Zalando - How to introduce Procurement into an Agile Culture?

Zalando - Germany

Alejandro told the audience from quite a different story introducing more Professionalism in Procurement into a purely Agile Company like Zalando.

The recording

To hear Alejandro’s talk jump right to 40:25 in the video.

The slide deck

Zalando - How to introduce Procurement into an Agile Company? from Mirko Kleiner

Our Conclusions

• Zalando is a 10 Years old Startup with more than 10,000 Employees, which is already Agile as an organization and introducing more “structure” in Procurement needs to be adapted to the current culture & mindset

• Also at Zalando the Procurement has applied Scrum in their commercial organization, while swarming cross-functional e.g. for making negotions more effective, etc.

• Zalando also applied agile practices such as Scrum in development of their P2P Implementation with awesome impact to time-to-market and customer satisfaction

More about the Speaker

• Alejandro Basterrechea Head of Procurement Excellence Zalando

Author

AGCO Int. - How Collaboration with Vendors / Competitors increases Innovation

AGCO International GmbH - Global

Konstantin introduced us in the world of direct sourcing and how agile principles such as collaboration & transparency with partners / competitors could foster innovation & improve business success.

You might know AGCO’s Brands of Tractors such as e.g. Fendt, Valtra, Massey Ferguson, etc.

The recording

To hear Konstantin’s talk jump right to 1:12:46 in the video.

The slide deck

AGCO Int. - How Collaboration with Vendors / Competitors increases Innovation from Mirko Kleiner

Our Conclusions

• AGCO’s approach of Agile Product Clinics where they bring together current Partners & Competitors to review the current m modules / components of their tractors turned out as a very effective way to come up with new ideas / improvements and also to select alternative vendors

• Those Agile Product Clinics need a cross-functional support lead by a team consisting of Product Management / Marketing, Engineering, Production and Procurement. What a surprise that AGCO uses Scrum as operating model for this cross-functional team - the most effective way to organize a team.

• Combining those workshops with revisiting / improving the current agreements will boost the outcomes for both parties at buyer and supplier side even beyond.

More about the SpeakerS

• Konstantin Meier-Kulenkampff, Vice President Purchasing & Materials EME at AGCO

• Jan-Henner Theissen, CPO-Advisor & Interim Manager targetP!

Author

AGILE BUDGETS. AGILE CONTRACTS. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN FINANCIAL NEED MEETS MARKET REALITY?

Market and business uncertainty has created an unprecedented need for agile and adaptable systems and processes. Finance is at the forefront, struggling to set and manage budgets, forecasts and cash flow in today’s unpredictable conditions. 

Contracts are fundamental management tools and sources of information. For most industries, they drive revenue and for all industries they control spend – both external with suppliers and internal with employees and contract staff. But can they really become adaptive in ways that will better support the challenges that Finance faces? Is ‘agility’ achievable – and if so , how? 

Join us as we bring together three experts from the fields of finance, contracts and agile methods to discuss how we can best respond to the challenges of the market.

The recording

To hear the panel with Tim Cummins, Rikard Olsson & Mirko Kleiner watch the video.

Our Conclusions

• Commercial functions is a design from the past and needs to be adapted too to achieve true Business Agility

• Automatization & Digitalization will support the need for real time information / performance and decrease traditional reporting

• Relevant informations will be defined much more outcome-based by the business, while e.g. forecasts depend on empirical data and yearly budgets will become a too static thing from the past

• Ownership of financial needs more and more needs to be transferred to the value creation part of the organization

• Commercial Capabilities are still important but might be organized much closer to the market as today

• To react even faster to changing market needs the contracts / contractual frameworks need to become much more flexible than today

• our suppliers need to become our strategic partners, that co-develop / -server the market needs jointly

More about the Panelist’s

• Tim Cummins is founder and President of the global Alliance World Commerce & Contracting (formerly IACCM), Professor, Leeds University School of Law; Chair, International Commercial & Contract Management

• Rikard Olsson is Managing Director at Beyond Budgeting Ltd (Beyond Budgeting Roundtable and Beyond Budgeting Advisory) & Board Member at Ekan Management

• Mirko Kleiner is the President of the Lean-Agile Procurement Alliance, Thought Leader in Lean-Agile Procurement, CIPS Award Winner 2018, international speaker and co-founder of Flowdays – The Agile Cooperative. Mirko supports their customers as an Agile Enterprise Coach on their journeys to create a positive impact for their employees, customers and shareholder. 
  

OUR PARTNER

A big thank you goes to the WCC team who supports us in increasing the global awareness of agile in Procurement. 

To learn more about WCC check their website: https://www.iaccm.com

To learn more about Beyond Budgeting check their website: https://bbrt.org

Author

SwissCasinos - Is it possible to source an ERP System in just 4 Weeks?

SwissCasinos Group - Switzerland

Daniel started his talk with the question “Is sourcing of an ERP System in just 4 Weeks possible”?-Obviously it is and his story was recently awarded as the Winner of the World Procurement Awards 2020!

The recording

To hear Daniel’s talk jump right to 18:37 in the video.

The Slide deck

SwissCasinos - Is it possible to source an ERP System in just 4 Weeks? from Mirko Kleiner

Our Conclusions

• Having all 3 competitors in the same room to co-create their proposals, talk about any concerns / assumptions / questions / etc. was very beneficial also to get the right social- & cultural fit

• The commercial “negotiations” took place as well and because having the RIGHT people their from all the parties a WIN-WIN could be agreed on, with significant savings

• Scrum turned out as the optimal operating model for executing a cross-functional sourcing team

• improving an Agile Contract together with all participants helped to align / setup the delivery team, so that they could start the day after and keeping the partnership as flexible as needed

More about the Speaker

• Daniel Pellegrini, Former Head of Finance SwissCasinos Group

Author

APA Group - How Agile is changing an Industry & Lives!

APA Group - Australia

APA is a leading Australian energy infrastructure business. Henriette introduced us in how applying Agile is currently changing a whole Industry and also her Live!-In other words she’s talking us trough how Lean Agile Procurement has helped to shape significant change in individuals, teams, organisations and supply chains within the energy industry 

Henriette Kampfer & Marcus Ward talked about how agile in procurement changed their way of working / thinking at APA Group the major Gas supplier in Austral...

Source of video: APA Group, recorded for CIPS Meetup 25.1.2021

Our Conclusions

• Agile is more than just a new way of working, it changes lives of the people involved

• Instead of just following the sourcing process procurement became part of innovation, with e.g. impact on how people in Australia see their energy consumption

• the inclusive approach and applying scrum to the core-team consisting of all capabilities / functions needed helped to align with the strategy faster and to find the optimal partner

More about the SpeakerS

• Henriette Kamfer Category Specialist at APA Group

• Marcus Ward Agile Coach & Certified LAP Trainer Twenty2 Collective

MORE

• About the APA Group

• Join the CIPS Switzerland Linkedin Group here

• FREE Download of the global annual report State of Agility in Procurement & Supply

AUTHOR

6 Success Stories - Agile in Procurement just Talk or Reality?!

The COVID-19 crisis has emphasised the importance of new -more agile- approaches in procurement. But is it just another buzzword, or has it become reality?!-Learn from 6 cases all around the world how agile in procurement impacted their business positively. One of the stories just won the World Procurement Award 2020!

This is a short review / summary of the 6 talks at the joint Online Meetup with CIPS Switzerland. More details such as e.g. recordings / Slides / follow-up’s with the speakers / etc will follow - STAY TUNED!

Intro & State of Agility in Procurement & Supply

John & myself kicked off the event with more than 250 participants from all around the world.

It was my honor to give an even bigger picture what’s going on in terms of agility all over the world and presented a summary of our global annual report State of Agility in Procurement & Supply.

Find the Report for FREE download here.

Our Conclusions

• Business Agility became of strategic importance for all companies no matter on the buyer or supplier side

• More an more commercial functions are or will be including in their company-wide Agile Transformation Initiatives

• Lean-Agile Procurement is THE agile approach for Procurement beside standard agile approaches like Kanban / Scrum

• Minority of companies includes their partners in their journey becoming more Agile together yet

• Also is the value of more agile Contracts still underestimated

• Finally for 2021 respondents concluded that Education in Agile Practices / Approaches / etc. is the number 1 strategic Priority

More about the Speakers

• John Everett, Head of Procurement, BU Pigments at Clariant

• Mirko Kleiner, Thought Leader in Lean-Agile Procurement, co-founder flowdays

SwissCasinos Group - Switzerland

Daniel started his talk with the question “Is sourcing of an ERP System in just 4 Weeks possible”?-Obviously it is and his story was recently awarded as the Winner of the World Procurement Awards 2020!

