Agile Contracting in Banking using Lean-Agile Procurement

In this case story, Rivo Head of Procurement at Candriam shares how Lean-Agile Procurement was used to procure a complex solution in banking, in the matter of weeks not years.

Panelists

Rivo RANDRIAMANANJARA

Head of Procurement at Candriam

https://www.linkedin.com/in/randriamananjara/

Mattias Skarin

Lean & Kanban Coach, crisp.se

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattiasskarin/

Source of video: https://blog.crisp.se/2022/04/04/mattiasskarin/agile-contracting-in-banking-using-lean-agile-procurement

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!.

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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!

Lean-Agile Procurement Gathering 2019, Nice, France. from Damien Thouvenin

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!”

— Eric Chaumette, Managed Delivery Centers Program Management Air France

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!”

— Air France KLM

„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.

LAP Conference 2019 Cote d'Azure, France mirko-kleiner from waioblue

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.

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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

Agile@Procurement - Down under takes over!

During our exciting 2-days Lean-Agile Procurement certification workshop in Auckland some of the participants came and said to us: „Wow this is so awesome, but our boss/peers/etc needs to know about that too!“-As agile we are we setup some FREE one hour slots called Lean Coffee’s, where those participants could invite wherever they liked. This blog post is about what we’ve experienced & learned during those coffee sessions. Be aware, down under is about to take over the Lean-Agile Procurement movement!

As usual we had a very diverse group of 25 attendees in our 2-days certification workshop Lean-Agile Procurement (short LAP) in Auckland. Consisting of procurement and sales professionals, agile coaches, digital experts, even some lawyers. We haven’t had just a big diversity between roles and companies, but also on levels. From c-suite, CPO’s over strategic buyer/account manager to Program Managers, etc. we had almost the whole value stream represented. A very good base for open minded exchanges and one of the reason I personally like to work in that domain. Did I mentioned that we've been SOLD OUT!?

However, during the workshop 2-3 attendees came across and told us, that their peers should know about LAP too, because they thought it would bring so much value to their work/business/etc too. That was the moment, where we decided on the spot to offer some 1-hour FREE Lean Coffee sessions. Within minutes the slots were taken by the attendees for various reasons I suppose: Convincing their boss/peers, inspiring other departments, or getting some like-minded people together to start their first pilot project using LAP right away.

We had a comprehensive list of businesses from private and public sector to visit:

• Air New Zealand

• Tower Insurance

• Vodafone

• University of Auckland

• ASZ

Day after the workshop we started our first lean coffee session.

Air New Zealand

Jakub Jurkiewicz an enthusiastic Agile Coach at Air NZ asked for this session and made it happen, that we’ve been part of the team meeting of the whole #procurement team of Alistair Prebble, Head of Procurement Air NZ. Some more guys from the digital department squeezed in too so that the room was full.

Each party shared their current status, learnings and pitfalls. It felt like we‘ve cooperated already for years.

It turned out that the procurement team and their digital team has experimented much more as the average company we‘ve met so far. For commodity sourcing cases they‘ve invested in Lean Procurement and digitalization from source to pay as many other company. 

In digital initiatives they‘ve experimented with more collaborative tenders as we did with LAP. They haven‘t gone as far as we did but they for sure will now they‘ve seen how!

Even more interesting to see was that the procurement team of Air NZ has started to make their work visible using Kanban Boards. They are just one step before creating cross-functional teams as Barclays did.

Vodafone

Right after the Business Agility Meetup I went with Jörg Breitenberger, Agile Coach with Vodafone, to a Lean Beer and we had a good exchange about agile transitions, pitfalls and how this could drive enthusiastic employees into demotivated ones. Our key conclusion was we need to onboard everybody, especially the top management so that everybody understands why we‘re becoming agile and how.

Tower Insurance

Bruce McClintock, an extraordinary person with a background in law, economics, IT and Agile wanted to get us in touch with Stu Waddington a like-minded program manager at Tower Insurance. He runs currentely one of the biggest program at Tower in digitalization and we had a lot of stories to share about. One key takeaway was that getting the #RIGHTpartner is key. Especially if we have to deal with a lot of uncertainty and surprises as we go. They‘ve shared their current contractual setup where Tower has agreements on packes of story points with their partners. It works out very good with them, but we shared our concerns about it with them. Because it might be a risk if the partner is in control of the kpi he gets mesured and payed. 

