Agile ways of working have been utilized at Posti for several years, but systematical transform covering the entire organization was initiated under the leadership of Sari Hildén in May 2019. The agile change at Posti has been implemented by providing training and support to take learnings into one's daily life in small increments. As understanding has been grown, new methods have been explored and good, proven functional models adopted more widely. Personnel from all sorts of roles have been contributing on this.
“By involving personnel, we have been able to build the right practices solving the real challenges, and via that, there is no fear that the teams will return to their old ways of working after a while”, says Sari.
Best Practices
We have collected best agile practices to a SharePoint site, available for all working at Posti and with Posti employees. There you will find practices, on how to begin your agile journey, as well as tips for more advanced agilists. The site is constantly updated based on feedback and topics we have learned.
Continuous Improvement
One of the agile fundamentals is continuous improvement. Gathering and processing feedback, as well as continuous improvement is already embedded in agile events. In addition, we have agile coaches available, who guide the teams to find and adopt suitable practices, e.g. by facilitating the first agile events. Coaches are also helping the teams to develop to high-performing teams.
Competence Development
Competence development plays a key role at Posti. Everyone needs to understand what benefits agile operating model brings and how it affects in their daily work.
“We have fundamental training courses to create understanding of agile principles and benefits. We also have courses for agile roles and different groups like leadership, marketing and human resources, where the benefits are presented from the focus groups perspective. We provide also new courses as needed”, explains Sari.
In addition to training courses, Posti has open communities, where those interested in the same topic solve their challenges and share learnings with others. Communities have their own facilitator who, based on the feedback, selects suitable topics for subsequent meetings. This provides a great channel for the information sharing and learning across organizational boundaries.
Implementation of the Strategy at all Levels
One of the agility goals is to bring visibility to the strategy implementation so that everyone understands why we are doing certain things. Management has a very clear understanding of this, but it often blurs as you go further in the organization.
To strengthen our understanding, we organize planning events, where we share the strategic goals for the coming period and agree on the things that will be achieved. The developed topics are presented in open demo events, where participants can ask questions and provide feedback.
For development, we have defined steps to get the best results: before starting, we ensure the topic is broken into small-enough parts to deliver value to our customers early and to collect the learnings and customer feedback, before moving to more complex functionality.
Because the initiatives are linked to the strategy, everyone is able to see, how the work contributes to our strategy and understands its implications.
All in all, Posti has tremendous opportunities to develop as a company and a great environment to improve continuously. Everyone is welcomed to be part of that, regardless of role and job duties. “By working together, we achieve great results!”, concludes Sari.