Our Conclusions

• Having all 3 competitors in the same room to co-create their proposals, talk about any concerns / assumptions / questions / etc. was very beneficial also to get the right social- & cultural fit

• The commercial “negotiations” took place as well and because having the RIGHT people their from all the parties a WIN-WIN could be agreed on, with significant savings

• Scrum turned out as the optimal operating model for executing a cross-functional sourcing team

• improving an Agile Contract together with all participants helped to align / setup the delivery team, so that they could start the day after and keeping the partnership as flexible as needed

More about the Speaker

• Daniel Pellegrini, Former Head of Finance SwissCasinos Group

Zalando - Germany

Alejandro told the audience from quite a different story introducing more Professionalism in Procurement into a purely Agile Company like Zalando.

Our Conclusions

• Zalando is a 10 Years old Startup with more than 10,000 Employees, which is already Agile as an organization and introducing more “structure” in Procurement needs to be adapted to the current culture & mindset

• Also at Zalando the Procurement has applied Scrum in their commercial organization, while swarming cross-functional e.g. for making negotions more effective, etc.

• Zalando also applied agile practices such as Scrum in development of their P2P Implementation with awesome impact to time-to-market and customer satisfaction

More about the Speaker

• Alejandro Basterrechea Head of Procurement Excellence Zalando

AGCO International GmbH - Global

Konstantin introduced us in the world of direct sourcing and how agile principles such as collaboration & transparency with partners / competitors could foster innovation & improve business success.

You might know AGCO’s Brands of Tractors such as e.g. Fendt, Valtra, Massey Ferguson, etc.

Our Conclusions

• AGCO’s approach of Agile Product Clinics where they bring together current Partners & Competitors to review the current m modules / components of their tractors turned out as a very effective way to come up with new ideas / improvements and also to select alternative vendors

• Those Agile Product Clinics need a cross-functional support lead by a team consisting of Product Management / Marketing, Engineering, Production and Procurement. What a surprise that AGCO uses Scrum as operating model for this cross-functional team - the most effective way to organize a team.

• Combining those workshops with revisiting / improving the current agreements will boost the outcomes for both parties at buyer and supplier side even beyond.

More about the SpeakerS

• Konstantin Meier-Kulenkampff, Vice President Purchasing & Materials EME at AGCO

• Jan-Henner Theissen, CPO-Advisor & Interim Manager targetP!

Gazprom Neft - Russia

Boris introduced us how to deal with finding the right partner in a huge country like Russia and that applying LAP is also much more fair to all the parties.

Our Conclusions

• Lean-Agile Procurement workshops, to negotiate with multiple vendors simultaneously, can be done 100% online. It even makes a lot of sense if the spend is not so big and the vendors would have inadequate expenses

• the principles of Lap could be applied to sourcing in the public sector too

• in many cases with a high promotion of innovation it’s recommended to run a proof-of-concept in parallel

More about the SpeakerS

• Boris Zobnin, Head Procurement Digitalization Program

• Ivan Dubrovin Agile Coach & Certified LAP Trainer ScrumTrek

Air France KLM - France/Global

Frédéric introduced us in his world of Cargo and how to outsource a strategic product development at AirFrance KLM.

Our Conclusions

• Social- & Culture fit turned out as important than the hard facts such as price / quality / etc.

• Just by bringing together the right people and forming a cross-functional team they could ensure that all interests are covered

• Instead of eliminating the less promising offers they have been able to improve all of them in the big room event together with all the vendors / competitors and choose the best out of it!

• It’s not just about fast sourcing, but also faster delivery value to the business.

• LAP has create much more than just a relationship, we became friends!

More about the SpeakerS

• Frédéric Jaques CARGO IT MANAGER Air France KLM

• Sophie Durand Agile Coach & Certified LAP Trainer Goood!

APA Group - Australia

Henriette introduced us in how applying Agile is currently changing a whole Industry and also her Live!-In other words she’s talking us trough how Lean Agile Procurement has helped to shape significant change in individuals, teams, organisations and supply chains within the energy industry 

Our Conclusions

• Agile is more than just a new way of working, it changes lives of the people involved

• Instead of just following the sourcing process procurement became part of innovation, with e.g. impact on how people in Australia see their energy consumption

• the inclusive approach and applying scrum to the core-team consisting of all capabilities / functions needed helped to align with the strategy faster and to find the optimal partner

More about the SpeakerS

• Henriette Kamfer Category Specialist at APA Group

• Marcus Ward Agile Coach & Certified LAP Trainer Twenty2 Collective

MORE

• Join the CIPS Switzerland Linkedin Group here

• FREE Download of the global annual report State of Agility in Procurement & Supply

Author

AirFrance KLM - How to Outsource a Critical Project with Lean-Agile Procurement

With a challenging six-month time frame, Air France looked to a new innovative approach to procuring the right team for the job.

Air France KLM Cargo Operations needed to improve the efficiency and productivity of its door-to-door cargo. Time is essential in freight and any delay or break in the chain would lead to product waste and unhappy customers. It was critical that a new system was created to improve the efficiency.

A new booking system was required within six months, how were Air France going to assemble a team that worked cohesively and remotely, thought innovatively, understood the cargo industry, and produce the product within the challenging time frame.

Key Points

Challenges:

• Critical project with potentially high business outcomes

• Short time frame

• Keeping a high level of cooperation with an outsourced team in a remote location

• Remodel the vendor sourcing policy

Results:

• Six weeks to select a vendor and actually start the project

• Accelerated project start: team building already done and new team already well aware of the business context and challenges

• Challenging milestones easily reached

A key player in the air cargo industry, AIR FRANCE KLM MARTINAIR Cargo is the specialised air cargo business of the Air France KLM Group, offering a worldwide network of 457 destinations from two hubs, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

The recording

To hear Frédérique’s talk jump right to 31:17 in the video.

The slide deck

AirFrance KLM - How to Outsource a Critical Project with Lean-Agile Procurement from Mirko Kleiner

End of 2018, Frédéric was facing two major problems:

1. Deliver a new critical IT application for Cargo Truck management within a tight schedule. High importance – vital the Cargo Truck management system was efficient to reduce waste and increase output.

2. Recruit a new team to develop the new system. The existing team consists of many contractors from different vendors. It is not big enough to handle the project and there is a need for new skills.

The Team - Air France KLM Cargo Operations Department

• Frédéric Jacques, Head of Cargo Operations IT

• Simon Spoor, Frédéric’s Business counterpart (acting as Product Owner)

• Eric Chaumette, Head of Managed Delivery Centers initiative

• Sophie Durand and Lionel Massiera, Agile Coaches and LAP specialists

According to the new Air France procurement policy on hiring contractors, Frédéric would have to source a whole team, remotely located on the vendor’s premises.

Air France Cargo department has been working in an agile way for years (SAFe): how would a brand new remotely located team fit in? How would they quickly reach the necessary level of cooperation?

Time was of the essence and following the current procurement policy would have taken several months. Frédéric’s business counterpart, Simon was really concerned with this issue and couldn’t believe that sourcing a new team would fit in the challenging project schedule, given that traditional RFP (request for proposal) processes usually lasted several months a new way of thinking was needed.

Congratulations & Thank you!

Congratulations to the whole AirFrance KLM Team and our LAP Trainer Sophie Durand & Lionel Massiera. Furthermore we also wanna give a big thank you to Emily Ruffle from the Agile Business Consortium how made the interviews, crafted this success story and co-published it to spread the word.

There are NO Agile Contracts!

Similar as there are no unicorns, even no cats with one :-), there also don’t exist agile contracts!-In my opinion we not just need get rid off this term, we also need to rethink how we come to an agreement.

In this blog post you’ll find out why and learn alternatives to overcome the dilemma of Business Agility and handling the legal aspects with your partners.

Unfortunately we need to inform you, that there’s been a big misunderstanding the last 15+ years. The agile community has come up with new concepts around contracting, even contractual templates have been developed, etc. However, there is no silver bullet and for sure there are NO agile contracts!

Why an Agile Contract doesn’t make any sense?

Have you ever thought about the words „Agile Contract“?-„Agile“ (1) stands for values & principles where we act on the same eye level, looking for people, partners, etc, that are able to respond to change more effective together. While „Contract“ has the word „Contra“ in it, which means against or opposite (2). 

“Contract is legally an agreement with specific terms between two or more persons or entities in which there is a promise to do something in return for a valuable benefit known as consideration.”

— legal definition of the term contract(2)

However „agreement“ is part of the definition, in practice it’s much more of the „against or opposite“ behaviors we recognize. Borders of responsibilities are usually cemented in a contract, so that lawyers increase the chances to win at court if something goes really wrong. In fact a contract is more of saving the buyer’s, or vendor’s interest and tries to reduce it’s risks as much as possible. Btw. There’s nothing wrong about that. However, it’s more of the way it’s getting approached. We’ve somehow lost the aspect of „agreement“. I often experience „take it or leave it“-situations, predefined contracts with penalties, etc. in place where there’s no opportunity to improve it together. Doing so we are not applying any agile values & principles to the process of agreeing even though we refer to it often in the contract. How weird is that?

