Dr Klaus Leopold, computer scientist, Kanban pioneer and creator of the Flight Levels Model, has many years of experience as a top management consultant. He advises companies worldwide on how to act agile on the market. Klaus is author of the bestseller Rethinking Agile, Practical Kanban and co-author of the standard work Kanban Change Leadership. He is co-founder of the Flight Levels Academy and he publishes his current thoughts and experiences in the world of Flight Levels and organisational development on his blog www.LEANability.com.

Rethinking Agile - Why Agile Teams Have Nothing to Do With Business Agility

In this talk, Klaus discusses an agile transition where approximately 600 people were involved. The goal was to shorten the time-to-market for initiatives to be able to respond to customer needs more quickly and, as such, improve business agility. In order to achieve this, a reorganization was carried out. Cross-functional teams were constructed so knowledge needed for development is fully available within the team. In addition, the teams were categorized according to product in order to remove any dependencies. Visualization of the work, Standup meetings and Retrospectives made the agile transition complete—except for the expected improvements.

In this session, he shares what we did to improve the situation and reach the goal of "more business agility". He also shows how you can approach an agile transition of this size, so you can avoid the issue of no improvements being seen. This much he can tell you in advance: do not start at the team level—it will save not only your nerves, but also a lot of money!