In a fast changing world is the team the main asset!
Côte d’Azure in France, April 25+26 2019 - Together with guests from Air France KLM and David Kershaw from the UK Cabinet office we spent 2 days on our first LAP Retreat 2019, exchanging, challenging, developing Lean-Agile Procurement (short LAP) and most important had some fun & beers!-This blog post is a short summary about and why our concussing was valid for us as well: „In a fast changing world the team is the main asset!“
Who were „we“?-The main attendees were the members of the LAP Alliance, the Certified LAP Trainers. To get an outside view we invited members of the recent success story with LAP at Air France KLM as well with David a representative from the public procurement/GOV. We’ve got hosted by 2 of our members Sophie and Lionel from Good!. A big thank you again for that!
We had great exchanges, we’re able to align towards a joint strategy and even developed new things, just awesome!-I for my side enjoyed it a lot.
A brief summary of our achievements:
Great exchanges with our guests from Air France KLM and with David Kershawfrom the UK Cabinet Office (involved in the Brexit)
Intensive exchanges, challenging our approaches, even the strategy of LAP, so that we became all better as a team
Gathering quotes and exchanging about further success stories
Understanding public procurement, it’s challenges and drafting how LAP could be applied
Develop new things like e.g. 1st drafts of visualizations about LAP in general and the Big Room Evaluation Day (so called POCATHON)
Sharing LAP to a bigger audience in France via the first LAP Conference together with Air France KLM
We’d like to share with you the following out of this exciting 2 days.
1st LAP Conference
In the evening of the 1st day Sophie and Lionel organized our very first LAP Conference for and with their customers/community. It was setup as private event and almost 40 people showed up, mostly with a procurement background. The event was kicked of by Damien, also Certified LAP Trainer and the found of goood!.
His talk about „Building a Sustainable Business“ showed very good, why we should include our partners and need to start treating them as such. Furthermore it’s no more a choice of being „just“ profitable but also responsible. And that in a fast changing world the team becomes an intangible asset!-We couldn’t agree more on that!
To achieve that he closed with the statement „We need to BREAK with all the RULES, but not the LAW“. In other words if we find and enable the mavericks in our businesses only we will overcome the current traps.
Air France KLM Success Story
After Damiens talk Frederic and Eric representing their Air France KLM team shared their success story with LAP in an interview style. AF KLM is already operating mostly agile, but the sourcing was done in a classic approach still and they saw very fast the benefits of LAP and were confident to rock it with the help of Sophie and Lionel.
Frederic started the interview, that it was quit a difficult project for him. He was new to AF KLM Cargo and they didn’t knew the partners either. The organization at AF KLM is furthermore highly distributed (Nizza, Amsterdam, Paris, …). At this moment they had less trust, that the vendors will provide the right people and a new approach to source a partner for their new Tracking Solution was very welcome.
It’s important to mention, that LAP wasn’t applied full stack. The pre-selection of the shortlisted vendors and the final contract negotiations have been done in a classic approach. However, to choose the right partner they all met in Amsterdam for 2 days in the center of AF KLM Cargo. The potential parters should show up with the people that will do the job and the ones with the commercial background too.
“Instead of eliminating the less promising offers, we ended up improving each proposal and choosing the best one!”
They have recognized from first hands how the vendor is organized, how they run the proof-of-concept (POC) and how decisions have been taken. E.g. one vendor showed up with 7 commercial people and decision taking was very painful with them. As on the other hand another vendor could take decisions right away. During the POC they run 1/2 day iterations and demoed at the end of each iterations their results to the real users at CARGO. At the end of the 2 days they decided and continued working with the partner the week after!-Ericmentioned something very interesting: Instead of eliminating the less promising offers, we ended up improving each proposal together with the potential partner and then we've chosen the best of it!
“The team building with the partner has been done mostly within the 2 days!”
„It seemed that the team building has been done within the 2 days right away!“, they said.-Interesting to hear was, that the initial ranking from the RfP had changed seeing the partners and their people in action.
Frederic and his team are very satisfied with the results of LAP and will apply it to future complex sourcing cases with AF KLM. One more time we’d like to thank Frederic and his team for sharing their case with us and the LAP community.
SwissCasinos Success Story - How we sourced an ERP in just 2 days!
Before the QnA session I had the pleasure to introduce LAP based on our latest full stack success story with SwissCasinos Group, that has sourced an ERP in just 2 days!-Full stack in a sense of setting up an agile, cross-functional product team with people that will do the job from the start. So became e.g. Daniel Pellegrini, Head of Finance & Board Member at SC Group, the Product Owner of this initiative. He and his team will be in charge not just for the sourcing, but the whole product life cycle. This is in his interest, as he knows exactly where he wants to develop that topic at SC Group.
In other words we started as early as possible with the right people. In addition to the AF KLM case we also co-created and signed the agile contract by the end of the 2nd day of the partner workshop. Therefor we needed beside procurement, decision takers, legal, etc. just everybody needed from both parties at the table.
Did you recognize how many we’ve mentioned „the right people“ and „team“?-Yes a lot!-Coming back to our initial hypothesis „In a fast changing world is the team the main asset!“ I personally can confirm, this!-I’ve felt it during the LAP Retreat, while hearing the story of AF KLM and I've got remembered by every success story we’ve done so far!
I can just recommend everybody out there: „give it more of a weight, the social facts are as important as the hard facts! “
We had a lot of fun too and this comes with true social fit for free :-)
Cheers
Mirko
Co-founder of flowdays, Creator Lean-Agile Procurement