Even if we’ve put good practices such as „money for nothing“, „changes for free“, a more outcome based focus of the contract, etc. it’s still missing the collaboration aspect of an agreement!-Even worse than that put people who aren’t so deep in agile think by such good practices of a silver bullet and put everything in one new big template and call it an agile contract. Or others call a true agile contract has been based on time and materials. All of those are wrong!

The reason why nobody has found the silver bullet yet is there is none!-It depends on the context, the parties involved, the people and their values/cultures, etc.

So, what’s the alternative?-Goodbye Agile Contract, welcome Lean-Agile Agreement

First of all we’d like to change the term „Contract“ into „Agreement“, because it has „agree“ in it and if we’re believing in true agile values such as trust, honesty, etc. we’d also respect a co-creation of the legal agreement. In our cases with Lean-Agile Procurement we’re applying this principle of co-creating very successfully which leads to more honest conversations between all parties about each others concerns, risks, cost-drivers, etc. A CEO of one of the vendor’s recently even said, this is the fairest agreement we’ve ever signed!

“This is the fairest agreement we’ve ever signed!”

— CEO of a Vendor while applying Lean-Agile Procurement

We also  need to understand, that there are no agreement, that are evil. We should more think of all the different agreement types as of a continuum, or different meals we can choose from depending on our context. Find some listed the following.

Time & Materials is one of those agreement types, that could make sense in certain contexts. But and there is a big BUT, we need to have a honest conversation about the risks we’re transferring to the buyer side and how to handle those. Of course there are quite radical agreement types, such as e.g. „Outcome-based with profit sharing“, service subscription, etc. that might even change the business model. Do you remember, that e.g. Rolls Royce - one of the biggest suppliers of aircraft engines and services - switched to a service subscription where the airlines „just“ pay per flying hour?-But that’s another story.

On the continuum you’ll not find fake agile agreements such as e.g. Story point based agreement or Sprint-based agreement. Just think about who is in control of story point estimation and you’ll realize that this makes no sense. If any kind of estimation point makes sense it would be Business Value Point estimation. Or why should we create more legally overhead at the end of a sprint e.g. every week as an iteration is more an opportunity to test our assumptions and learn together.

As we’re also not looking for 100-pages legal documents we also should consider to keep an agile agreement as lean as possible. That’s why we’d like to introduce to the community a new term „Lean-Agile Agreement“!

Goodbye Negotiation, welcome Commercial Conversation

As mentioned above a key aspect of a Lean-Agile Agreement is collaboration between the parties and taking this to an even further level of co-creation. On the other hand we need to say goodby to endless negotiations, approvals, etc. Here Lean-Agile Procurement as an approach could be beneficial. We often spend less than 20min for finalizing the agreement with a 3rd party thanks to the fact, that we have all the right people in one room simultaneously.

We’d like to have honest commercial conversations where we act on the same eight level and improving of the Lean-Agile Agreement together is not an exception but more of the new normal. To foster collaboration and this commercial conversation we’ve asked ourselves what are the key aspects that drives, or blocks an agreement. Find a collection of topics as cards for self-printing the following. 

Get a joint understanding what each of the topics means to you, what other topics might be important to you and try to prioritize the LAP Agreement Cards together to get an understanding about each others values, concerns, etc. Btw. have I mentioned that „negotiation“ is a term from the past too :-)?-We’re also looking to improve this wording into „Commercial Conversation“.

Our key take-away

• Agile Contract is an unfortunate term because it consists of „Contra“, that doesn’t fit really with agile values & principles.

• We therefor should start using Lean-Agile Agreement, that pushes the principle of lean, joint agreement, co-creation more explicit.

• There are no agreement types, that are evil. We should more think of all the different agreement types as of a continuum to choose from depending on our context, people, culture, etc. The LAP cards are supporting us here.

• The LAP Agreement Cards also support us in the commercial conversation based on agile values & principles instead of traditional negotiations.

Find out in our next blog post why we need a major upgrade of the agilemanifesto.org

Author

Sources:

• Header image: https://cutecatsinhats.com/unicorn-cat-hat/

• 1) agile https://agilemanifesto.org

• 2) https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/contra

• 2) Legal dictionary https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/contract

Big Room Event - How to co-create an Agile Contract in less than 2 days with 3 parties simultaneously

The fascination with Lean-Agile Procurement lies definitely in the big room events, where we gather customer needs with 100+ end users or co-create a Lean-Agile Agreement (Contracts) with e.g. 3 parties each or even let them form alliances as they go. People that hear that often think this isn’t possible, it sounds like magic because up till now it took us months to just finalize a contract!-In this blog post we’d like to share with you the secret sauce and some tipps-n-tricks around it, preparation! 

PLEASE NOTE: First of all we need to set a disclaimer. Not a single case in a complex space we operate in was the same. In other words look at this blog post as well as on Lean-Agile Procurement in general more of a framework. This framework might inspire you, in rare cases it even solves exactly your problem, but it’s definitely no checklist. Use your brain-power of the cross-functional team, take bits and pieces and adapt it to your needs!

Introduction

If you are the one, or part of an organization, that likes to organize a Big Room Event to decide on a partner, their service/product, etc. this seems like a huge challenge. Get inspired how it looks in reality in this fast-motion video with the CKW Group. They called it internally Pocathon (Proof-of-Concept + Hackathon).

A lot of people from various parties are swarming in the room and work on something. It looks like in a beehive and yes there are some similarities with it. We arrange the shortlisted vendors around the queen bee, or in our case the buyer’s cross-functional team, their decision taker, etc. (table in the center of the room). Everybody (vendors) should have always a direct access to the customer to ask questions, etc..

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The reason we organize such an expensive event is to get the maximum alignment out of it and so minimize risk by talking about all assumptions, risks, etc. Doing so we improve each of the proposals and the contract. We even try to use the expertise in the room of the vendors to let them come up with their ideas (wow the first time we’re getting Innovation through collaboration), or let them challenge an intermediate result from their competitors. This might sound unfair, but basically our intend is different. We wanna make them learn and improve, so that not just the buyers risk get decreased, but both sides win.

“None of us is as smart as all of us.”

— Ken Blanchard

It’s all about Alignment

Beside the traditional Business Fit around pricing, quality, timing, etc. we introduce with Lean-Agile Procurement also a Cultural- and Human Fit!-From our experience this is in complex sourcing cases as important than choosing the right product/service. However the vendors often experience this as assessment and it really is one. Similar to a Speed-Dating we wanna test our collaboration even before we get married!

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Source: LAP Alliance, by Philipp Engstler

Another big difference is the set of values we apply during Lean-Agile Procurement and which become the new values for the cross-functional team for delivery. As we’re looking for a true partnership agile values like transparency, honesty, commitment, or fairness apply e.g. also while the „negation“ and co-creation of the contract.

“This is the fairest contract we’ve ever agreed on!”

— various parties joined a Big Room Event

Everything you need to know

So before we give you some insights about how we’ve organized Big Room Event in the past you need to ask yourself:

WHO & WHAT’s needed to agree in a minimum amount of Time?!

Just answer this question in your context and you’ll get the RIGHT setup and agenda for your case. You’ll realize that this means a lot of preparation, where you’ll need the full attention of the cross-functional team.

Agile Organization of your Big Room Event

It turned out a good practice to apply to the facilitation of a Big Room Event agile practices as well and that’s why we usually sprint in several iterations through all the topics below. Sprinting allows us to get and share fast feedback and learn for the next iteration. This improves every vendor’s results with every iteration and at the end we’re able to choose the best of it!-You need an Agile Roadmap as an appendix to your contract?-Well then iterate on it and improve it together until it’s “Good enough”!

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Source: LAP Alliance - Principle Big Room Organization

Depending on your preferred Lean-Agile Agreement (Contract type) you might not need some of the topics below. Also a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) sometimes isn’t appropriate, but I wouldn’t miss to let the vendors create at least a presentation, or a solution design or similar. If we’re sprinting, why not introducing the results to the real end-users again from time to time and get their feedback too?-Or let the vendors pull their topics in a joint planning and test their commitment right away.

Backlog of possible Topics

• Introduction: Getting in touch, who’s here, in what role, what 

• Approach & Agenda incl. Definition of Done (DoD)

• Alignment/Context: Vision, business objective of product/service (buyer/vendor)

• Persona’s: Customer segmentation, it’s importance & needs

• Agile Roadmap incl. Objectives & Key results

• PoC: Delivery/Presentation of most challenging aspects

• Lean-Agile Agreement: Improving draft of agile contract, it’s commercial-/collaboration-model, etc.

• Solution: Technical design/-conditions

• Estimation: Putting the numbers together & agree on risk-share, assumptions, etc.

