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News-Ticker 02/2024

We would like to introduce you to our new NEWS TWITTER. Every month you'll receive 5-10 links to the most exciting news, stories, disruptions, developments, etc. around Agile, Supply Chain, Leadership, Ecosystems, ..

Sustainable Growth Redefined: How IKEA is Pioneering a Climate-Positive Future

IKEA decouples economic growth from environmental impact, achieving a 24.3% reduction in climate footprint from 2016, while boosting revenue by 30.9%.

—> Read the Article (Source scope3.co / Ikea.com)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • The New Paradigm of Business Sustainability is a booster for revenue. Business Agility and commercial roles such as procurement play an important role to solve bigger problems together across companies.

  • Year-on-year progress is vital. It reflects a company's ongoing commitment to sustainability, adapting and improving with each passing year.

  • Ikea’s approach exemplifies the importance of continuous innovation in corporate sustainability strategies.

  • Sustaining Year-on-Year Progress, each year counts. Ikea's initiatives, from ramping up renewable energy use to enhancing energy efficiency, demonstrate a commitment to making real change, year after year.

The Management Paradigm Driving The World’s Most Valuable Firms

The most valuable and the fastest growing firms today are being managed very differently from average performing firms. The shift is being driven by practitioners: average firms are still catching up. In 2024, it’s time to follow Peter Drucker’s 1997 advice and “look out the window and see what's visible—but not yet seen." A paradigm shift in management has occurred. The new way of managing embodies at least five big shifts.

—> Read the Article (Source: Forbes.com)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • From the most successful firms can we learn that to solve todays increasingly complex problems, introduce the next innovation, or to survive upcoming competitors a new mindsets and ways of working is required.

  • Work Is Done By Self-Organizing Teams which requires a new management / leadership.

  • As Satya Nadell explains the change and the need to improve became part of the business. “the key was agility, agility, agility. We needed to develop speed, nimbleness, and athleticism to get the consumer experience right, not just once but daily.”

Nintendo CEO’s refusal to layoff staff goes viral following industry-wide cuts

"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease."
said former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, who cut his own salary by 50% and all of the board members cut their pay by 20% so they wouldn't have to lay off anyone

—> Read the Article (Source: NME.com)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • Good people are very hard to find again and laying them off is based on a very much a short-term thinking

  • Leaders should ask themselves if the business results are not developing as expected to cut their salary instead

  • In last consequence even more disruptive companies like e.g. Haier have reduced the hierarchy and instead fully empowered their employees including a cost- and wealth sharing with incredible business results.

Reinventing Procurement: From Cost Center to Innovation Driver

The interview with Todd Heimes of Amazon Business highlights the transformation of procurement teams from traditional cost centers to strategic drivers of innovation. Embracing digital technologies such as AI, ML, and blockchain, procurement is evolving to play a more pivotal role in achieving organizational goals, including environmental and social objectives. Heimes emphasizes the growing importance of hiring tech-savvy procurement teams and the integration of these teams into the broader organizational ecosystem. The interview anticipates a future where procurement becomes more personalized, emphasizing the need for adaptability, collaboration, and innovation within procurement teams.

—> Read the blog post (Source: MIT Sloan Management Review)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • The necessity to build a Collaborative Ecosystem: not only across functions in the company, such as operations and finance, but also including external companies, such as suppliers and partners. The procurement teams can undoubtedly play a pivotal role in fostering this collaboration.

  • Agile Mindset for Adaptability: Adopting an agile mindset will encourage procurement teams to embrace change and adapt quickly to evolving technologies, business objectives and resiliency.

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Sophie Durand Sophie Durand

Enerkem boosts their procurement process with Lean Agile Procurement for the EcoPlanta project

Learn how Enerkem, an innovative leader of the clean tech, sourced a strategic engineering partner in less than 3 months for deploying their technology at the heart of EcoPlanta, which will produce biomethanol and circular methanol from non-recyclable waste.

Enerkem, a clean technology company headquartered in Montreal, is the global pioneer in the production of renewable methanol and ethanol from solid waste.

Their agile and innovative approach reflects also in their ways of working.

Faced with a critical three-month deadline to select a strategic partner for the design of their new European plant, EcoPlanta, Enerkem adopted an innovative approach with Lean Agile Procurement (LAP) to ensure efficient and rapid collaboration.

In the petrochemical industry, selecting a partner of this magnitude generally takes a minimum of six months.

How did Enerkem manage to select a supplier while accurately assessing the cultural and business alignment between its team and the partner's, thus ensuring a smooth and effective collaboration, all within a timeframe half as long as the standard ?

Watch the video


Download case study.

This case study was also published in the Swiss Magazine Professional association for Purchasing and Supply Management in German & French

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News-Ticker 01/2024

We would like to introduce you to our new NEWS TWITTER. Every month you'll receive 5-10 links to the most exciting news, stories, disruptions, developments, etc. around Agile, Supply Chain, Leadership, Ecosystems, ..

How China's BYD Overtook Tesla

Elon Musk’s Tesla has been overtaken by China’s BYD as the world’s top selling electric carmaker. BYD’s rise is the result of long-term strategic thinking by both the company and the Chinese government. And it’s setting up China to be a dominant player in the global automotive industry. Here are the three most important things that have made BYD the king of EVs.

—> Watch the Video (Source Bloomberg)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • Joint longterm strategy of company, partners and government

  • Business Agility which allows faster response to market or supply chain disruptions and made the business more resilient

  • Competitiveness through a high vertical integration, localization of production and in-house development of key expertises

Managing Change Fatigue?

For better or worse, all types of changes – personal and professional, big and small – impact our lives. In this episode of Relearning Leadership, Pete talks about his own experience managing change fatigue as well as how he has seen its effects in our communities, workplaces, and personal lives.

Listen now to hear his three ways in which we can acknowledge and manage how change can be tiring – and how to reframe it to be reinvigorating. 

—> Listen to the Podcast (Source: ALJ a LAP Alliance Partner)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • Change has become multi-dimensional, continuous and exhausting (market disruptions, climate change, changes in society, ...)

  • Change is good if fulfills a purpose, we can change us but nobody else. Start small yourself.

  • Accept the things that I can’t change.

Agile Performance Management?

Learn from the global healthcare manufacturer Coloplast how they’ve achieved success with a new performance management approach.

—> Read the case study (Source: BBRT a LAP Alliance Partner)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • The overall purpose is to create the foundation for unleashing / realizing the company’s full potential. It is actually more about enabling performance than about managing perform­ance.

  • Budgets were not coherent with the strategy and resulte often in wrong and undesired behavior, needs a lot of time making them, and, on top of that, they are useless a few months into the accounting period

  • The separation of the budget purposes: Ambition, Forecast, Capital Allocation and Incen­tives increased the quality of our work substantially, and at the same time, we avoided the problems associated with the annual budget

Agile Contracts - The only Template you’ll ever need!

Agile collaboration became the new normal to deal with the ever-changing demands of today’s business. Often this collaboration isn’t supported enough  with an as agile contract. 

—> Read the blog post (Source: LAP Alliance)

Some of our conclusions are:

  • Contracts that embrace Agile values and principles allow for more agile collaboration between parties and therefore better management of uncertainty.

  • The potential is huge. Compare with the example by the New Zealand Government.

  • An agile contract isn’t just the Statement of Work ;-)

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Trust-Based Development of the COVID-19 Vaccine

Find out why BioNtech, Pfizer and Fogun chose to work together in a trust-based way, rather than what you might expect from a contract. Tim Cummins, President of the WorldCC, along with Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNtech, shared this story at the World Agility Forum 2024, co-hosted by the LAP Alliance this year.

Find out why BioNtech, Pfizer and Fogun chose to work together in a trust-based way, rather than what you might expect from a contract. Tim Cummins, President of the WorldCC, along with Ugur Sahin, CEO of BioNtech, shared this story at the World Agility Forum 2024, co-hosted by the LAP Alliance this year.

Hear Ugur Sahin, CEO BioNtech speaking about why and how they’ve established a trust-based collaboration with their former competitors Pfizer and Fosun and why this all has resulted in the most successful project ever for all the parties.

Transcription of Ugur Sahin’s part:

“ Indeed, the question is, how can you generate a contract for such a complex project to develop a vaccine, again, a completely unknown pathogen, yeah, where So what we understood is there's no time to make a contract. Contract making requires usually at least six, usually up to 12 months in the pharmaceutical industry.

So we just started with a letter of intention to collaborate. Yeah, it was a few page document describing in a memorandum of understanding the shared vision. The framework of core principle to direct the collaboration, some of them which I had listed in the slide before.

And the memorandum of understanding explicitly provided flexibility to address challenges. And adapt the contract and adapt the principles when the situation evolved. So the only agreement that we signed later on was the development agreement. And, there were other agreements, agreements, which were needed, for example, the manufacturing agreement, the commercial commercialization agreement.

And we did not touch that. So actually the commercialization agreement was signed about 10 months after we started the project, and the problem was in this agreement and also in the manufacturing agreement that it was difficult to describe what we were doing on a daily basis.

Because if you put that into a contract language appears not to fit anymore to the way how we solve the problem. And as mentioned, commercial interests were not a roadblock because they were not the key drivers of this project. So we simply decided that the project is a 50 percent cost sharing and profit sharing collaboration and we will find out later on.

How to sort that in, in detail. I don't know. The only thing that I know is that this task based collaboration was the most successful way of dealing with the project. And, and the project became also commercially highly attractive. For me, the key question is, I strongly believe that all, all task-based collaborations there which would use the same type of model would be much superior, than collaborations which are based on control.”

