Case Study: Towards efficiency

Funny man showing stuff to the rest of the team

The GfK NORM team practicing effective retrospectives

Case client

GfK Norm

Background

The CTO at GfK NORM had understood that his team was more in chaos than in order, and especially not working in an Agile fashion. He needed the team to become way more efficient to tackle the delivery problems they currently had.

Assignment

I was assigned to structure the process for the team, focus the delivery efforts and make sure that the team stayed motivated. 

Activities

  • Attained comprehension and promoted awareness through facilitating a situation assessment with the team, so that everyone had the same view of the problems and opportunities, including me
  • Boosted ownership through defining a preferred future state, together with the team
  • Facilitated barrier removal through setting subgoals / work themes together and found actions to realise them. We worked especially with creating a well-oiled continuous improvement process, so that the team could easily follow-up actions, and be able to assess whether or not the actions had or would led them towards the subgoals
  • Developed competencies by coaching the group in solving their own problems together as a team
  • Catalysed improvement through being there for them whenever questions arose and following up / re-assessing the situation every other month over a 9-month period.

Delivery

  • The team got a clearer path towards the future
  • Some team members matured with the task and got increasingly motivated

Client benefit

The team could work autonomously analysing their own process problems and easily identify which problems that they could solve and which they couldn’t. This information helped the CTO to restructure his work force in a more efficient way.