• Demo’s: Presentations of intermediate-/results/content for the participants or with the main stakeholders

• Peer-feedback: intermediate feedback/decisions

If this is your first Big Room Event it’s recommended to include at least a facilitator that is used to handle 20+ people. Furthermore I always create a script with a detailed estimation for each time box so that it’s more feasible how long it really takes. However, you always should expect the unexpected at any time and then react!-We once realized that the license model was super complex and we immediately stopped the workshop and let the 3 competitors co-create the optimal license model together. 

Good Practices

Find some more good practices below:

• Sprinting: Iterating on above topics with joint events such as Sprint Planning, Review, Retro

• Fixed Time-boxes: Strict facilitation of time-boxes 

• PULL: Self-organization of vendor teams

• Facilitation: Mix up with various big group facilitation technics

• Co-location: All in 1 room all the time, except for confidential topics private sessions

• Transparency: Immediate sharing of new insights

• Collaboration: Let the people work together that might become partners and will ship the product/service together

• Surprises: To test behavior’s under stress insert some surprises and pitfalls too and see how they react on those

• No Secrets: Put anything on the table you recognize such as bad behavior, strange solution, etc. to clarify it immediately

• FUN: Don’t forget to make and keep a good atmosphere 

Management Summary

At the end a short management summary for your decision takers:

• Investment: It’s worth it spending 1-2+ days with so many people so that they all will be aligned and ready to deliver immediately. Imagine the costs, if they aren’t instead?!-An incremental sourcing minimizes risk and maximizes business value at the same time!

• Time-to-Market: Time-to-Market only could improved if we change the way we currently work. As leader you’re in the position to make this work and support the business in keeping up with the market demand. In avg. we have a lead time of 2-4 weeks per case (Big Room Event included). This is an improvement of 400-800% to traditional approaches!

• Constraints: This new way of working doesn't come for free. It needs a high support from you as a leader because we need to rethink and bend a lot of existing rules. However, as we have all experts e.g. from compliance, procurement, business, etc. in the cross-functional team we ensure to stay complaint all the times. So no worries!

• Presence: Being present as a leader makes a huge difference and gives the topic it’s importance and you could support with an introduction in business objectives, the vision, or support the cross-functional team with your experience e.g. during negotiations, critical questions or situations, etc. If you’re not needed you could just be there and enjoy working without disturbance :-)

I wish you all the best with your application of a big room event. Let us know how it went!

Author

Sources:

• Image: https://www.fotocommunity.de/

• Video: CKW Group

• Content: LAP Alliance, all rights reserved

Agile Sourcing, how to plan for uncertain? (LAP Nuggets - Episode 2)

Have you ever wondered, why some of the strategic sourcing cases failed and others were successful?-In a series of episodes we gonna introduce you, what we’ve learned from our LAP Alliance networks’ multiple engagements and successful sourcing cases with LAP. With the LAP Nuggets we’ve furthermore developed and assembled applicable tools, that are easy to understand and will reduce your risks during strategic sourcing significantly!

In this episode we’d like to answer the question: „If we can’t plan uncertainty in strategic sourcing cases, how we can source it then either?!“

<< Back to the previous article of the series: The secret Sauce of successful Sourcing (LAP Nuggets - Episode 1)

Initial position

In our mandates as agile coaches I often hear „We are agile, we follow NO plan!“-This is scary to any leader and not a good ground to start an agile journey in procurement either. Fact is, that this is often taken as excuse of the current chaotic state of their agile transformation. In other words these people haven’t fully understood #BusinessAgility yet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a journey!-Nevertheless it’s a fact that with Lean-Agile Procurement we’re dealing with the most complex sourcing cases, in strategic new fields mostly unknown and with a lot of surprises to be expected with the first customer contact.

“We are agile, we follow NO plan!
”

— various agile teams in our mandates

In complex, strategic sourcing cases it’s very hard to foresee the next few months and to build a detailed plan. Or would you blame your broker because his estimation of the gold price hasn’t met his prediction?!-However we still need to invest in a „plan“ to be successful, but is this  still agile then?-Long story short, YES!

The Procurements Dilemma

Procurement professionals or businesses in more general, that like to source more complex, strategic products / services / etc. are usually not aware of the dilemma they are dealing with. Applying the classic sourcing approaches, such as RfX, to complex sourcing cases feels often very hard, as it wouldn‘t be the right tool. Lets dive into the dilemma shortly. Classic approaches are thought to be transactional. In other words take an idea as input and you’ll get a vendor or a product or service as output. 

If we think we could specify uncertainty of complex sourcing cases with this ONE-time shot, it’ll leads to a:

• HUGE SCOPE - Everybody adds his/her needs and wants, event the nice to have’s

• LONG CONTRACTUAL PERIODE - a big scope increases the delivery time and RISK

• TIME-TO-MARKET - gets decreased from our experience to 6-12 months

With Lean-Agile Procurement we accept uncertainty and try to source more often focusing on what’s most valuable to the customer right NOW. 

This doesn’t come for free either, to work like this we need to:

• REDUCE SCOPE - to what we assume is the most valuable for our customers right NOW

• DECREASE CONTRACTUAL PERIODE - so that we could test our assumptions of business value at any time with the customer and stop development with partner as needed.

• MINIMIZE RISKS - as an investor we’d like to minimize our vague investments every time

• TIME-TO-MARKET - while we’d like to be faster as our competitors in the market

Another view on it is if we see it from an investors perspective. Every spend is like an investment, where do we expect a return. If we source just one times it’s usually a huge investment, that takes very long until we’ll get first market feedback and so our return. In a very worst case our competitors are faster than us and we don’t get the expected return at all. Furthermore we need to think of what this means in a strategic/complex sourcing case. What’s the impact of cost savings to our return?-Will we get new innovative product earlier if we have less senior people doing the job?-Most probably not.

Start thinking like an Investor!

LAP and the Lean Procurement Canvas foster collaboration between all parties throughout the whole lifecycle of a product or service. Having such a visual tool in place helps to answer all the key questions WHY/WHAT/HOW/WHO and creates alignment by default.

Imagine you have an investment 100mio worth it. For an investor it’s pretty clear he’ll do just a 1-10mio in a first hand, so that he/she could test market impact. If our most important goals have been successfully received by the customers we’ll invest more, and so on. With LAP we demand the same for procurement and apply this investors-thinking too.

This way our „Savings“ or profit (investment - return) might get hopefully much bigger and much earlier too. Because we will stop our investments if we’ve reached the max. growth. From software we know that just 20% of all features delivered are often used by the users. This means we have a potential of up to 80% „savings“ just by focussing to the RIGHT NEEDS first!-Combined with earlier return, most probably bigger market share as you’ve been much earlier than your competitors the return will be even more maximized.

Now being fast is not enough. We still need a „plan“ to get focus. That’s why we’ve put all our expertise together howto write a good agile roadmap and developed the „golden“ LAP Nuggets„Timebox & KPI‘s“ we’d like to share with you in this blog post. More nuggets are about to come in the next episodes of this series of blog posts.

LAP Nuggets: Timebox & KPI’s

If it comes to an internal agreement with our main stakeholders we do exactly need to know what is expected and possible till when. In other words there’s no more the time to run into detailed specifications. We rather need to get a high-level alignment about realistic business goals within a certain time box and how we track, that we’re doing good achieving those goals. If you work together with 3rd party partner this gets even more important, as you’ll have cash-out every month.

In agile I always loved the fact that we agree on a fixed time-box such as a sprint of 2 weeks. Within this time box we try to achieve the most important customer needs possible. A similar concept is used some abstraction levels higher with an agile roadmap. For the very first time we’ve defined what a time box and a good metric should contain.

To make it more easy to understand find below a rough example of a startup, that wants to become the #1 eBike rental-service provider.

Time box - example

The LAP Nugget Time box consists of:

• Title, which gives the team a rememberable name / overview of the time box

• From / to, which often contains multiple sprints. We also like to make given milestones transparent. In this case we just add the to-date.

• Progress, the time is running and can’t be held up. We just make it visual by updating it roughly.

• Checklist, which shows us if the time box is just our regular pace e.g. 2 months of 8 sprints each or an external milestone we need to consider.

As always we value from an alignment point of view the co-creation and involvement of all stakeholders more than the result!-Nevertheless it’s also much more effective if it comes to questions with stakeholders, a new person need to be introduced, etc. if the team has all the main informations on the Lean Procurement Canvas hanging at the wall :-).

Metric - example

The LAP Nugget Metric consists of:

• Title, which gives the team a rememberable name / overview of the time box

• Checklist, which shows us which dimension we like to keep track.

• Shared with, PLEASE NOTE: Just by measuring we’ll influence the systems behavior. That’s why we need to ask ourselves which of the metrics we like to share with others and which we keep private like e.g. team velocity.