The way how they currentely source is quit traditional and takes a lot of time in a complex environment, what a surprise. They’ve might got some inspiration from LAP for future projects.

University of Auckland 

Xian Fu organised a session with David Rees‘ procurement team and representatives from project management. The university of Auckland is under #publicLaw and we had very interesting and open minded discussions how to apply LAP at #GOV. They run all digitalization already in an #Agile setup and to our surprise David spoke about how they’ve source in a more collaborative approach even before the agile movement 20-30 years ago. We encouraged them to publish the way they did and they definately toke some inspiration out of LAP. Such as to improve the collection of customer needs in a more collaborative approach.

ASB Bank

Last but not least Lean Coffee session was organised by Kerry Walden and she brought us in touch with Mark Jones, General Manager Procurement ASB Bank and Chris from their digital department.

They started the exchange we #DONT run classic tenders any more. We tend to get in touch with our partners, agree on just 3-4 pages contracts and gather customer needs eg. via design thinking workshops.

On the other hand they do have room for improvement in automization of commodity sourcing cases. Or may be I‘ve got them wrong?

What they did naturally we‘d call the #futureOfProcurement. They‘ve started to establish #businessPartnerships and supported the business on site as part of their cross-functional team. It worked out very good with them and after a 6 month experiment they look forward what to do next. That the whole bank is under an Agile Transition definitely helped to encourage running such experiments.

Conclusions

What we‘ve seen and heard about Agile@Procurement in these couple of hours was more promising then what we‘ve seen so far in Europe or the States all over!-The Kiwi's might be still be behind in terms of Business Agility, but if it comes to being open minded in procurement we'd wish, that more companies and leaders are behaving like them. Beware the Kiwi's taking over the lead in the movement Lean-Agile Procurement :-)

We‘d like to encourage you to connect to these leaders and exchange about their learnings. Take an examples of a more customer centric procurement and overcome the classic traps. Or as Ross recentely said, at least similar :-): The future is now, what are you waiting for!

Special thanks goes to Andrea Gregory, Head of Procurement Tower Insurance, who connected the dots and brought us over to New Zealand!

One more thing: We learned a lot to and will definitely repeat it as we think it was a win-win for both parties. Also we will have another 2-days certification workshop in Auckland and may be in Melbourne again end of 2019. Stay tuned and check our workshop calendar

Enlarging our Reach via iTunes & Spotiy, thx to AgileAmped!

New York City, March 15 - Mirko, the creator of LAP has got interviewed by AgileAmed, the most famous podcast about agile about Lean-Agile Procurement. Thanks to AgileAmped the reach of our movement got enlarged to their audience and the audience of iTunes and Spotify too!-We’re looking forward to inspire even more people around the world.

AgileAmped has 400+ episodes so far, that have been recording since 2015 and more than 300,000 downloads/listens. They are all available in our podcast library on our website. Not all of the podcasts get released on iTunes/Spotify and other podcast apps, only a highlight episode once per week (so not all 400 are on those platforms). We feel honored to be one of those!

 If you wanna know more about AgileAmped check out their quick 1-min video about the podcast.

Episode 1: Get to Market 400% Faster with Lean-Agile Procurement | Business Agility Series

When it comes to procurement in a Lean-Agile context, according to Mirko Kleiner, “It’s not rocket science” – but it does deliver compelling business value. Kleiner wears many hats: a thought leader in Lean-Agile procurement, author, co-founder of Flowdays and the list goes on. Lean Agile Procurement, he says, has some simple tenants that any agilist would recognize:

• Bring everyone together for alignment from legal to procurement to the supplier and the business users to form a cross-functional team.

• Accept uncertainty.

• Empower the team.

The outcomes include a client with a better understanding of what it wants, less re-work or misunderstanding about requirements, and – get this – an average increase of 400% in time-to-market.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at the 2019 Business Agility Conference in New York City.

Original Source: Find the podcast also on the AgileAmped website