Watch the Recording

FREE Download of the Slides

Expect other case studies from all around the world in this series.

Speaker Bio

Tim Cummins, President at World Commerce & Contracting

Thank you!

Ab big thank you goes to our sponsor apd.coach for taking care of the post production of all these videos

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Awarded success Story with the Dunedin City Council

The Dunedin City Council won an award for Outstanding Cooperation & Collaboration at the 2023 World Commerce and Contracting (Asia Pacific) Innovation and Excellence Awards – Congratulations to both the team and the new partner!

Dunedin City Council, New Zealand, www.dunedin.govt.nz

The Dunedin City Council won an award for Outstanding Cooperation & Collaboration at the 2023 World Commerce and Contracting (Asia Pacific) Innovation and Excellence Awards – Congratulations!

I’ve awarded many, many contracts, but I’ve never been hugged by a vendor at the end of it, when I told him that he won the contract. That tells you something.

— Serge Kolman, Procurement & Contracts Manager, Dunedin City Council

The award was for a Lean-Agile Procurement (LAP) process the Dunedin City Council (DCC) undertook to source a Contract Lifecycle Management System, and the outstanding way DCC and the successful vendor/partner, Portt, collaborated through the lean-agile process to achieve their goals.

Procurement at Dunedin City Council

The Dunedin City Council represents the people that live in Ōtepoti Dunedin, New Zealand. The DCC’s purpose is to enable decision making by and on behalf of communities, and to promote social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing.

Public dollar spend makes up a significant proportion of the NZ economy, including spend from local government organizations like DCC. The DCC has an important responsibility to ensure it spends rate payers funds prudently through its procurement processes – in an open, transparent and accountable way. DCC follows the NZ Government Rules of Procurement. When procuring Goods or Services, they use the NZ Government Electronic Tendering Site (GETS) to list all open market tenders. This site enables registered users to electronically review and respond to all current open market tenders being conducted by the Council.

One of DCC’s procurement rules is that procurement with a cumulative value of over $100,000 requires an open and competitive process, which typically takes over three months.

Why Dunedin City Council used a Lean-Agile approach

Previously, DCC had faced challenges sourcing Software as a Service (SaaS) through a traditional open market Request for Proposal (RFP) approach, with a few complex SaaS contracts resulting in vendor/partners that could not deliver on requirements.

The DCC was going through a Contract Management improvement project, which included sourcing a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system and wanted to ensure the same situation did not occur again as with previous SaaS procurements. This was a strategically important project for DCC, and therefore success was paramount.

It was important that the CLM system sourced met the Council’s requirements to ensure the success of the wider Contract Management improvement project.

When DCC was looking for a way to maximize the success of the procurement process to ensure the right outcomes were achieved, they began looking into the Lean-Agile Procurement approach as an option.

Dunedin City Council’s Lean-Agile Approach

To source the CLM system, DCC decided the contract was complex enough to use a Lean-Agile Procurement approach.

DCC undertook a two stage procurement process.

Stage one was an open market Registration of Interest, using GETS(fn). This was done for two reasons:

1. To comply with DCC’s Procurement and Contract Management Policy.

2. We didn’t know what we didn’t know and didn’t want to miss out on new or emerging technology that we hadn’t uncovered through our market research (aka we had FOMO!).

Following stage one, DCC shortlisted three vendor/partners for the second stage of the CLM Software procurement.

Stage two was a two day workshop ‘Big Room Event’ utilizing Lean-Agile Procurement techniques. As it was DCC’s first Lean-Agile Procurement process, we engaged Ross Darrah from Pareto Toolbox, as an expert in LAP, to assist and coach the DCC team through the process.

Image source: Dunedin City Council - DCC and Pareto Toolbox presenting to Lean Agile Procurement Canvas during the DCC LAP Process.

It was acknowledged that LAP was a new process for vendor/partners and DCC stakeholders, and particularly as this was being conducted in a public sector environment, probity was absolutely crucial. The DCC team and vendor/partners were therefore coached and fully briefed on LAP, to ensure full understanding of the process and to give confidence to all stakeholders and vendor/partners that they were involved in a ‘safe’ process which was fair, transparent and complied with required public sector regulations and probity standards.

The DCC team fully embraced the LAP process and focused during the two days on getting to know the shortlisted vendor/partners. It was important for DCC to understand how the respective vendor’s approach would work for DCC and the capabilities of their CLM solutions.

During the two days of the LAP process, DCC and shortlisted vendor/partners approached the event as an opportunity to start building the relationships.

Business Outcomes Achieved using the Lean-Agile Approach

In adopting a Lean-Agile Procurement approach, DCC achieved accelerated decision making and cut down the time and cost required for vendor/partners to do business with DCC. It also enabled strong relationship building between DCC and the successful vendor/partner – setting a solid foundation for the delivery of the work.

Image source: Dunedin City Council - Serge Kolman, DCC Procurement and Contracts Manager presenting to vendor/partners on day one.

The CLM solution was delivered on time and within budget. The success of this contract can be attributed to the innovative procurement approach, effective project delivery, and the willingness of DCC staff to try new ways of working that benefit DCC, its vendor/partners, and the Dunedin communities they work for.

There were some doubts voiced by vendor/partners prior to the event, as this was the first Lean-Agile process DCC and the vendor/partners had participated in. However, the feedback from staff and all vendor/partners involved was overwhelmingly positive - even from the vendor/partners who were not successful!

Key Learnings, Tips and Takeaways

Investment Logic Mapping

Once the CLM software contract was awarded, and as part of the implementation phase, DCC undertook an investment logic mapping (ILM) process with the successful vendor/partner, Portt.

The ultimate aim of the ILM process was to get to the core of the problems we are trying to solve by developing problem statements and identifying the benefits of solving those problems.

Image Source: Dunedin City Council. - Natalie Strong, DCC Procurement Advisor and LAP facilitator updating the LAP canvas during canvas review with DCC staff and shortlisted vendor/partners.

DCC found this process valuable, and they would in future undertake an ILM exercise with key staff and stakeholders before they went through a Lean-Agile Procurement process, as this would inform the canvas (true north) and User Stories by developing problem statements and can be used to measure success of Lean-Agile process.

Working with Vendor/Partners to solve Problems

DCC found it very valuable to have the ability to talk through issues and challenges with vendor/partners, who then demonstrated how they could help solve these problems in real time.

Two Days vs Three Days

DCC felt like they would benefit from one more day, to feel less rushed.

A great outcome can be achieved by doing a Lean-Agile process in two days, but DCC felt like they would get a bit more out of the process if an extra day was included.

Online vs In-Person

Lean-Agile Procurement works best with people in the room, online presence is fine but to be really successful DCC found that physical presence was best.

Tips for other Procurement Leaders

Embrace the process. DCC have found Lean-Agile Procurement to be a really useful tool to have in the procurement toolbelt for the right project.

Ensuring you engage early with decision makers within your environment is essential to the success of the process. Engage early to enlist the support you need (including from decision makers with financial authority) and to enable and achieve the full benefits and potential of a Lean-Agile process.

Time Management & Peer Feedback

A key learning from the Lean-Agile Procurement event was the importance of time management. As already stated, there was a lot to achieve in two days, meaning that sticking to agreed timeframes was of utmost importance. To mitigate this challenge, we ensured that vendor/partners were clear about timeframes up front and this was reinforced throughout the event. In addition, vendor/partners (and DCC stakeholders) were kept on time by using a timer and alarm. This ‘refereeing’ of the event ensured that the time was maximized.

The strict keeping of time added an additional benefit. It ensured there was sufficient time to provide immediate feedback to vendor/partners to ensure they knew where they stood and made the event a success. This also ensured respect was given to vendor/partners, that is they were held to time but they were provided with feedback on where they needed to improve.

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Current Trends & Crisis in Procurement - How to integrate this with Lean-Agile Procurement

The world has become very unpredictable (supply chain disruptions, inflation, ..), new trends arrive every other day (ESG, circular economy, sustainability, diversity, ..) while the demand in procurement is increasing. So how to integrate all this, and do we need to adapt anything in Lean-Agile Procurement?

The world has become very unpredictable (supply chain disruptions, inflation, ..), new trends arrive every other day (ESG, circular economy, sustainability, diversity, ..) while the demand in procurement is increasing. So how to integrate all this, and do we need to adapt anything in Lean-Agile Procurement?

Many procurement organisations and it's professionals are getting overwhelmed by the unpredictability, new trends and increasing demands.

The only thing we can predict: Things are unpredictable.

—- Tim Cummins, President World Commerce & Contracting

Let's take one of the latest trends in procurement - ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance). It is currently one of the top priorities in the c-suite, a head of ESG is often hired, etc. Don't get me wrong, ESG deserves its place and procurement needs to embrace it. However, my observation of the day-to-day work of procurement professionals doesn't really change anything. They are still following their internal procurement process, so that such an important topic never really scales.

So the question is how to scale new trends and integrate current challenges such as supply chain disruptions, rising prices, etc.?

Well, by applying Lean-Agile Procurement we work cross-functional. This allows us to invite experts into the team as needed. While the aim is always to enable the team members in all new topics. This allows any new issue to be scaled across the organisation over time.

In additon, the Lean Procurement Canvas is a nice summary of the key aspects of a strategic sourcing case and drives the right conversations. To take this to the next level we've added some new questions to the "Cheat Sheet" that relate to the current trends/crises such as ESG.

We look forward to your feedback!