Agile Roadmap - How all fits together

Similar to the Go Product Roadmap we could know put everything together and get a high-level „plan“ or better an Agile Roadmap. We often see companies trying to make their backlog as part of the contract, which I personally think is WRONG!-The details will change anyway. But we could agree on some more high-level goals, where we’ve co-created key results and metrics. In a truly agile approach even that might get a subject of change.

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The Agile Roadmap we usually use as appendix to the Lean Procurement Canvas.

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Please note: Important to understand is that all of our LAP Nuggets are not prescriptive to run LAP or use the Lean Procurement Canvas. Majority of users still use just sticky notes. As every good practice one size doesn’t fit it all, but could always be a source for inspiration!-Btw. You might use them in other contexts as well :-)

Learnings

• Having no „plan“ is not an option. Every agile team, or team-of-teams do need a direction. It’s in the responsibility of the leadership team to co-create this in a collaborative approach. Otherwise we’ll end up in anarchies!

• We take the same principle of time boxing of sprints to the next level. This Agile Roadmap could become our main communication tool with the business, our customers and our 3rd party partners. We often prefer to have it as part of contract than any more detailed scope definition. This way we keep our flexibility while delivery, as with the 1st customer feedback the details will change anyway!

• With metrics we do influence the system just by the fact we measure. That’s why we need to consider unwanted side-effects and make certain metrics private. Furthermore are various dimensions to be considered to measure value.

• In procurement we need to start thinking more as investors and source more often smaller bits instead of a one time investment. This will reduce our overall risk, increase time-to-market and lead to a competitive advantage with a hopefully higher and earlier return!

FREE Download 

All our LAP Nuggets are open source and could be download FREE of charge for self-printing. The nuggets are available in different colors and contains examples, sources.

Please note: During checkout process you’ll be asked for payment details. In case you added just FREE product only you could ignore it.

Author

Sources

• Lean-Agile Procurement Alliance, 2019

• LAP Approach, https://www.lean-agile-procurement/approach 

• Scrum Timeboxes by https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

• Go Product Roadmap by Roman Pichler

• Dimensions of metrics by ScrumAtScale.com

Image sources

• Head-image: https://www.mastermindupdate.com

• All other images by LAP Alliance

Knowledge Paper - Co-published with CIPS.org

We’re very proud to announce, that we recently co-published a knowledge paper about Lean-Agile Procurement together with cips.org - The largest global association for supply management- and procurement professionals.

CIPS-Members

CIPS Members could download the knowledge paper directly on the cips.org knowledge section lean & agile.

Free Download (Registration needed)

Anybody else could also download it for free joining the LAP Community (all free).

UPCOMING - Stay tuned!

The secret Sauce of successful Sourcing (LAP Nuggets - Episode 1)

Have you ever wondered, why some of the strategic sourcing cases failed and others were successful?-In a series of episodes we gonna introduce you, what we’ve learned from our LAP Alliance networks’ multiple engagements and successful sourcing cases with LAP. With the LAP Nuggets we’ve furthermore developed and assembled applicable tools, that are easy to understand and will reduce your risks during strategic sourcing significantly!

In this episode we’d like to introduce you the secret sauce of successful souring - Strategic Alignment!

Initial position

Today companies run a sequential RfX process with a lot of handovers (1), often not by the people that will do the job and less involvement (1) of the real users or customers of the product/service. With Lean-Agile Procurement (short LAP) we overcome these main issues by setting up an agile, cross-functional product development team, that „will do the job“ and highest possible involve of all stakeholders and potential partners (2).

In both approaches complex, strategic sourcing cases still might fail while others are successful. Why is that?-We believe one of the key driver for success is strategic alignment and we’re very bad in it today.

The challenge

In our mandates we recognize a lot of mis-alignment. It starts, that the various functions have divergent business goals, so that we often run into a challenge getting the right people on board. Often the people don’t know the supported company goal of the sourcing case either, nor the business case of the product and it’s purpose, vision, etc. Even though they’ve got this information it’s often a written document, which lets a lot of room for interpretation. No joke, it happened to me in one mandate as I asked the sponsor to repeat his vision for the new product that the sourcing team responded: 

“We understood the written business case 180 degrees different, good you explained it again!”

— Sourcing team in one of our LAP mandates

If you still run a traditional RfX it might be even worse. The business might know it, but it’s mostly intransparent, or gets lost with each handover in the  process. And it’s the same thing by providing the potential partners „just“ an tender document: A lot of room for interpretation and that’s then why the proposals look like they do!

The question is, how should anybody find the right partner/product/service NOT knowing the fundamental direction?!-And how should a partner deliver the „right thing“ within time/budget/quality either?!

From idea to impact with the Lean Procurement Canvas

LAP and the Lean Procurement Canvas foster collaboration between all parties throughout the whole lifecycle of a product or service. Having such a visual tool in place helps to answer all the key questions WHY/WHAT/HOW/WHO and creates alignment by default.

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When we assemble an agile, cross-functional product development team we always „start with WHY“, as Simon Sinek used to say (3). What’s the purpose of this product or service, what’s the company goal we’re supporting with, etc. You might wonder how many companies had no ad hoc answer to this simple questions!

During the process you might develop a cascading strategic alignment from purpose to action for the product to be sourced :

—purpose

——vision

———mission

————goals

—————needs

——————etc.

All of this could be co-created by the team and all stakeholders - especially the users and customer - and summarized on the Lean Procurement Canvas. More advanced teams even do a color-coding of the elements on the canvas. Find below an excerpt of the Lean Procurement Canvas how it could be interpreted.

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Key is the co-creation, even with the potential partners. Without, there will be no strategic alignment!-Eric from AirFrance recently said the following applying LAP in one of their strategic sourcing cases (They co-created 3 proposals simultaneously with 3 potential partners in 1 room using the Lean Procurement Canvas):

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To improve each proposal we do need collaboration and for collaboration we first of all need alignment. That’s why we usually need up to 80% of the time with at the buyer side only to agree on the WHY and WHAT internally first. To come to action it’s fundamental important, that the team, including the partner and it’s main stakeholders, have a joint agreement about the ultimate next goal/s. The challenge we’ve observed is, that even everybody knows SMART (4), we’re all very bad in applying it. I personally find it almost impossible to write a business goal, that is specific, measurable, actionable, relevant or realistic and time-bound. It always felt I needed to be a jack of all trades and it seemed our customers had the same issue.

That’s why we’ve put all our expertise together howto write good business goals and developed the „golden“ LAP Nugget „Business Goals & Key Results“ we’d like to share with you in this blog post. More nuggets are about to come in the next episodes of this series of blog posts.

LAP Nuggets: Business Goals & Key Results

If it comes to an internal agreement with our main stakeholders we do exactly need to know when we will have been successful. Same thing is important for the potential partners to create their proposals and to become e.g. a fundamental aspect of a joint contract too.

“Good practices are never the solution, but could be always a source for inspiration.”

— Mirko Kleiner

In agile I always loved the fact that we slice complex customer needs down to slices, that are achievable within days or hours and could be further prioritised. We furthermore agree on the acceptance criterias even before we start implementation. A similar concept is used some abstraction levels higher with the OKR’s (5). The Objective and Key Results have been one of our main source of inspiration writing better business goals. We enhanced the concept by further aspects specifically for LAP and created the LAP Nuggets „Business Goals & Key Results“. 

Please note: Important to understand is that all of our LAP Nuggets are not prescriptive to run LAP or use the Lean Procurement Canvas. Majority of users still use just sticky notes. As every good practice one size doesn’t fit it all, but could always be a source for inspiration!-Btw. You might use them in other contexts as well :-)

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If you’re familiar with OKR’s it’ll be obvious to you. Each Business Goal consist of a card „Business Goal“ and one or more „Key Results“. From my point of view is it this seperation, that makes it much easier to define faster, better business goals!

To make it more easy to understand find below a rough example of a startup, that wants to become the #1 eBike rental-service provider.

Business Goal - example

In comparison to the OKR’s we added the:

• Strategic classification, which gives the team some background of the strategic areas this case is supporting

• Rank / weight, which foster a discussion about priority and weighting of multiple business goals. This gets relevant e.g. if we gather customer needs. In case the business goal is just minor important we shouldn’t waste our time in gathering too much customer needs.

• Checklist, which leads us with the most important aspects in writing good business goals

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Key Result

In comparison to the OKR’s we added the:

• ID, which help us referring to the rank of a business goal, or from e.g. customer needs, etc.

• Owner / Progress, which owns and tracks it. The key result could be achieved within hours or days, but also months.

