DNA moving into company-wide agility

In brief

Customer

DNA

Challenge Improve agility within the organisation to gain more visibility on dependencies and flow of work.

Results A significant increase in transparency, cooperation and predictability, leading to agility becoming a company-wide strategic core competence.

Benefits Increased employee satisfaction, shorter cycle times on product development and successful remote work during the pandemic.

In five years, agility has become a strategic core competence for DNA. Through increased transparency, innovation and seamless cooperation, the teams are able to continuously reach 85-100% of their objectives, allowing DNA to serve its customers with even more efficacy, ease and speed.

From separate agile bricks to a coherent agile foundation

The cooperation of Nitor and DNA started in 2016 with the objective to increase and expand agility within the organisation. This was done by implementing a larger “master” agile team, unifying separate teams having dependencies between them.

Earlier, a number of teams were working on separate projects, having numerous dependencies between them, with little communication. This caused late surprises and a domino effect with significant delays in the overall delivery timetables. DNA also had some agile islands where teams were utilising adaptive and iterative development methods, but the rest of the organisation was not yet using agile principles, which made cooperation difficult between different parts of the organisation.

Forming one common larger agile team of teams with shared planning allowed people involved in different projects to have visibility of how work proceeds, and what is needed and when. Everybody involved gained visibility of potential future obstacles, making it possible to address the issues before they created problems.

In 2018, the cooperation expanded to implementing B2B lean portfolio management, in order to increase transparency in upper levels of management. This resulted in better prioritisation and ability to react to changing business requirements, as well as an increase in trust in the process of new product development. This, in turn, allowed management to have greater confidence in the completion of the business outcomes as intended.

Photos: DNA

85%+

Objectives reached

60+

Agile teams

56%

Increase in deployments 2019 – 2020

Now I have true visibility of the big picture instead of partial views through project reports. I’m able to communicate our future development roadmap with 85 percent certainty. Two years ago, when we started working with Nitor, our coach Ari showed that our true predictability was around 30 percent. That was a wake-up call to us managers. We wanted to improve.

Mikko Kannisto, Vice president, DNA

Balance and clarity through agile ways of working

The implemented agile practices became important means for creating balance to daily work. Employees and partners of DNA would not become overwhelmed with their workload, due to transparency and improved cooperation. Increased transparency made it possible to see how one’s input affects the work as a whole, and this resulted in having the work flow effortlessly throughout the whole process. In addition, cooperation and trust improved not only within DNA’s own organisation, but also between DNA and its partners, who were included in the planning process from the start.

After five years of improving and expanding agile ways of working, it has become easier for a large organisation to make quick changes in unpredictable times. Agility becoming a strategic core competence for DNA has been a significant factor in how effortlessly teams were able to collaborate while working remotely during the pandemic.

From easing the work of technical teams to a company-wide strategic core competence

The assignment began with creating a larger agile team of teams, with joint planning, to make the work of technical teams flow more easily. People involved in the same workflow would plan together, identifying and solving problems beforehand. Next, lean portfolio management was implemented to gain visibility and transparency, leading to a significant increase in creating value to customers.

As agile ways of working expanded within DNA, more than 60 teams are now planning together to make all the work at hand flow as easily as possible throughout the whole process. Agility has become a strategic capability that is lead by a group of dedicated agile coaches, who continue to further develop and expand agile practices in the organisation. During the past two years, agile methods have been taken into use in the support functions outside product development making it available for everyone at DNA.