisciplinary teams. Value streams are self-organising and their members embody a feedback culture that aids continuous learning.

Want to carve out a career with Swisscom? Are you looking for a new challenge with the freedom to shape it as you wish? We are looking for DevOps Engineers, Product Owners & Managers, Solution Managers, Release Train Engineers and other talents. Are you interested in the ICT and telecommunications industry? Do you value an agile way of working, which allows you to help shape the future of a company? You can find out more about working at Swisscom here: swisscom.com/jobs. We are also looking for DevOps experts in Rotterdam. Find out more here.

What are your experiences with New Work and agile setups?

What is your challenge with new forms of collaboration? I look forward to your comments. Many thanks in advance!

This article wraps up my series on New Work. I hope that I was able to offer you some exciting insights into our transformation journey, I'm sure there will be more articles on this in the future. After all, transformation today is a continuous process with no beginning and no end.

In the next series, I will get to grips with telecommunications networks.

Digital greetings, Christoph

#christophaeschlimann #Agile #NewWork #Swisscom #ICT #digitaleTransformation

Christoph Aeschlimann, CTO and CIO Swisscom. My passions include the latest technologies such as 5G, Cloud, AI and everything to do with software - modern forms of collaboration such as agility and DevOps also fascinate me, which employees can use to become more involved and autonomous when working towards achieving a common goal.