• Checklist, which leads us with the most important aspects in writing good key results

As you could imagine we value from an alignment point of view the co-creation and involvement of all sttakeholders more than the result!-Nevertheless it’s also much more effective if it comes to questions with stakeholders, a new person need to be introduced, etc. if the team has all the main informations on the Lean Procurement Canvas hanging at the wall :-)

Learnings

• Business Goals give a clear direction for the team and to all it’s stakeholders what to expect from the product/service to be build and/or sourced

• Writing Business Goals is hard and patterns such as the LAP Nugget „Business Goals & Key Results“ could help

• Development of Business Goals always is a team effort. In other words „the process of development is more important than the result!“

• Visualization during Alignment helps coming back to it more easily and getting the big picture on one view

• Without an alignment about the WHY we source, nor having an idea about the supporting company goal we better shouldn’t start sourcing as we might head in the wrong direction

FREE Download 

All our LAP Nuggets are open source and could be download FREE of charge for self-printing. The nuggets are available in different colors and contains examples, sources.

Please note: During checkout process you’ll be asked for payment details. In case you added just FREE product only you could ignore it.

In the next episode

In the next blog post we'll answer the question “Does Agile Sourcing mean to have no Plan?”. Expect more useful LAP Nuggests and stay tuned!

Author

Sources

(1) Lean-Agile Procurement Alliance, 2019

(2) LAP Approach, https://www.lean-agile-procurement/approach 

(3) Simon Sine, golden circle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw

(4) SMART creteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

(5) Objectives & key results by OKRs Andrew Grove, Intel

Image sources

• Head-image https://www.fortheheartskitchen.com/mega-knusprige-vegane-golden-nuggets/

• All other images by LAP Alliance

What means Agile from a Procurement point view?

If you’d ask 10 agile coaches you’ll get 11 answers what agile means to them. You’d argue isn’t there one definition for it?-Sure there is, the „Agile Manifesto 2001“, but everybody does it’s interpretation slightly different. Inspired by the blog post „Building Agile Partnerships - Lean Agile Procurement“ by Simon Reindl, Certified LAP Trainer recently wrote about Lean-Agile Procurement I’d like to share what agile means to me from a procurement point of view. Therefor we’ll also refer to the agile manifesto.

Big thanks goes also to Philipp Engstler, Certified LAP Trainer & Board Member LAP Alliance who first came up with the idea of linking the Agile Manifesto to our work with Lean-Agile Procurement.

The Procurement’s Dilemma

Before we could dive into  the topic agile we need to understand where procurement is up to today. We live in an exciting, rapidly developing world where it’s possible, for example, to print an aircraft engine within 72 hours (1). Commodity sourcing cases are increasingly digitized or taken over by machines. That leaves the complex, mostly strategic sourcing cases for which our existing tools such as Rfi, Rfp, Reverse Auction, etc. are inadequate (2). 

In other words, we need new approaches to deliver added value to the business faster and so to stay relevant as procurement 

What it means if procurement knows just one tool, e.g. a hammer every problem looks like a nail!-In other words classic sourcing approaches such as RfI/RfP are more than 120 years old and where thought to solve slightly different challenges. Don’t get me wrong, those are still valid for commodity sourcing cases. But if we try to apply these old receipts to source complex products/services or similar we run into the Procurement’s dilemma.

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To cope with a lot of uncertainty in complex sourcing cases such as e.g. sourcing a new ERP we’d need to invest a lot of time and sweat in scope definition or specification. As we’re aware of the expensiveness of the sourcing approach we know that we’ll have just this one-time shot. This will lead to a „scope-explosion“ and this to a long contract periode for it’s delivery. With this huge investment in figuring out an as detailed specification as possible we accumulate incredible amount of risks and slow-down our time to market.

But what’s the alternative?-Lets imagine we’d be able to source within hours or days. We’d run the approach more often. However, this doesn’t come for free. We’d need to accept a reduced scope, usually specified in less details too e.g. goal-based. This would lead to an improved time-to-market and less risks and a shorter contract periode. With Lean-Agile Procurement we demand exactly that, as we accept uncertainty and upcoming changes with the first customer feedback.

Aligned to the Agile Manifesto

If we come back to the  Agile Manifesto 2001, you’ll realize that Lean-Agile Procurement is completely aligned to it. 

PS: There is an important note to understand the If Agile Manifesto (head-lines) if you’re newby: The first paragraph is always more important than the second, while we still need the 2nd paragraph.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

To overcome The Procurement’s Dilemma we need to start thinking out of our „silo“ or function and start collaboration with all stakeholders - especially the real users or customers - in the current process from the beginning. The lightweight nature of the Lean Procurement Canvas highlights having cross functional, empowered people engaged in the process from all parties. The canvas provides a structure for the right conversations to be held to achieve an agreement.

Working software product over comprehensive documentation

As with a lot of organisations that are using the manifesto to guide their work, the product has not to be software! The product is the alignment within internal stakeholders and an agreement with partner between organisations in order to solve a particular problem or build a particular product. Through that alignment starting with WHY, the vision, the business goals, etc. over to the WHAT, the customer needs to the HOW, potential solutions, etc. we ensure that we always focus to the RIGHT and most important things first. After the sourcing we always demand incremental delivery to ask for customer feedback as early as possible. This allows us to adapt at any time.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

This is the game changing aspect of this approach. The finished canvas is a contract, that has been built collaboratively! The emphasis of the workshop approach is to create a meaningful dialogue between all prospective partners and the company, who collaboratively shape the contract. In practice we co-create an agile contract with e.g. 3 vendors simultaneously in 1 room, so that we could decide right away and continue value delivery.

Responding to change over following a plan

Using this approach there is an opportunity to learn in an iterative, incremental and collaborative way. What may have taken weeks before is now reduced to days – with less space for misunderstanding. With such approach we dramatically decrease risks and stay as flexible as possible. Needless to mention that working like this needs a mind shift 180°!

Thanks to the agile Manifesto, which always was and still is a great inspiration we’ve created our Mission Statement for Lean-Agile Procurement in a similar „A instead of B“. We’re curious about your feedback about it?

OUR MISSION

Days instead of Months
Needs instead of Wants
Adaptive instead of Fixed
Partnership instead of Relationship
FUN instead of PAIN

Author

Sources

(1) Additive Manufacturing, GE 2016
(2) Survey/research about agile@procure- ment & sales, flowdays, Switzerland, 2018 

Case Study with Amnesty International France - Talk-show Video

Talk-show style interview of the very first LAP initiative in France involving Amnesty International France (the client), Troopers Web Republic (the winning Partner) and Goood (the LAP trainer and coach)The interview focuses on how all 3 parties (Amnesty, Troopers and Goood) lived the experience.


This is a video capture of a conference held for Web2Day 2019 in Nantes, June 2019 in French.

Authors & Lead Coaches

Keynote Article in THE PROCUREMENT MAGAZINE - This is the dawning of the age of agility

Lets change the game
with Lean-Agile Procurement

by Mirko Kleiner & Philipp Engstler

This Article has got published in THE PROCUREMENT MAGAZINE 2019-05 as lead article. It was also hand-out at their procurement awards. A big thanks goes to Micol Barba, Editorial Manager - Editor in chief at THE PROCUREMENT ITALIA, who is a strong supporter of our movement Lean-Agile Procurement!

Not just a new approach, but a new mindset, even a new age is needed to cope with the upcoming market demands. Cases using this new mindset have been proofed to source complex cases in as little as one day! No wonder do companies such as Barclays, Gazprom, Air France, etc. radically tran- sform their organisation and so their strategic procurement.

We live in an exciting, rapidly developing world where it’s possible, for example, to print an aircraft engine within 72 hours (1). Commodity sourcing cases are increasin- gly digitized or taken over by machines. That leaves the complex, mostly strategic sourcing cases for which our existing tools such as Rfi, Rfp, Reverse Auction, etc. are inadequate (2).

In other words, we need new approaches to deliver added value to the business fa- ster and so to stay relevant as procurement

“It’s a matter of delivering fast added value as procurement”

— Stephan Chassaing de Bourdeille,former Vice head of group procurement, Axel Springer SE

How do we meet the challenges of in- creasing complexity and the demand for rapid time-to-market? The startup scene has already shown how it can be done. They use approaches such as Lean Startup (3), Scrum/Agile (4), or the Bu- siness Model Canvas (5), and they have absorbed uncertainty into their DNA. Benefiting from their experience, lean-agi- le procurement (6) opens up completely new possibilities for procurement, sales and partner management.

DESIGNED FOR ADAPTIVE, STRATEGIC SOURCING

Lean-Agile Procurement is an approach that can be used in both direct and indirect sourcing (6). Originally developed for the sourcing of agile development teams in di- gitalization, it is now used in all categories and industries (2).

The prerequisite is a high level of com- plexity in terms of sourcing content or organization, which is usually the case in strategic sourcing. It is unsuitable for com- modity sourcing, where it may even gene- rate unnecessary overhead.

Barclays for example has started begin of 2018 to organize more than 100 people in pods (stable, cross-functional) teams. Idea is that these pods could handle complex, strategic cases as team much faster, than handing them over and over again. Their numbers showed, that they were able to increase lead time radically.