Free download here (Bottom of homepage)

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Roche - The Agile Journey of Roche Procurement

Most have heard of ‘Agile’ by now and the theory sounds promising - to setup your organisation, team and ways of working to be ready to respond and innovate quickly in a world that is changing at an unprecedented speed. In Procurement and Contracting, the Agile success stories that come from IT and App building can feel remote and hard to translate to our world. In Roche, these pressures sit alongside the need to constantly bring ‘value beyond savings’ from suppliers and contracting. Join Colm Diamond and Mirko Kleiner spoke at the European Summit 2022 of the WorldCC about Roche’s journey on how the Procurement and Contracts function are changing their structure, how they think and how they work fundamentally to try to get Agile to work for them and how it’s going in reality.

Roche - Global

Colm and Mirko were invited to talk at the European Summit of the World Commerce & Contracting about the Agile Journey of Roche Procurement. It’s an inspiring session where Colm is giving us with several stories some insights in the new ways of working at Roche Procurement.

The slide deck

The Slide Deck could be #free download here: https://bit.ly/3tQwfGy

More about the Speaker

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Agile Contracting in Banking using Lean-Agile Procurement

In this case story, Rivo Head of Procurement at Candriam shares how Lean-Agile Procurement was used to procure a complex solution in banking, in the matter of weeks not years.

In this case story, Rivo Head of Procurement at Candriam shares how Lean-Agile Procurement was used to procure a complex solution in banking, in the matter of weeks not years.

Panelists

Rivo RANDRIAMANANJARA

Head of Procurement at Candriam

https://www.linkedin.com/in/randriamananjara/

Mattias Skarin

Lean & Kanban Coach, crisp.se

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattiasskarin/

Source of video: https://blog.crisp.se/2022/04/04/mattiasskarin/agile-contracting-in-banking-using-lean-agile-procurement

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Agile Contracts - The only Template you’ll ever need!

Agile collaboration became the new normal to deal with the ever-changing demands of today’s business. Often this collaboration isn’t supported enough with an as agile contract.

Agile collaboration became the new normal to deal with the ever-changing demands of today’s business. Often this collaboration isn’t supported enough  with an as agile contract. 

In this blog post you’ll learn about the only template you’ll ever need.

Agile Collaboration - Houston we have a problem!

With Lean-Agile Procurement we’re fostering collaboration and co-creation of e.g. the solution design, a joint agile roadmap, the proposal, etc. between all parties even before signing a contract. This is also because it turned out that the social- and cultural fit are as important success criterias, then the business fit. Nobody chooses his partner in life just because of her/his looking too. If we’re looking closer to an agile collaboration we’re constantly re-agreeing because of an ever changing environment. The interdisciplinary team consisting of internal- and external people is e.g. re-agreeing and improving their collaboration model, their joint agile roadmap, their joint business objectives of the next iteration, down to the concrete implementation of a customer need, etc. with every feedback cycle. These good practices e.g. applied with the help of Scrum became the new normal. So all good? Unfortunately not, Houston we have a problem!

The problem is that a lot of agile cross-company delivery teams lack of a legal foundation based on agile values & principles, that supports this kind of agile collaboration. Furthermore there hasn’t been a „standard“ yet, what an Agile Contract really is and what not. This made it difficult to onboard the legal community and even worse created an even bigger confusion in the agile community.

The Solution - The only template you’ll ever need!

The easiest solution for defining a standard would be creating a, or even better THE template of an Agile Contract. This has served us very well up till now, where the things have been predictable. As Agile Collaboration tries to embrace uncertainty every contract became very contextual. To put it on one extreme: Sometimes the only thing we have is a vision like e.g. how Artificial Intelligence (AI) could support our business?-So time-n-material is the only way to go?-A clear NO!-T+M is just one possibility. But there is a whole spectrum of potential agile contract types e.g. driven by the level of risk-sharing. 

The only solution for a standard left is to take it to the next level of abstraction: Values & principles. Please welcome the Agile Contract Manifesto (ACM), created by a global group of experts from agile-, commercial- and legal communities.

It consists of 4 main values..

Image source: agilecontractmanifesto.org

.. and 10 principles

Image source: agilecontractmanifesto.org

ACM in Practise - How to apply the ACM?

Similar to an Agile Contract are values & principles contextual too. So as a first step it’s recommended to create a joint understanding. The easiest is e.g. by sharing examples. Then you could take an existing „agile“ Contract and assess and improve it based on the ACM. It’s recommended to include all parties in that exercise such as e.g. Product Owner, delivery team members, agile coach or Scrum Master, lawyer, etc. as development of this legal foundation becomes a team effort as well to create the maximum ownership and minimizing risks at the same time. Tipp: Check out the Lean Procurement Canvas, which gives a lot of guidance to ask the important questions. 

Furthermore it’s very important to understand that an Agile Contract is not just the Statement of Work (SoW). It includes all parts of a contractual framework such as e.g. None-disclosure Agreement (NDA), General Terms & Conditions (GTC), Master Service Agreement (MSA), etc. If you think of e.g.  your latest NDA you’ll agree there’s a lot of improvement to assign agile values.

Conclusions

In other words if Agile Contracts embrace the values & principles of the ACM we could create an even bigger impact than just supporting a more agile collaboration. The potential is huge. Take the example of an outcome-based contract by the New Zealand Government. They took the outcomes of the partnership to society and sustainability into consideration of the services and goods they’re buying. Read more about it here:  https://bit.ly/3H1iFnw

Become part of this movement and sign the ACM:  https://bit.ly/34IVuS7

Be the change you wanna see in the world. As an agile coach / Scrum Master get in touch with your legal team or the other way round!

Wanna become an Expert in Agile Contracts?

The LAP Alliance offers a unique Certified Advance LAP Module on the topic, where you learn the different agile contract types, how to apply the ACM and coach your peers in this important topic.

Find out more, or register: https://bit.ly/3I0B6tM  

ACCONOLOGEMENT

A Big thanks goes to my peers of the ACM Creators Group!

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Scaling Agile beyond Companies

In this article you’ll learn why Tesla never had a chip shortage, how you could select new strategic partners in DAYS instead of Months and so how to start scaling agile beyond your company with your preferred Agile Framework and Lean-Agile Procurement.

The Covid-19 crisis made it obvious we are at risk if we don’t manage our dependencies to our suppliers and partners along the whole supply chain. They are an essential part of our value stream/s we need to take into consideration to achieve true Business Agility. In other words we are only as agile as our partner ecosystem is. 

In this article you’ll learn why Tesla never had a chip shortage, how you could select new strategic partners in DAYS instead of Months and so how to start scaling agile beyond your company with your preferred Agile Framework 1 and Lean-Agile Procurement 2 (Short LAP).

A retrospective - Scaling cross-Company today

If you’re not an agilist you need to know that out of good practices a number of scaling frameworks have evolved in the past years. You might have heard of SAFe1.1, Scrum@Scale1.2, the Spotify “Model”1.3, Agile@Scale DA1.4, LESS1.5 or NEXUS1.6. The purpose of all of them was to scale the benefits of aligning around value with cross-functional teams to the whole organization.

Find out more about the benefits of these scaling frameworks in the Annual State of Agile Report.

Where are the suppliers in the Agile Scaling Frameworks?

The suppliers are basically treated as team members, full cross-functional teams or even integrated services. Depending on the business suppliers might have other important roles e.g. as advisors in the portfolio, etc. 

Image source: compare with framework references

  

In other words, all the frameworks like to apply the same values & principles to our suppliers and partners, which is very good at least in theory :-)

Find out more about suppliers in agile in the article suppliers@SAFe.

Reality check - Top 3 challenges with suppliers while scaling agile?

Challenge 1: Who’s responsible for the suppliers?

In non-agile organizations the commercial functions such as sales, procurement, partner management, etc. have been responsible for the supplier management. To be honest the agile community hasn’t really found a more agile way for most of those tasks and responsibilities yet. They are mainly treated as shared services. In the best case they’ve visualized their work via a Kanban Board or started to experiment with Scrum. If you think of your latest negotiation you’ll agree that they are far away from applying agile values yet. 

Image source: scrumatscale.com

To be fair, good Scrum Masters or on higher level Scaled Scrum Masters have taken over some of the tasks to e.g. manage a supplier, the contracts, etc.

Procurement & Sales are responsible for up to 80% of a Company’s revenue
— Chief Procurement Manager leading Bank in UK

The potential is huge if we think of the fact that procurement and sales are responsible for up to 80% of a company’s revenue!-Imagine the direct business impact, if we could improve time-to-market by just some percentage?!

Challenge 2: How to select key partners?

In Portfolio Management where often the need for a new strategic partnership is defined today we’re using e.g. the Business Canvas. The canvas has a section “Key Partners”, but there’s no approach based on agile values & principles to find and select those.

Image source: strategizer.com


Find out more selecting a partner in agile e.g. in the article Strategic Vision & Backlog Prioritization in Scrum@Scale.

Challenge 3: How to align contracts with Agile collaboration?

The global annual State of Agility in Procurement & Supply showed that 78% of professionals in commercial functions have less than 3 years experience in Agile Contracts.

Image source: LAP Alliance


In other words even if the parties like to collaborate in an agile way they most likely suffer from a good legal foundation. 

Find out more in the article Agile Contracts in SAFe or download the full report about the State of Agility in Procurement & Supply here.

Scaling cross-Companies with Lean-Agile Procurement!

Let’s find out what we could learn from DevOps, how you’ll improve time to market by 400-800% applying Lean-Agile Procurement to your supplier selection approach and how  all of this will help you in scaling agile cross-company.

