At VirtualExpo Group, the Agile method was initiated by the Information Systems Management in 2015 to give a better vision of the company's strategy to the IT teams on one hand, and on the other hand to improve the visibility of the IT projects’ progress for the other departments.
The IT development teams needed a sense of meaning, they needed to understand the company’s major strategies so that they could offer the most optimal solutions, with even greater autonomy.
The business teams on the other hand needed a vision of the concrete progress being made in order to visualize the changes gradually, so that they could better look to the future and also to be actors of change.
We started with the Scrum and Kanban methods, which we adapted to our context over the course of iterations, always including a process of continuous improvement.
Then, logically, we applied Agility to the other departments, starting with a lot of imagery to promote awareness based on the values and principles, followed by fun and collaborative workshops (such as the Serious Game).
In 2019, we set up an inter-departmental committee, made up of operational employees from different departments (IT, sales, marketing, etc.), each working 50% of their time on the company's strategic project.
This committee provides each department’s vision, and allows for a better diffusion of information (whether it be upward or downward). This allows everyone to participate in the implementation of VirtualExpo Group's strategy.
Retrospectives and collective intelligence workshops are now commonplace in our company, even for teams starting out with Agility.
The evolving role of managers
Managers are the keystone of this transformation, which has led to a change in the managerial position: now they are like coaches, helping teams grow and bringing agility to the day-to-day.
To support them, we have opted for a management bootcamp 3.0: Agile training to highlight Agile tools and the philosophy behind it.
As part of our managerial practices, we are particularly fond of "one to one” meetings: time for weekly discussions between each team member and their manager/coach.
These moments are used to exchange news, give feedback and help employees grow individually (with a feedforward approach and focus on solutions).
Like our teams, our practices are constantly evolving. We now have a large panel of micro tools at our disposal to enable us to be increasingly efficient.
We can say that we introduced Agility to the company in an Agile way!