FOUR TIMES FASTER FROM IDEA TO FIRST VALUE DELIVERED

The awarded success story of the CKW Group (7), an energy company in Switzer- land with 1,700 employees and a turnover of ~850 million, showed that with Lean-Agile Procurement complex sourcing cases can be successfully processed in 4-5 weeks.

While this could be done twice as fast without a problem as this included team setup, learning on the job, etc. Even though this represents four times faster time-to-market compared to classic ap- proaches (4). New ideas can be introduced and tested in the market much faster, and the generated return occurs much earlier. Companies applying Lean-Agile Procure- ment have a competitive advantage with direct impact on the company’s success. From a customer perspective this means a much faster availability of new services and/or products and high reduction of cost-of-delay. Focusing on time-to-market changes everything for procurement!

“This is a game changer”

— Phil Thomas, Managing Director, Head of global sourcing at Barclays

~80% SAVINGS THROUGH ALIGNMENT AND FOCUS

In complex sourcing cases, especially strategic sourcing, there is a very high de- gree of uncertainty as to what the custo- mer or market needs (8). This makes it all the more important to focus first on the most important business goals (why) and customer needs (what), and only after that on solutions or products (how).

During the development of a new busi- ness case we should already be entering into an intensive interaction with our custo- mers and continuously collecting feedback (3). Instead of creating huge specification documents it’s recommanded to have e.g. representatives of all customer segments in one room and directly ask them for their needs, priority, etc., we are using the Lean Procurement Canvas(6) to capture this. By consistently focusing on the most impor- tant customer needs we simultaneously increase our alignment, push nice-to-ha- ve’s to the back of the queue, and minimize unnecessary effort (4).

RADICAL RISK REDUCTION THROUGH ADAPTABILITY

Tighter focus leads to smaller batches, which allow for increasingly faster sour- cing, which in turn makes it possible to prolong or even change a partner/product/ etc. more easily (6). The overheads incur- red by suppliers, legal, etc. are reduced and incremental deliveries ensure a fun- ctional solution at all times. The fact that customer feedback is collected after each iteration ensures that the solution meets the initial expectations. This requires new, more agile contracts (9) with which a part- nership can be adapted, or even stopped, at any time. This radically reduces risk.

Current cases that applied this principle e.g. co-created the contract with their po- tential partners in one room simultanuo- usly. Doing so open questions, concerns could have been resolved immediately. Even more than that cost drivers could have been identified much earlier and adapted jointly even before starting the cooperation.

~50% MORE EFFICIENT ECONOMICALLY

Complex sourcing cases are corre- spondingly complex to implement. With Lean-Agile Procurement we reduce the overheads on the buyer side by an average of 50% (2). This is mainly achieved by set- ting up a cross-functional team of experts, that can do the job. Having an empowered team together reduces decision-latency to the minimum, so that things develop much faster.

The reduction of effort on the suppliers’ side should also not be underestimated. From an economic point of view, what we are achieving is an optimization of non-va- lue-adding work (10), which ultimately has a direct effect on market performance and the associated success of the company.

COLLABORATION INCREASES INNOVATION

Uncertainty about customer needs can only be minimized through direct inte- raction with customers and users. Consul- tation occurs not just once, but continues throughout the entire procurement process and beyond. Not just the customers but the providers too are included and bring their ideas into the discussion.

A common understanding of customer needs leads to simpler solutions, better collaboration, and new ideas (2). That’s why it’s recommended to ask for a joint wor- kshop with the potential partner/s, where both parties bring in the people that might cooperate and do the job.

Being agile is a mindset and we need to ensure even before we go into a partner- ship, that we have a social fit too. Often we run a proof-of-concept in parallel to the co-creation of an agile contract. This way the delivery capabilities and the behaviors of the people in the room could be obser- ved while actually working. If we invite e.g. at the end of each day the real users we even get direct feedback for new innovative ideas implemented.

TRUE PARTNERSHIP — BOTH SIDES WIN

Strategic sourcing is a two-way street. It requires an attitude of trust cooperation based on partnership and shared values (6). Binding contracts and cost focus are usually to the disadvantage of one party and do not lead to a genuine partnership.

While in Lean-Agile Procurement the hard facts of quality, costs, etc. remain important, social facts, such as the beha- viour of potential suppliers in concrete si- tuations, become just as important, if not more so, as issues are worked out during contract fullfillment.

This leads to fundamental changes in behaviour not only towards partners but also within the company itself (10). This has consequences for the reputation, loyalty, and indirectly also for the motivation and work performance of each individual em- ployee (2).

In one case a new ERP has got sourced in just two days (!) with three potential part- ners in one room simulaneously. The buyer side decided as a team for one partner, but asked for another person from another competitor to join their team. This wouldn’t be possible sending papers back-n-forth.

HIGHER PRODUCTIVITY

Lean-Agile Procurement makes the exi- sting sourcing process more efficient, whi- le focusing on being more effective – doing the right things. In an uncertain environ- ment (8) this also means saying goodbye to detailed specifications, and accepting that anything can change at any time. In today’s smart business development scene the Business Model Canvas (5) is a living document and 100-page business cases are a thing of the past. With Lean-Agile Procurement we demand the same, and the Lean Procurement Canvas provides it.

“Speed is the new currencyof business”

— Marc Bemopff, Ceo Salesforce

EARLIER RETURN AND FAST FEEDBACK CYCLES IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN COSTS

With innovative ideas, it is more important to learn from customer feedback and to be ahead of the competition than to optimize the last few percent of costs. Because we are only sourcing in small batches, the risk of a bad investment remains small (3).

It’s not any more a question if agile will become a topic for procurement, then in most companies agile transformation pro- grams are already in progress. Full stack business agility require an agile acting procurement departmenet, start experi- ments with agile practices, approaches such as Lap and see what of it makes sen- se in your context.

• Lean-Agile Procurement is a proven ap- proach for indirect and direct sourcing in all categories where the sourcing case has a certain complexity. Applied in commodity sourcing cases it creates unnecessary overhead.

• It is a practical approach that improves time-to-market significantly and radically decreases risk through incremental and value-added funding for improved busi- ness outcomes.

• Lean-Agile Procurement has a sustainable impact on the way we work together, both internally and with our partners – because the soft facts are evaluated by the very people who are going to be working together.

• With Lean-Agile Procurement it is once again possible to deliver added value to the business faster and thus remain relevant as procurement.

For more information go to: https://www. lean-agile-procurement.com

Magazine

To order the magazine goto:

https://www.theprocurement.it

The original article could be download here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1EyJC-MLPJqsfTM99dbZYI2A7fo5RUY1f

Autors

(1) Additive Manufacturing, GE 2016
(2) Survey/research about agile@procure-ment & sales, flowdays, Switzerland, 2018(3) The lean startup by Eric Ries
(4) For example: “Twice the work in half of thetime” by Dr. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of SCRUM, author and founder of Scrum Inc.(5) Business Model Canvas, Alex Osterwalder(6) lean-procurement.com & Lean Procure-ment Canvas by Mirko Kleiner, flowdays
(7) “CKW case study”, CKW & flowdays, 2018 (8) Complexity theory by R. Stacey, 2019
(9) See agile contracts at e.g. http://www. flexiblecontracts.com
or http://www.vestedway.com, 2019
(10) Decision latency, www.scrumatscale. com 2019 (11) Pull system by Lean Manu-facturing 2019”

Rolling out Lean Agile Procurement at BNP Paribas: A retrospective.

GUEST Blog Post: We’re proud to co-publish and share with you a very honest retrospective by Reeve Randriamananjara rolling out Lean-Agile Procurement at BNP Paribas. He described his journey from being infected by the LAP virus in one of our public workshop, over convincing his stakeholders at BNP Paribas to actually executing a first pilot. Thanks so much for sharing your story and we’re keen on your further developments with LAP@BNP Paribas :-)

The training

1 March 2018: Snowstorm in Switzerland. All planes going to Geneva had been grounded. Luckily my plane was heading to Zurich. However I only had confirmation that I was going to fly a couple of hours before the check-in at Brussels airport. From Basel, I had to take the train to Rotkreuz, home to the pharma giant, Roche. Rotkreuz was also where my one-day Lean Agile Procurement training was going to take place on the following day. But what was I exactly looking for?

Well, I was on a mission to challenge myself and take my 15-year IT procurement experience to another level. For over a decade, I had always been facing the same challenge: lengthy sourcing processes (request for proposals or RFP's, that is), poor alignment with project teams and, occasionally, conflicts with the vendors around the signed contracts.

There was a permanent debate between us, buyers, who demand that our IT colleagues wrote down 100% of their requirements as a condition to send out an RFP. My colleagues, on the other hand, needed a fast sourcing or procurement process, seeing it as necessary pain. Something was structurally wrong and it was high time we changed our ways. This is where I had decided to embrace Lean Agile Procurement.

What is Lean Agile Procurement?

 "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” - Woody Allen.

As Woody says it, Lean Agile Procurement is difficult to put in a nutshell.