History

Traditional sourcing approaches are transactional 3, where the buyer side defines the scope and the supplier side offers a solution incl. price for it. This process called Request for Proposal (short RfP) hasn’t really changed in the past 120 years. If applied to complex cases such as e.g. introducing a new ERP system with a new partner it delays time to market by 6-12+ months on average 4. The main reason is that all the details in scope e.g. new business processes, technical integrations, etc. can’t be foreseen in a reasonable amount of time or will change as we go.

Lean-Agile Procurement in a Nutshell

Lean-Agile Procurement (short LAP) was invented to introduce an approach to find and select a key partner based on agile values & principles in DAYS instead of months. The selection is highly collaborative, similar to a PI-planning having all the right people from all parties -even competitors- in the same room co-creating their proposals and an agile contract together. LAP has become the global standard, winning in 2020 the World Procurement Awards with the success story “Sourcing an ERP System in just 2 DAYS” 4 and is currently changing the view on Business Agility.

Of course will the sourcing of all the simple to complicated staff such as e.g. stationary be digitized. Those so-called operational tasks are up to 90% of such centralized services. In other words the sweet spot of LAP is complex or strategic sourcing 3.

The Agile Team redefined

After more than 5 years experience applying LAP in every industrie it became obvious that in a truly agile organization consisting of team-of-teams e.g. procurement, sales and partner management will become additional capabilities every agile team needs to have. Some people call LAP “DevOps on Steroids” or just the next logical evolution of it.

Lean-Agile Procurement is like DevOps on Steroids!
— Senior Agile Coach

In practice this means we add all capabilities we’ll need to define strategy, customer needs, sourcing strategy, delivery, operation and even to contract to an agile team. In other words the agile team gets full ownership over the product livecycle. While applying LAP e.g. in Banking it turned out that compliance is a huge roadblocker, so we added somebody from compliance to the team too. 

Image source: LAP Alliance

A further advantage of such an end-to-end agile team or team-of-teams is that we overcome the transactional nature of e.g. sourcing. As we all know handovers are always a risk, delaying time-to-market, etc.

The Lean Procurement Canvas 

LAP doesn’t make the existing sourcing process more efficient. Instead the focus lies always on being effective – doing the RIGHT things. In an uncertain environment this also means saying goodbye to detailed specifications, and accepting that anything can change at any time. In today’s smart business development scene the Business Model Canvas 5 is a living document and 100-page business cases are a thing of the past. LAP demands the same for defining a partnership, and the Lean Procurement Canvas 2 provides it.

Image source: LAP Alliance 

The canvas is divided in the right / left side, where on the right the customer or buyer side is represented and on the left we gather the information about the partner or supplier. The four main sections are about the WHY <> WHAT <> HOW. As an integral part of the canvas we also define the WHO or the people from both parties that will collaborate. A social- and cultural fit turned out as a very important success criteria for any collaboration.

For more details download the cheat sheet or start with it in your favorite tool Mural.co / Miro.com.

“By focusing to the customer needs Tesla never ran into a Chip shortage”
— -- Joe Justice Authored Scrum Master (book), created eXtreme Manufacturing, founded WIKISPEED.

During the Covid-19 crisis the big German car manufacturers ran and are still running into huge shortages e.g. in Computer Chips. Main reason was that their sourcing strategy was based on lean principles only. They in fact had prefered suppliers for each component and the component was exactly defined with focus to the HOW and the lowest price. With LAP we focus on the buyer side on the WHY and WHAT and wanna stay as agile on the HOW and with that also on the supplier. Following this principle Tesla never ran into that problem until today.

The Lean Procurement Canvas is an Agile Contract
— Ursula Sury, lic jur, Die Advokatur AG

it turned out that the Lean Procurement Canvas is to most lean Agile Contract beside a verbal agreement. 

​​The Canvas can be used by startups, corporations who would like to:

  • Setup and align a new internal, mixed or outsourced 3rd party agile product delivery team

  • Co-create an agile agreement with multiple vendors in the same room simultaneously

  • Assess and manage existing teams or partnerships with 3rd parties

  • Close a deal more effectively as a vendor

It has been used by Air France KLM, Gazprom, BNP Parisbas, Auckland Council and many more from the private and public sector.

SAFe / Scrum@Scale / etc & LAP Approach - Source a key Partner in Days!

Let’s see how all fits together and how you could source a key partner in DAYS too!-The LAP Approach has four generic steps that need to be implemented in every context differently. The Lean Procurement Canvas is our guiding tool, while it is by definition a living document throughout a partnership and can always just be a summary. We usually end up with a ton of attachments to it such as e.g. personas, a user story map, collaboration model, contractual framework, etc.

To make it more clear, find the following four generic steps of the LAP Approach and some explanation how this could fit into SAFe, Scrum@Scale and the Spotify “Model”.

Image source: LAP Alliance 

Find out more about the Big Room Workshop/s in LAP in the Article Big Room Workshop.

Business Outcomes with Lean-Agile Procurement

CKW a swiss Energy Company together with flowdays, won the 2018 CIPS-Europe award 7 at the Budapest ProcureCon event. Find some empirical data from that success story to get an idea about the business outcomes with LAP in comparison to traditional sourcing approaches.

Time-to-market was radically improved from 4 months to 4 weeks while the efforts could be cut in half. Through focusing to prioritized customer needs and talking about any risk / concern, etc. while the big room workshop we’re able to improve spent by 80%. The agile team assessed not just the best product, but the full package including the best social- & cultural fit. 9 out of 10 recommended the LAP Approach, even the shortlisted vendors that didn made it.

In terms of delivery the project was a success too. The jointly agreed objectives have been overachieved within the initial budget and time. In fact the team was faster as expected and could add more to the initial plan.

Beside the success of the project with LAP we deliver value faster and create the business outcomes earlier, which often means millions depending on the case.

Conclusion 

Lean-Agile Procurement extends the point of view of Business Agility to the external partners and fosters a thinking of Adaptive Partner Ecosystem 6 instead of a static supply chain. Where the agile team is the core of an agile organisation and needs to extend their capabilities with procurement / sales / partner management skills to own the whole product life cycle.

Also it gives an answer to the 3 challenges with suppliers in scaling Agile frameworks and applies the same principles of co-creation as in e.g. a PI-Planning to sourcing and partner management, while an agile contract is more seen as the result of the agreement developed in the Big Room Workshop.

Agilists applying any of the existing Scaling Frameworks have the potential to become pioneers by creating much bigger business impacts faster by scaling agile cross-company with Lean-Agile Procurement.

More than that, a pilot with LAP is also a very good starting point for a company becoming agile. In most of our success stories the company wasn’t agile yet, or not yet in the leadership and for sure not in Procurement nor Sales. The urgency of a strategic sourcing case helped to get the management support and as with an end-to-end agile team we’re introducing a flavor of agility in every function LAP turned out as a very good catalyst! 

Autor

References

(1.1) Scaled Agile Framework by Scaled Agile 

https://www.scaledagileframework.com 

(1.2) Scrum@Scale  by Scrum Inc. Jeff Sutherland

https://www.scrumatscale.com/ 

(1.3) Spotify “Model” by Spotify

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/ 

(1.4) Agility@Scale by Disciplined Agile - PMI

https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/agility-at-scale 

(1.5) Large-scaled Scrum by The LeSS Company B.V.

https://less.works/less/framework 

(1.6) NEXUS by Scrum.org

https://www.scrum.org/resources/nexus-guide

(2) Lean-Agile Procurement & Lean Procurement Canvas by LAP Alliance, https://www.lean-agile-procurement.com

(3) Strategic sourcing process outlined via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_sourcing 

(4) “SwissCasinos case study”, SwissCasinos & flowdays, 2020 https://mailchi.mp/flowdays.net/procurement-award-winner 

(5) Business Model Canvas, Alex Osterwalder https://www.strategyzer.com/canvas/business-model-canvas

(6) Adaptive Partner Ecosystem by Mirko Kleiner 2018

https://flowdays.net/en/blog-en/2017/6/11/one-size-doesnt-fit-it-all-build-your-own-maturity-model-for-business-agility 

(7) CIPS Supply Management Awards Europe 2018 - Best Procurement Consultancy Project

https://www.cips.org/en/supply-management/news/2018/october/dwp-triumphs-in-cips-sm-awards-europe/, https://flowdays.net/de/blog-de/2018/10/22/medienmitteilung-ckw-amp-flowdays-gewinnen-supply-management-award-2018-europe

Lean-Agile Procurement is like DevOps on Steroids
— a Senior Agile Coach
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Zalando - How to introduce Procurement into an Agile Culture?

The COVID-19 crisis has emphasised the importance of new -more agile- approaches in procurement. But is it just another buzzword, or has it become reality?!-Learn from Zalando - How to introduce Procurement into an Agile Culture?

Zalando - Germany

Alejandro told the audience from quite a different story introducing more Professionalism in Procurement into a purely Agile Company like Zalando.

The recording

To hear Alejandro’s talk jump right to 40:25 in the video.

The slide deck

Our Conclusions

  • Zalando is a 10 Years old Startup with more than 10,000 Employees, which is already Agile as an organization and introducing more “structure” in Procurement needs to be adapted to the current culture & mindset

  • Also at Zalando the Procurement has applied Scrum in their commercial organization, while swarming cross-functional e.g. for making negotions more effective, etc.

  • Zalando also applied agile practices such as Scrum in development of their P2P Implementation with awesome impact to time-to-market and customer satisfaction

More about the Speaker



Author

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AGCO Int. - How Collaboration with Vendors / Competitors increases Innovation

The COVID-19 crisis has emphasised the importance of new -more agile- approaches in procurement. But is it just another buzzword, or has it become reality?!-Learn from AGCO Int. - How Collaboration with Vendors / Competitors has increased their Innovation.

