Lightning Talk from The Digital Skills Summit: Powered by Wired Sussex on Monday 23rd March 2015 @ Komedia, Brighton

1. Strategy and Culture
Martin Wilson
Caroline Collyer

2. Agenda
• How we radically restructured our company to
maximise learning (Martin)
• Our approach to our employees’ growth (Caroline)

3. What do we do?
• Custom software
• Software products e.g. Asset Bank (a Digital Asset
Management application)

4. How we used to be?
• Small company growing to medium size
• Hierarchical management structure
• Traditional waterfall approach

5. What made us change?
• Transition to Agile for software
• Similar issues in other areas of the business
• Explored lean principles

6. What made us change?
Agile - iterative development, in which
requirements and solutions evolve through
collaboration between self-organizing, cross-
functional teams.
Lean - creating more value for customers with
fewer resources, i.e. by avoiding waste

7. What did we do?
• Research of leadership topics
• Radical restructuring - into self-managed teams
• Team leaders not managers
• Short feedback loops to maximise learning

8. How we used to do it
• 6 monthly appraisals
• Feedback collated by managers
• Very little positive feedback until appraisals
• Blame culture
• Inconsistent approach between managers

9. What we do now
• Regular coaching
• ‘Feedback groups’
• Culture change to welcoming feedback
• Collaboration

10. Skills gaps and motivation
• Benefits of self-managed teams
• Peer coaching
• Stretch objectives (linked to progression goals)
• Agile tools/techniques