In addition to the weekly planning meetings with the business, the team conducted daily stand-ups to ensure that work was on track and blockers removed. Retrospectives with the objective of improving the ways of working were also performed, both in planned meetings and as daily improvement activities. New
things were tested, some of which were kept and others discarded.
Benefits realized included:
- Increased work flow More work items were completed, and lead times shortened.
- Reduced waste More time was spent on the work items that created most value.
- Increased quality More technical debt was resolved, and work on infrastructure projects increased.
- Improved relationships with and between customers The visualization and regular meetings that were set up create
synergies and mutual understanding of the needs and situation of each stakeholder involved.
Managing compliance
The other part of Olingo’s assignment focused on ensuring that the regulatory controls, imposed and audited by financial bodies due to the stock exchange entry, were adhered to.
The concept of team autonomy had an important role to play in this case. The plan was to introduce generic change, test and release management processes to roll out to all the teams that were impacted by the financial regulation. There were several specific controls to comply with, but the ones that impacted
the financial teams the most were the segregation of duty and audit trail requirements. Segregation of duty
means that relevant, and separate, roles
must be involved in testing and approving changes, and audit trailing means that it must be possible to track all changes made to the financial system.
The processes were drafted, and the team owning the process tool was involved to make the necessary changes to the workflows in the tool. Meetings to go through the processes and planned tool updates with each team and decide how to perform the implementation were arranged. However, instead of getting the
acceptance that was expected, Olingo were hit by a flood of questions and comments:
- Why do we need these controls? They seem to slow us down.
- Why should we have a change process that looks like that? We already keep track of all our changes but we work
differently to that.
- Why does that role and person need to be involved? They don’t have the time to approve on that level.
- Why are we making that change to the process tool? We use categories in a different way.
Some of the questions and comments could be easily addressed while others proved more difficult to answer. The team autonomy had led to vastly different ways of working and individual ways of using the process tool. The Olingo consultants had made the mistake of acting as teachers instead of coaches and it was clear that they would have to re-think their tactics. They re-grouped and approached the assignment from a different angle, reformulating the message as:
‘These are the regulatory rules you need to comply with. They are a requirement for reaching the organizational goal of