AGCO International GmbH - Global

Konstantin introduced us in the world of direct sourcing and how agile principles such as collaboration & transparency with partners / competitors could foster innovation & improve business success.

You might know AGCO’s Brands of Tractors such as e.g. Fendt, Valtra, Massey Ferguson, etc.

The recording

To hear Konstantin’s talk jump right to 1:12:46 in the video.

The slide deck

Our Conclusions

  • AGCO’s approach of Agile Product Clinics where they bring together current Partners & Competitors to review the current m modules / components of their tractors turned out as a very effective way to come up with new ideas / improvements and also to select alternative vendors

  • Those Agile Product Clinics need a cross-functional support lead by a team consisting of Product Management / Marketing, Engineering, Production and Procurement. What a surprise that AGCO uses Scrum as operating model for this cross-functional team - the most effective way to organize a team.

  • Combining those workshops with revisiting / improving the current agreements will boost the outcomes for both parties at buyer and supplier side even beyond.

More about the SpeakerS

Author

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AGILE BUDGETS. AGILE CONTRACTS. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN FINANCIAL NEED MEETS MARKET REALITY?

Market and business uncertainty has created an unprecedented need for agile and adaptable systems and processes. Finance is at the forefront, struggling to set and manage budgets, forecasts and cash flow in today’s unpredictable conditions. Learn from our Panalists Tim Cummins, Rikard Olson & Mirko Kleiner

Market and business uncertainty has created an unprecedented need for agile and adaptable systems and processes. Finance is at the forefront, struggling to set and manage budgets, forecasts and cash flow in today’s unpredictable conditions. 

Contracts are fundamental management tools and sources of information. For most industries, they drive revenue and for all industries they control spend – both external with suppliers and internal with employees and contract staff. But can they really become adaptive in ways that will better support the challenges that Finance faces? Is ‘agility’ achievable – and if so , how? 

Join us as we bring together three experts from the fields of finance, contracts and agile methods to discuss how we can best respond to the challenges of the market.

The recording

To hear the panel with Tim Cummins, Rikard Olsson & Mirko Kleiner watch the video.


Our Conclusions

  • Commercial functions is a design from the past and needs to be adapted too to achieve true Business Agility

  • Automatization & Digitalization will support the need for real time information / performance and decrease traditional reporting

  • Relevant informations will be defined much more outcome-based by the business, while e.g. forecasts depend on empirical data and yearly budgets will become a too static thing from the past

  • Ownership of financial needs more and more needs to be transferred to the value creation part of the organization

  • Commercial Capabilities are still important but might be organized much closer to the market as today

  • To react even faster to changing market needs the contracts / contractual frameworks need to become much more flexible than today

  • our suppliers need to become our strategic partners, that co-develop / -server the market needs jointly

More about the Panelist’s

  • Tim Cummins is founder and President of the global Alliance World Commerce & Contracting (formerly IACCM), Professor, Leeds University School of Law; Chair, International Commercial & Contract Management

  • Rikard Olsson is Managing Director at Beyond Budgeting Ltd (Beyond Budgeting Roundtable and Beyond Budgeting Advisory) & Board Member at Ekan Management

  • Mirko Kleiner is the President of the Lean-Agile Procurement Alliance, Thought Leader in Lean-Agile Procurement, CIPS Award Winner 2018, international speaker and co-founder of Flowdays – The Agile Cooperative. Mirko supports their customers as an Agile Enterprise Coach on their journeys to create a positive impact for their employees, customers and shareholder. 

OUR PARTNER

A big thank you goes to the WCC team who supports us in increasing the global awareness of agile in Procurement. 

To learn more about WCC check their website: https://www.iaccm.com

To learn more about Beyond Budgeting check their website: https://bbrt.org

Author

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SwissCasinos - Is it possible to source an ERP System in just 4 Weeks?

The COVID-19 crisis has emphasised the importance of new -more agile- approaches in procurement. But is it just another buzzword, or has it become reality?!-Learn from Daniel how SwissCasinos sourced an ERP System in just 4 !-This story was recently awarded as the Winner of the World Procurement Awards 2020!

SwissCasinos Group - Switzerland

Daniel started his talk with the question “Is sourcing of an ERP System in just 4 Weeks possible”?-Obviously it is and his story was recently awarded as the Winner of the World Procurement Awards 2020!

The recording

To hear Daniel’s talk jump right to 18:37 in the video.

The Slide deck


Our Conclusions

  • Having all 3 competitors in the same room to co-create their proposals, talk about any concerns / assumptions / questions / etc. was very beneficial also to get the right social- & cultural fit

  • The commercial “negotiations” took place as well and because having the RIGHT people their from all the parties a WIN-WIN could be agreed on, with significant savings

  • Scrum turned out as the optimal operating model for executing a cross-functional sourcing team

  • improving an Agile Contract together with all participants helped to align / setup the delivery team, so that they could start the day after and keeping the partnership as flexible as needed

More about the Speaker

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-30 um 15.30.07.png

Author

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APA Group - How Agile is changing an Industry & Lives!

Henriette introduced us in how applying Agile is currently changing a whole Industry and also her Live!-In other words she’s talking us trough how Lean Agile Procurement has helped to shape significant change in individuals, teams, organisations and supply chains within the energy industry.

APA Group - Australia

APA is a leading Australian energy infrastructure business. Henriette introduced us in how applying Agile is currently changing a whole Industry and also her Live!-In other words she’s talking us trough how Lean Agile Procurement has helped to shape significant change in individuals, teams, organisations and supply chains within the energy industry 

Henriette Kampfer & Marcus Ward talked about how agile in procurement changed their way of working / thinking at APA Group the major Gas supplier in Austral...

Source of video: APA Group, recorded for CIPS Meetup 25.1.2021

Our Conclusions

  • Agile is more than just a new way of working, it changes lives of the people involved

  • Instead of just following the sourcing process procurement became part of innovation, with e.g. impact on how people in Australia see their energy consumption

  • the inclusive approach and applying scrum to the core-team consisting of all capabilities / functions needed helped to align with the strategy faster and to find the optimal partner

More about the SpeakerS

MORE

  • About the APA Group

  • Join the CIPS Switzerland Linkedin Group here

  • FREE Download of the global annual report State of Agility in Procurement & Supply

AUTHOR

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6 Success Stories - Agile in Procurement just Talk or Reality?!

The COVID-19 crisis has emphasised the importance of new -more agile- approaches in procurement. But is it just another buzzword, or has it become reality?!-Learn from 6 cases all around the world how agile in procurement impacted their business positively. One of the stories just won the World Procurement Award 2020!

The COVID-19 crisis has emphasised the importance of new -more agile- approaches in procurement. But is it just another buzzword, or has it become reality?!-Learn from 6 cases all around the world how agile in procurement impacted their business positively. One of the stories just won the World Procurement Award 2020!

This is a short review / summary of the 6 talks at the joint Online Meetup with CIPS Switzerland. More details such as e.g. recordings / Slides / follow-up’s with the speakers / etc will follow - STAY TUNED!

Intro & State of Agility in Procurement & Supply

John & myself kicked off the event with more than 250 participants from all around the world.

It was my honor to give an even bigger picture what’s going on in terms of agility all over the world and presented a summary of our global annual report State of Agility in Procurement & Supply.

Find the Report for FREE download here.

Our Conclusions

  • Business Agility became of strategic importance for all companies no matter on the buyer or supplier side

  • More an more commercial functions are or will be including in their company-wide Agile Transformation Initiatives

  • Lean-Agile Procurement is THE agile approach for Procurement beside standard agile approaches like Kanban / Scrum

  • Minority of companies includes their partners in their journey becoming more Agile together yet

  • Also is the value of more agile Contracts still underestimated

  • Finally for 2021 respondents concluded that Education in Agile Practices / Approaches / etc. is the number 1 strategic Priority

More about the Speakers

SwissCasinos Group - Switzerland

Daniel started his talk with the question “Is sourcing of an ERP System in just 4 Weeks possible”?-Obviously it is and his story was recently awarded as the Winner of the World Procurement Awards 2020!

Our Conclusions

  • Having all 3 competitors in the same room to co-create their proposals, talk about any concerns / assumptions / questions / etc. was very beneficial also to get the right social- & cultural fit

  • The commercial “negotiations” took place as well and because having the RIGHT people their from all the parties a WIN-WIN could be agreed on, with significant savings

  • Scrum turned out as the optimal operating model for executing a cross-functional sourcing team

  • improving an Agile Contract together with all participants helped to align / setup the delivery team, so that they could start the day after and keeping the partnership as flexible as needed

More about the Speaker

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-30 um 15.30.07.png

Zalando - Germany

Alejandro told the audience from quite a different story introducing more Professionalism in Procurement into a purely Agile Company like Zalando.

Our Conclusions

  • Zalando is a 10 Years old Startup with more than 10,000 Employees, which is already Agile as an organization and introducing more “structure” in Procurement needs to be adapted to the current culture & mindset

  • Also at Zalando the Procurement has applied Scrum in their commercial organization, while swarming cross-functional e.g. for making negotions more effective, etc.

  • Zalando also applied agile practices such as Scrum in development of their P2P Implementation with awesome impact to time-to-market and customer satisfaction

More about the Speaker

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-30 um 15.27.19.png

AGCO International GmbH - Global

Konstantin introduced us in the world of direct sourcing and how agile principles such as collaboration & transparency with partners / competitors could foster innovation & improve business success.

You might know AGCO’s Brands of Tractors such as e.g. Fendt, Valtra, Massey Ferguson, etc.

