Our transition into agile land...

This is not going to be a very structured and well-rehearsed post. Infact, I am starting this blog to bring some order into my own confusion. If, along the way, I manage to convince some of my readers (hopefully, there will be some :-) ) this will be like a nice dessert for a good meal. But the main goal of this is to reflect and get some perspective about what is happening right now in my professional life. So why don't we start at the beginning?

I am one of the founders of a company called BrainStore. We are based in Switzerland and have been in business for 21 years. We are an Idea Factory, and we help companies come up with better innovation, build innovation teams and use processes and frameworks to make their innovation initiatives more successful.

We grew from 3 founders to more than 80 people and then downsized to roughly 25 over a period of two years because of the economic challenges we faced in the last 24 months. So far, we have been structured quite hierarchically with one of the founders being the CEO but also mainly leading all innovation, most of sales and most of operations. Though we knew that there are risks involved with this, we just never managed to organise ourselves in a diffferent way, mainly, probably, because we made the usual mistakes founders make when they cannot let go of their "baby".

This year, however, we realized that we need drastic change in order to prepare ourselves for a (hopefully) successful future. And we went looking for solutions. How should we re-organise so that the responsibility for the company, it's products, services, software, finances etc.? How can we do this in a way that is truly fit for our culture and how can we make it happen without having to hire new people? These questions lead some of us to an interesting movement that is mainly used in software development today: agile / lean.

We discovered that agile pracices cover a lot of the things we were looking for and also some that we had not yet considered, but sounded sensible for our purpose. Some of these ideas involved self-organised teams, constant interaction wtih the customer, development of small parts of the project or product that are constantly shipped to the client instead of planning, then creating and then delivering the whole thing, limitation of work in progress, pulling of work instead of pushing and more.

Also, there were some values in the literature about agile that we, as a company, were sorely in need of, such as mutual respect, sustainable way of working, teambuilding, reaching our potential and many more.

And although, so far, we have found only a handful of companies that use agile working methods outside the software world or the industrial world, where agile or lean ways of working have been applied for a long time, we decided to embark on the journey of making our company agile.

I will be completely honest with you here: It's a rollercoster ride, with more of the typical "why did I join this ride"-feelings than the "wow, this is great!" ones. The journey has started in January with first discussions, reading of lots of materials, discussions with our board and some trial projects. We have started to work (or at least try to work) in an agile way about four weeks ago, including the whole team as recently as two weeks.

I will discuss some of the challenges we are having in becoming agile, the resistance, the fear, the learnings, trial and errors and more as this blog grows. And I am looking very much forward to hearing from others who have either started a similar journey or are thinking about it.