Our Conclusions

  • AGCO’s approach of Agile Product Clinics where they bring together current Partners & Competitors to review the current m modules / components of their tractors turned out as a very effective way to come up with new ideas / improvements and also to select alternative vendors

  • Those Agile Product Clinics need a cross-functional support lead by a team consisting of Product Management / Marketing, Engineering, Production and Procurement. What a surprise that AGCO uses Scrum as operating model for this cross-functional team - the most effective way to organize a team.

  • Combining those workshops with revisiting / improving the current agreements will boost the outcomes for both parties at buyer and supplier side even beyond.

More about the SpeakerS

Gazprom Neft - Russia

Boris introduced us how to deal with finding the right partner in a huge country like Russia and that applying LAP is also much more fair to all the parties.

Our Conclusions

  • Lean-Agile Procurement workshops, to negotiate with multiple vendors simultaneously, can be done 100% online. It even makes a lot of sense if the spend is not so big and the vendors would have inadequate expenses

  • the principles of Lap could be applied to sourcing in the public sector too

  • in many cases with a high promotion of innovation it’s recommended to run a proof-of-concept in parallel

More about the SpeakerS

  • Boris Zobnin, Head Procurement Digitalization Program

  • Ivan Dubrovin Agile Coach & Certified LAP Trainer ScrumTrek

Air France KLM - France/Global

Frédéric introduced us in his world of Cargo and how to outsource a strategic product development at AirFrance KLM.

Our Conclusions

  • Social- & Culture fit turned out as important than the hard facts such as price / quality / etc.

  • Just by bringing together the right people and forming a cross-functional team they could ensure that all interests are covered

  • Instead of eliminating the less promising offers they have been able to improve all of them in the big room event together with all the vendors / competitors and choose the best out of it!

  • It’s not just about fast sourcing, but also faster delivery value to the business.

  • LAP has create much more than just a relationship, we became friends!

More about the SpeakerS

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-30 um 15.25.00.png

APA Group - Australia

Henriette introduced us in how applying Agile is currently changing a whole Industry and also her Live!-In other words she’s talking us trough how Lean Agile Procurement has helped to shape significant change in individuals, teams, organisations and supply chains within the energy industry 

Our Conclusions

  • Agile is more than just a new way of working, it changes lives of the people involved

  • Instead of just following the sourcing process procurement became part of innovation, with e.g. impact on how people in Australia see their energy consumption

  • the inclusive approach and applying scrum to the core-team consisting of all capabilities / functions needed helped to align with the strategy faster and to find the optimal partner

More about the SpeakerS

MORE

  • Join the CIPS Switzerland Linkedin Group here

  • FREE Download of the global annual report State of Agility in Procurement & Supply

Author

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AirFrance KLM - How to Outsource a Critical Project with Lean-Agile Procurement

With a challenging six-month time frame, Air France looked to a new innovative approach to procuring the right team for the job.

Air France KLM Cargo Operations needed to improve the efficiency and productivity of its door-to-door cargo. Time is essential in freight and any delay or break in the chain would lead to product waste and unhappy customers. It was critical that a new system was created to improve the efficiency.

A new booking system was required within six months, how were Air France going to assemble a team that worked cohesively and remotely, thought innovatively, understood the cargo industry, and produce the product within the challenging time frame.

With a challenging six-month time frame, Air France looked to a new innovative approach to procuring the right team for the job.

Air France KLM Cargo Operations needed to improve the efficiency and productivity of its door-to-door cargo. Time is essential in freight and any delay or break in the chain would lead to product waste and unhappy customers. It was critical that a new system was created to improve the efficiency.

A new booking system was required within six months, how were Air France going to assemble a team that worked cohesively and remotely, thought innovatively, understood the cargo industry, and produce the product within the challenging time frame.

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-15 um 07.27.09.png

Key Points

Challenges:

  • Critical project with potentially high business outcomes

  • Short time frame

  • Keeping a high level of cooperation with an outsourced team in a remote location

  • Remodel the vendor sourcing policy

Results:

  • Six weeks to select a vendor and actually start the project

  • Accelerated project start: team building already done and new team already well aware of the business context and challenges

  • Challenging milestones easily reached

A key player in the air cargo industry, AIR FRANCE KLM MARTINAIR Cargo is the specialised air cargo business of the Air France KLM Group, offering a worldwide network of 457 destinations from two hubs, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

The recording

To hear Frédérique’s talk jump right to 31:17 in the video.

The slide deck

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-15 um 07.27.47.png

End of 2018, Frédéric was facing two major problems:

  1. Deliver a new critical IT application for Cargo Truck management within a tight schedule. High importance – vital the Cargo Truck management system was efficient to reduce waste and increase output.

  2. Recruit a new team to develop the new system. The existing team consists of many contractors from different vendors. It is not big enough to handle the project and there is a need for new skills.

The Team - Air France KLM Cargo Operations Department

  • Frédéric Jacques, Head of Cargo Operations IT

  • Simon Spoor, Frédéric’s Business counterpart (acting as Product Owner)

  • Eric Chaumette, Head of Managed Delivery Centers initiative

  • Sophie Durand and Lionel Massiera, Agile Coaches and LAP specialists

According to the new Air France procurement policy on hiring contractors, Frédéric would have to source a whole team, remotely located on the vendor’s premises.

Air France Cargo department has been working in an agile way for years (SAFe): how would a brand new remotely located team fit in? How would they quickly reach the necessary level of cooperation?

Bildschirmfoto 2021-01-15 um 07.28.02.png

Time was of the essence and following the current procurement policy would have taken several months. Frédéric’s business counterpart, Simon was really concerned with this issue and couldn’t believe that sourcing a new team would fit in the challenging project schedule, given that traditional RFP (request for proposal) processes usually lasted several months a new way of thinking was needed.


Congratulations & Thank you!

Congratulations to the whole AirFrance KLM Team and our LAP Trainer Sophie Durand & Lionel Massiera. Furthermore we also wanna give a big thank you to Emily Ruffle from the Agile Business Consortium how made the interviews, crafted this success story and co-published it to spread the word.

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There are NO Agile Contracts!

Similar as there are no unicorns, even no cats with one :-), there also don’t exist agile contracts!-In my opinion we not just need get rid off this term, we also need to rethink how we come to an agreement.

In this blog post you’ll find out why and learn alternatives to overcome the dilemma of Business Agility and handling the legal aspects with your partners.

Similar as there are no unicorns, even no cats with one :-), there also don’t exist agile contracts!-In my opinion we not just need get rid off this term, we also need to rethink how we come to an agreement.

In this blog post you’ll find out why and learn alternatives to overcome the dilemma of Business Agility and handling the legal aspects with your partners.

Unfortunately we need to inform you, that there’s been a big misunderstanding the last 15+ years. The agile community has come up with new concepts around contracting, even contractual templates have been developed, etc. However, there is no silver bullet and for sure there are NO agile contracts!

Why an Agile Contract doesn’t make any sense?

Have you ever thought about the words „Agile Contract“?-„Agile“ (1) stands for values & principles where we act on the same eye level, looking for people, partners, etc, that are able to respond to change more effective together. While „Contract“ has the word „Contra“ in it, which means against or opposite (2). 

Contract is legally an agreement with specific terms between two or more persons or entities in which there is a promise to do something in return for a valuable benefit known as consideration.
— legal definition of the term contract(2)

However „agreement“ is part of the definition, in practice it’s much more of the „against or opposite“ behaviors we recognize. Borders of responsibilities are usually cemented in a contract, so that lawyers increase the chances to win at court if something goes really wrong. In fact a contract is more of saving the buyer’s, or vendor’s interest and tries to reduce it’s risks as much as possible. Btw. There’s nothing wrong about that. However, it’s more of the way it’s getting approached. We’ve somehow lost the aspect of „agreement“. I often experience „take it or leave it“-situations, predefined contracts with penalties, etc. in place where there’s no opportunity to improve it together. Doing so we are not applying any agile values & principles to the process of agreeing even though we refer to it often in the contract. How weird is that?

Even if we’ve put good practices such as „money for nothing“, „changes for free“, a more outcome based focus of the contract, etc. it’s still missing the collaboration aspect of an agreement!-Even worse than that put people who aren’t so deep in agile think by such good practices of a silver bullet and put everything in one new big template and call it an agile contract. Or others call a true agile contract has been based on time and materials. All of those are wrong!

The reason why nobody has found the silver bullet yet is there is none!-It depends on the context, the parties involved, the people and their values/cultures, etc.

So, what’s the alternative?-Goodbye Agile Contract, welcome Lean-Agile Agreement

First of all we’d like to change the term „Contract“ into „Agreement“, because it has „agree“ in it and if we’re believing in true agile values such as trust, honesty, etc. we’d also respect a co-creation of the legal agreement. In our cases with Lean-Agile Procurement we’re applying this principle of co-creating very successfully which leads to more honest conversations between all parties about each others concerns, risks, cost-drivers, etc. A CEO of one of the vendor’s recently even said, this is the fairest agreement we’ve ever signed!

This is the fairest agreement we’ve ever signed!
— CEO of a Vendor while applying Lean-Agile Procurement

We also  need to understand, that there are no agreement, that are evil. We should more think of all the different agreement types as of a continuum, or different meals we can choose from depending on our context. Find some listed the following.

continuum of tradition- & lean-agile agreements.png


Time & Materials is one of those agreement types, that could make sense in certain contexts. But and there is a big BUT, we need to have a honest conversation about the risks we’re transferring to the buyer side and how to handle those. Of course there are quite radical agreement types, such as e.g. „Outcome-based with profit sharing“, service subscription, etc. that might even change the business model. Do you remember, that e.g. Rolls Royce - one of the biggest suppliers of aircraft engines and services - switched to a service subscription where the airlines „just“ pay per flying hour?-But that’s another story.

On the continuum you’ll not find fake agile agreements such as e.g. Story point based agreement or Sprint-based agreement. Just think about who is in control of story point estimation and you’ll realize that this makes no sense. If any kind of estimation point makes sense it would be Business Value Point estimation. Or why should we create more legally overhead at the end of a sprint e.g. every week as an iteration is more an opportunity to test our assumptions and learn together.

As we’re also not looking for 100-pages legal documents we also should consider to keep an agile agreement as lean as possible. That’s why we’d like to introduce to the community a new term „Lean-Agile Agreement“!

Goodbye Negotiation, welcome Commercial Conversation

As mentioned above a key aspect of a Lean-Agile Agreement is collaboration between the parties and taking this to an even further level of co-creation. On the other hand we need to say goodby to endless negotiations, approvals, etc. Here Lean-Agile Procurement as an approach could be beneficial. We often spend less than 20min for finalizing the agreement with a 3rd party thanks to the fact, that we have all the right people in one room simultaneously.

We’d like to have honest commercial conversations where we act on the same eight level and improving of the Lean-Agile Agreement together is not an exception but more of the new normal. To foster collaboration and this commercial conversation we’ve asked ourselves what are the key aspects that drives, or blocks an agreement. Find a collection of topics as cards for self-printing the following. 

LAP-Card4CommercialConversation.png

Get a joint understanding what each of the topics means to you, what other topics might be important to you and try to prioritize the LAP Agreement Cards together to get an understanding about each others values, concerns, etc. Btw. have I mentioned that „negotiation“ is a term from the past too :-)?-We’re also looking to improve this wording into „Commercial Conversation“.

Our key take-away

  • Agile Contract is an unfortunate term because it consists of „Contra“, that doesn’t fit really with agile values & principles.

  • We therefor should start using Lean-Agile Agreement, that pushes the principle of lean, joint agreement, co-creation more explicit.

  • There are no agreement types, that are evil. We should more think of all the different agreement types as of a continuum to choose from depending on our context, people, culture, etc. The LAP cards are supporting us here.

  • The LAP Agreement Cards also support us in the commercial conversation based on agile values & principles instead of traditional negotiations.

Find out in our next blog post why we need a major upgrade of the agilemanifesto.org

Author

Sources:

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Big Room Event - How to co-create an Agile Contract in less than 2 days with 3 parties simultaneously

The fascination with Lean-Agile Procurement lies definitely in the big room events, where we gather customer needs with 100+ end users or co-create a Lean-Agile Agreement (Contracts) with e.g. 3 parties each or even let them form alliances as they go. People that hear that often think this isn’t possible, it sounds like magic because up till now it took us months to just finalize a contract!-In this blog post we’d like to share with you the secret sauce and some tipps-n-tricks around it, preparation! 

The fascination with Lean-Agile Procurement lies definitely in the big room events, where we gather customer needs with 100+ end users or co-create a Lean-Agile Agreement (Contracts) with e.g. 3 parties each or even let them form alliances as they go. People that hear that often think this isn’t possible, it sounds like magic because up till now it took us months to just finalize a contract!-In this blog post we’d like to share with you the secret sauce and some tipps-n-tricks around it, preparation! 

PLEASE NOTE: First of all we need to set a disclaimer. Not a single case in a complex space we operate in was the same. In other words look at this blog post as well as on Lean-Agile Procurement in general more of a framework. This framework might inspire you, in rare cases it even solves exactly your problem, but it’s definitely no checklist. Use your brain-power of the cross-functional team, take bits and pieces and adapt it to your needs!

Introduction

If you are the one, or part of an organization, that likes to organize a Big Room Event to decide on a partner, their service/product, etc. this seems like a huge challenge. Get inspired how it looks in reality in this fast-motion video with the CKW Group. They called it internally Pocathon (Proof-of-Concept + Hackathon).

A lot of people from various parties are swarming in the room and work on something. It looks like in a beehive and yes there are some similarities with it. We arrange the shortlisted vendors around the queen bee, or in our case the buyer’s cross-functional team, their decision taker, etc. (table in the center of the room). Everybody (vendors) should have always a direct access to the customer to ask questions, etc..

The reason we organize such an expensive event is to get the maximum alignment out of it and so minimize risk by talking about all assumptions, risks, etc. Doing so we improve each of the proposals and the contract. We even try to use the expertise in the room of the vendors to let them come up with their ideas (wow the first time we’re getting Innovation through collaboration), or let them challenge an intermediate result from their competitors. This might sound unfair, but basically our intend is different. We wanna make them learn and improve, so that not just the buyers risk get decreased, but both sides win.

None of us is as smart as all of us.
— Ken Blanchard

It’s all about Alignment

Beside the traditional Business Fit around pricing, quality, timing, etc. we introduce with Lean-Agile Procurement also a Cultural- and Human Fit!-From our experience this is in complex sourcing cases as important than choosing the right product/service. However the vendors often experience this as assessment and it really is one. Similar to a Speed-Dating we wanna test our collaboration even before we get married!

Source: LAP Alliance, by Philipp Engstler

Another big difference is the set of values we apply during Lean-Agile Procurement and which become the new values for the cross-functional team for delivery. As we’re looking for a true partnership agile values like transparency, honesty, commitment, or fairness apply e.g. also while the „negation“ and co-creation of the contract.

This is the fairest contract we’ve ever agreed on!
— various parties joined a Big Room Event

Everything you need to know

So before we give you some insights about how we’ve organized Big Room Event in the past you need to ask yourself:

WHO & WHAT’s needed to agree in a minimum amount of Time?!

Just answer this question in your context and you’ll get the RIGHT setup and agenda for your case. You’ll realize that this means a lot of preparation, where you’ll need the full attention of the cross-functional team.


Agile Organization of your Big Room Event

It turned out a good practice to apply to the facilitation of a Big Room Event agile practices as well and that’s why we usually sprint in several iterations through all the topics below. Sprinting allows us to get and share fast feedback and learn for the next iteration. This improves every vendor’s results with every iteration and at the end we’re able to choose the best of it!-You need an Agile Roadmap as an appendix to your contract?-Well then iterate on it and improve it together until it’s “Good enough”!

Source: LAP Alliance - Principle Big Room Organization

Depending on your preferred Lean-Agile Agreement (Contract type) you might not need some of the topics below. Also a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) sometimes isn’t appropriate, but I wouldn’t miss to let the vendors create at least a presentation, or a solution design or similar. If we’re sprinting, why not introducing the results to the real end-users again from time to time and get their feedback too?-Or let the vendors pull their topics in a joint planning and test their commitment right away.

Backlog of possible Topics

  • Introduction: Getting in touch, who’s here, in what role, what 

  • Approach & Agenda incl. Definition of Done (DoD)

  • Alignment/Context: Vision, business objective of product/service (buyer/vendor)

  • Persona’s: Customer segmentation, it’s importance & needs

  • Agile Roadmap incl. Objectives & Key results

  • PoC: Delivery/Presentation of most challenging aspects

  • Lean-Agile Agreement: Improving draft of agile contract, it’s commercial-/collaboration-model, etc.

  • Solution: Technical design/-conditions

  • Estimation: Putting the numbers together & agree on risk-share, assumptions, etc.

  • Demo’s: Presentations of intermediate-/results/content for the participants or with the main stakeholders

  • Peer-feedback: intermediate feedback/decisions

If this is your first Big Room Event it’s recommended to include at least a facilitator that is used to handle 20+ people. Furthermore I always create a script with a detailed estimation for each time box so that it’s more feasible how long it really takes. However, you always should expect the unexpected at any time and then react!-We once realized that the license model was super complex and we immediately stopped the workshop and let the 3 competitors co-create the optimal license model together. 

Good Practices

Find some more good practices below:

  • Sprinting: Iterating on above topics with joint events such as Sprint Planning, Review, Retro

  • Fixed Time-boxes: Strict facilitation of time-boxes 

  • PULL: Self-organization of vendor teams

  • Facilitation: Mix up with various big group facilitation technics

  • Co-location: All in 1 room all the time, except for confidential topics private sessions

  • Transparency: Immediate sharing of new insights

  • Collaboration: Let the people work together that might become partners and will ship the product/service together

  • Surprises: To test behavior’s under stress insert some surprises and pitfalls too and see how they react on those

  • No Secrets: Put anything on the table you recognize such as bad behavior, strange solution, etc. to clarify it immediately

  • FUN: Don’t forget to make and keep a good atmosphere 

Management Summary

At the end a short management summary for your decision takers:

  • Investment: It’s worth it spending 1-2+ days with so many people so that they all will be aligned and ready to deliver immediately. Imagine the costs, if they aren’t instead?!-An incremental sourcing minimizes risk and maximizes business value at the same time!

  • Time-to-Market: Time-to-Market only could improved if we change the way we currently work. As leader you’re in the position to make this work and support the business in keeping up with the market demand. In avg. we have a lead time of 2-4 weeks per case (Big Room Event included). This is an improvement of 400-800% to traditional approaches!

  • Constraints: This new way of working doesn't come for free. It needs a high support from you as a leader because we need to rethink and bend a lot of existing rules. However, as we have all experts e.g. from compliance, procurement, business, etc. in the cross-functional team we ensure to stay complaint all the times. So no worries!

  • Presence: Being present as a leader makes a huge difference and gives the topic it’s importance and you could support with an introduction in business objectives, the vision, or support the cross-functional team with your experience e.g. during negotiations, critical questions or situations, etc. If you’re not needed you could just be there and enjoy working without disturbance :-)

I wish you all the best with your application of a big room event. Let us know how it went!

Author

Sources:

  • Image: https://www.fotocommunity.de/

  • Video: CKW Group

  • Content: LAP Alliance, all rights reserved



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Agile Sourcing, how to plan for uncertain? (LAP Nuggets - Episode 2)

Have you ever wondered, why some of the strategic sourcing cases failed and others were successful?-In a series of episodes we gonna introduce you, what we’ve learned from our LAP Alliance networks’ multiple engagements and successful sourcing cases with LAP. With the LAP Nuggets we’ve furthermore developed and assembled applicable tools, that are easy to understand and will reduce your risks during strategic sourcing significantly!

In this episode we’d like to answer the question: „If we can’t plan uncertainty in strategic sourcing cases, how we can source it then either?!“

Have you ever wondered, why some of the strategic sourcing cases failed and others were successful?-In a series of episodes we gonna introduce you, what we’ve learned from our LAP Alliance networks’ multiple engagements and successful sourcing cases with LAP. With the LAP Nuggets we’ve furthermore developed and assembled applicable tools, that are easy to understand and will reduce your risks during strategic sourcing significantly!

In this episode we’d like to answer the question: „If we can’t plan uncertainty in strategic sourcing cases, how we can source it then either?!“

<< Back to the previous article of the series: The secret Sauce of successful Sourcing (LAP Nuggets - Episode 1)

Initial position

In our mandates as agile coaches I often hear „We are agile, we follow NO plan!“-This is scary to any leader and not a good ground to start an agile journey in procurement either. Fact is, that this is often taken as excuse of the current chaotic state of their agile transformation. In other words these people haven’t fully understood #BusinessAgility yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a journey!-Nevertheless it’s a fact that with Lean-Agile Procurement we’re dealing with the most complex sourcing cases, in strategic new fields mostly unknown and with a lot of surprises to be expected with the first customer contact.

We are agile, we follow NO plan!
— various agile teams in our mandates

In complex, strategic sourcing cases it’s very hard to foresee the next few months and to build a detailed plan. Or would you blame your broker because his estimation of the gold price hasn’t met his prediction?!-However we still need to invest in a „plan“ to be successful, but is this  still agile then?-Long story short, YES!

The Procurements Dilemma

Procurement professionals or businesses in more general, that like to source more complex, strategic products / services / etc. are usually not aware of the dilemma they are dealing with. Applying the classic sourcing approaches, such as RfX, to complex sourcing cases feels often very hard, as it wouldn‘t be the right tool. Lets dive into the dilemma shortly. Classic approaches are thought to be transactional. In other words take an idea as input and you’ll get a vendor or a product or service as output. 

If we think we could specify uncertainty of complex sourcing cases with this ONE-time shot, it’ll leads to a:

  • HUGE SCOPE - Everybody adds his/her needs and wants, event the nice to have’s

  • LONG CONTRACTUAL PERIODE - a big scope increases the delivery time and RISK

  • TIME-TO-MARKET - gets decreased from our experience to 6-12 months


With Lean-Agile Procurement we accept uncertainty and try to source more often focusing on what’s most valuable to the customer right NOW

This doesn’t come for free either, to work like this we need to:

  • REDUCE SCOPE - to what we assume is the most valuable for our customers right NOW

  • DECREASE CONTRACTUAL PERIODE - so that we could test our assumptions of business value at any time with the customer and stop development with partner as needed.

  • MINIMIZE RISKS - as an investor we’d like to minimize our vague investments every time

  • TIME-TO-MARKET - while we’d like to be faster as our competitors in the market

Another view on it is if we see it from an investors perspective. Every spend is like an investment, where do we expect a return. If we source just one times it’s usually a huge investment, that takes very long until we’ll get first market feedback and so our return. In a very worst case our competitors are faster than us and we don’t get the expected return at all. Furthermore we need to think of what this means in a strategic/complex sourcing case. What’s the impact of cost savings to our return?-Will we get new innovative product earlier if we have less senior people doing the job?-Most probably not.

Start thinking like an Investor!

LAP and the Lean Procurement Canvas foster collaboration between all parties throughout the whole lifecycle of a product or service. Having such a visual tool in place helps to answer all the key questions WHY/WHAT/HOW/WHO and creates alignment by default.

Bildschirmfoto 2019-08-20 um 09.19.44.png
Bildschirmfoto 2019-08-20 um 09.19.50.png

Imagine you have an investment 100mio worth it. For an investor it’s pretty clear he’ll do just a 1-10mio in a first hand, so that he/she could test market impact. If our most important goals have been successfully received by the customers we’ll invest more, and so on. With LAP we demand the same for procurement and apply this investors-thinking too.

This way our „Savings“ or profit (investment - return) might get hopefully much bigger and much earlier too. Because we will stop our investments if we’ve reached the max. growth. From software we know that just 20% of all features delivered are often used by the users. This means we have a potential of up to 80% „savings“ just by focussing to the RIGHT NEEDS first!-Combined with earlier return, most probably bigger market share as you’ve been much earlier than your competitors the return will be even more maximized.

Bildschirmfoto 2019-09-28 um 14.31.53.png

Now being fast is not enough. We still need a „plan“ to get focus. That’s why we’ve put all our expertise together howto write a good agile roadmap and developed the „golden“ LAP Nuggets„Timebox & KPI‘s“ we’d like to share with you in this blog post. More nuggets are about to come in the next episodes of this series of blog posts.

LAP Nuggets: Timebox & KPI’s

If it comes to an internal agreement with our main stakeholders we do exactly need to know what is expected and possible till when. In other words there’s no more the time to run into detailed specifications. We rather need to get a high-level alignment about realistic business goals within a certain time box and how we track, that we’re doing good achieving those goals. If you work together with 3rd party partner this gets even more important, as you’ll have cash-out every month.

In agile I always loved the fact that we agree on a fixed time-box such as a sprint of 2 weeks. Within this time box we try to achieve the most important customer needs possible. A similar concept is used some abstraction levels higher with an agile roadmap. For the very first time we’ve defined what a time box and a good metric should contain.

Bildschirmfoto 2019-08-20 um 09.17.41.png

To make it more easy to understand find below a rough example of a startup, that wants to become the #1 eBike rental-service provider.

Time box - example

The LAP Nugget Time box consists of:

  • Title, which gives the team a rememberable name / overview of the time box

  • From / to, which often contains multiple sprints. We also like to make given milestones transparent. In this case we just add the to-date.

  • Progress, the time is running and can’t be held up. We just make it visual by updating it roughly.

  • Checklist, which shows us if the time box is just our regular pace e.g. 2 months of 8 sprints each or an external milestone we need to consider.

Bildschirmfoto 2019-08-20 um 09.17.53.png

As always we value from an alignment point of view the co-creation and involvement of all stakeholders more than the result!-Nevertheless it’s also much more effective if it comes to questions with stakeholders, a new person need to be introduced, etc. if the team has all the main informations on the Lean Procurement Canvas hanging at the wall :-).

Metric - example

The LAP Nugget Metric consists of:

  • Title, which gives the team a rememberable name / overview of the time box

  • Checklist, which shows us which dimension we like to keep track.

  • Shared with, PLEASE NOTE: Just by measuring we’ll influence the systems behavior. That’s why we need to ask ourselves which of the metrics we like to share with others and which we keep private like e.g. team velocity.

Agile Roadmap - How all fits togetherSimilar to the Go Product Roadmap we could know put everything together and get a high-level „plan“ or better an Agile Roadmap. We often see companies trying to make their backlog as part of the contract, which I…

Agile Roadmap - How all fits together

Similar to the Go Product Roadmap we could know put everything together and get a high-level „plan“ or better an Agile Roadmap. We often see companies trying to make their backlog as part of the contract, which I personally think is WRONG!-The details will change anyway. But we could agree on some more high-level goals, where we’ve co-created key results and metrics. In a truly agile approach even that might get a subject of change.

The Agile Roadmap we usually use as appendix to the Lean Procurement Canvas.

Please note: Important to understand is that all of our LAP Nuggets are not prescriptive to run LAP or use the Lean Procurement Canvas. Majority of users still use just sticky notes. As every good practice one size doesn’t fit it all, but could always be a source for inspiration!-Btw. You might use them in other contexts as well :-)

Learnings

  • Having no „plan“ is not an option. Every agile team, or team-of-teams do need a direction. It’s in the responsibility of the leadership team to co-create this in a collaborative approach. Otherwise we’ll end up in anarchies!

  • We take the same principle of time boxing of sprints to the next level. This Agile Roadmap could become our main communication tool with the business, our customers and our 3rd party partners. We often prefer to have it as part of contract than any more detailed scope definition. This way we keep our flexibility while delivery, as with the 1st customer feedback the details will change anyway!

  • With metrics we do influence the system just by the fact we measure. That’s why we need to consider unwanted side-effects and make certain metrics private. Furthermore are various dimensions to be considered to measure value.

  • In procurement we need to start thinking more as investors and source more often smaller bits instead of a one time investment. This will reduce our overall risk, increase time-to-market and lead to a competitive advantage with a hopefully higher and earlier return!

FREE Download 

All our LAP Nuggets are open source and could be download FREE of charge for self-printing. The nuggets are available in different colors and contains examples, sources.

Please note: During checkout process you’ll be asked for payment details. In case you added just FREE product only you could ignore it.

Author

Sources

  • Go Product Roadmap by Roman Pichler

  • Dimensions of metrics by ScrumAtScale.com

Image sources

  • Head-image: https://www.mastermindupdate.com


  • All other images by LAP Alliance

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