It is an Agile procurement or sourcing framework that allows businesses to find solutions for complex and/or strategic IT projects; complex as in "we don't know what our customers want exactly and there isn't an off-the-shelf piece of software for that".

What it takes is a clear vision and part of the required features. More importantly, Lean Agile Procurement vows to reduce the time it takes to search, find and select the most appropriate vendor for a project. It claims to do so in days or weeks instead of months. And that's bold!

Lean Agile Procurement basically merges the RFI (request for information), RFP and contracting processes in a couple of daily workshops with the vendors. It invites people on either side of the negotiation table to fully cooperate by being transparent, focused and bringing the right people around. Last, the canvas is Lean Agile Procurement's keystone.

The framework is heralded by the folks at Flowdays. Mirko Kleiner tirelessly preaches all over the world. Interestingly Mirko doesn't have a buyer profile at all.

Complex projects have the following features: Those who sponsor them take strong commitments vis-a-vis the top management who, in turn, take commitments with the market and customers. Additionally innovation is the bottom line. So there is a huge constraint and expectation in marketing the right output the sooner the better. If either the deadline is missed or the deliverable is of poor quality, your competitor will move ahead and the organization will be left behind dealing with project cost overrunning, litigation with vendors and more stress on extended project team members to fix things.

Lean Agile Procurement promises to satisfactorily address the issue. Yet, to paraphrase the definition of Scrum: Lean Agile Procurement is simple to understand and difficult to master.

What Lean Agile Procurement is not or can't do

Lean Agile Procurement is not a miraculous therapy for dandruff, stinky armpits and smelly feet.

•  It isn't advisable if the product or service you are looking for is neither complex nor strategic. On the contrary, using it for everything will be counter-productive for your organization.

• It can't be the last resort to hastily shortcut procurement processes for ill-thought projects.

• It takes a huge toll on your workload; meaning that all other topics will have to be postponed until the process is done. Believe me when it is, all other topics will pop up again and hit you hard.

• If Agile values and principles are neither fully understood nor shared nor trusted, don't go for it. You will end up perverting the system and cutting corners.

So now, how did we do for our first project?

Finding candidate projects

Once I have received my Lean Agile Procurement certificate, I was full of hope and eager to implement the method as soon as possible. I quickly identified a first project in the same month. Of course, the project team was in a hurry and they asked me to advise on the best sourcing approach. I gave them the choice between the classical RFP and the experimental Lean Agile Procurement. They shrugged off the latter and eventually opted to stick to the standard process. Eventually, 8 months later, the RFP was dropped. What a disappointment.

Later in October 2018, a colleague asked to brief him about the standard procurement process and lead times for a strategic project. I told him to start filling the Request for Information (RFI) template documents with his requirements. I also warned him that it may take up to 6 months to have a contract ready for signature. He shared my warnings to the project team members. One of them called me back asking me if there was a way to make it in 2 months because they had to select a vendor by end of December.

So I took a poker face and told her quietly that I had a solution. The only trade-off I requested was everybody's full availability and dedication during those 2 months. And it worked.

From my initial procurement plan…

 Initially my plan was:

1. Send out a concise RFI with our vision, a description of our project, what we are looking for with a handful of requirements and leave the vendors 2 weeks to reply.

2. Analyze the answers and shortlist vendors for the workshops.

3. Invite the shortlisted vendors to come and attend a 1st workshop and share their questions with us and their competitors.

4. Prepare the Lean Agile Procurement canvas in order to share it with the vendors during the 2nd and 3rd workshops.

5. Invite all shortlisted vendors to come and attend a 2nd workshop and start collaborating using the canvas as the guidelines for the negotiations. The draft of contract would also be filled in. At the end of the day, we would share our feedbacks with the vendors and shortlist a few (i.e. 1 or 2) for the 3rd workshop.

6. Invite the shortlisted vendors to come and attend a 3rd and last iteration of the workshops. Again feedbacks to the vendors right at the end of the sessions.

7. Submit our vendor recommendation to the steering committee and confirm the award to the selected vendor.

8. Sign the contract and kick the project off.

… to our final procurement plan.

This is what we eventually did:

1. We wrote a 6-page RFI. The project team felt more comfortable with annexing a spreadsheets that contains requirements such as a fair list of features, a high level project, technical, operations, legal, commercial, ethics and vendor due diligence (i.e. financial risk assessment).

2. We elaborated an RFI balanced score card for the requirements we have listed. The format I have suggested has been discarded in favour of an old one everyone else was comfortable with.

3. We invited all vendors to attend the 1st workshop. However we didn't anticipate that vendors wouldn't speak their minds as they were surprised to find each other in the same meeting room!

4. Broadcasting the Lean Agile Procurement canvas received a lukewarm welcome among the team. In other words, nobody wanted to leave it in the clear. So we used the RFI score card structure as the guideline for our negotiations.

5. We held one workshop per vendor. The project team thought it was disrespectful to vendors to have them all in the same session and do a beauty contest. This was obviously more exhausting: Instead of one day with all vendors, it was a full week of 4-hour workshop with each. Also our legal team didn't wish to participate leaving the contracting as the last step of the process. As I expected it, this added another two intense weeks after the December deadline.

6. The last workshop worked well but was equally demanding.

7. There were a few requests from the steering committee that led to an extra-negotiation over the phone and via e-mails with the selected vendor. I expected this so no specific issue there.

8. The contract negotiations added some delay but it was great to see that those who participated to the workshops earlier on either side were perfectly aligned. So two weeks to close a contract in a fair constructive way wasn't bad at all.

The check list for success

 Here are my recommendations for a successful Lean Agile Procurement:

• Ensure people are available and focused during the workshops. This is a strong prerequisite. This entails everybody to be in the same place and participate (no multitasking).

• Prepare sufficient training and communication for the people who will be involved.

• An reciprocal non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is compulsory as usual. Your organization must have a template available. Note that a vendor that is too picky at NDA stage must be discarded. It is usually a bad sign.

• Keep your RFI content concise. 5 pages are recommended. Sentences must be clear and short. Avoid unnecessary (procurement and legal) jargon.

• The canvas is a must. It is difficult to draft if your mind is unclear. If you can't fill then you are neither ready to share your vision and objective nor ready to engage in a transparent and constructive conversation with the vendors. All your organization project documents must serve as annexes to the canvas.

• People (including all vendors) must be in the same room. Forget concerns about a vendor stealing new features from their competitors and releasing it fully-tested by the time the RFP is awarded. It is very unlikely to happen.

• The sponsors must participate to the workshops. They can't just be the "second negotiation table behind the scene" acting like the hidden puppet masters of the negotiations.

• Brief your project team members that they have to be very demanding with the vendors. Similarly, prepare them to be equally put on the grill by the vendors. Gone are the days where the mighty client knows it all and the vendor just executes.

• Still, it is acceptable not to have all vendors attending the same workshops. Keep in mind that this is more exhausting and vendors will attempt to regain control over the process by playing the game they know (i.e. the sales rep running the show and the other guys remaining silent for 4 hours).

• A 4-hour long demo is the best basis for the workshop interactions. So request your vendor to come ready. The canvas will be filled in by the buyer and the sales person.

• The inputs of the workshops must immediately fill the annexes of the future contract. So again, have the contractual structure ready and shared. Leave the main body of the contract to the lawyers though.

Lessons learnt and achievements

•  Lesson #1: Don't assume that those who blame lengthy procurement processes are ready to change them and adhere to Lean Agile Procurement.

• Lesson #2: Use the project's time constraint as an advantage to market the Lean Agile Procurement method internally.

• Lesson #3: Keep in mind that anything in Agile can adapt and improve. So procurement dogma don't always apply here.

• Lesson #4: Vendors are wary of their competitors. You have to factor that in when explaining the process and the project. Keep reminding them what the process is good for.

• In just one attempt, we managed to reduce to procurement lead time from 6+ months to 4 months. 1 cumulated month was sufficient for all workshops and contract negotiations. Also, Lean Agile Procurement has demonstrated that the Procurement department is a trusted partner for ambitious projects. To my surprise, we received very positive feedbacks from both sponsors and… vendors. And the word is spreading around faster than expected.

Conclusion

 I reckon I did find what I was looking for when I attended the Lean Agile Procurement training on a snowy day in Switzerland. So I will keep pushing. You might try it too.

For more information about Lean Agile Procurement, get in touch with Flowdays (https://flowdays.net/en/home) (https://www.lean-agile-procurement.com/#home/comparison).

From more information about Scrum (an Agile framework), read the Scrum guide (https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum-Guide-US.pdf) 

Before you leave this page:

I have enrolled for a User Experience course. Will you help me?

Users are often neglected when organisations decide to implement new projects. I have decided to do something about it whether it is for my daily job or for a longer term career plan.

I am building an airline booking system (desktop website and mobile app) for my portfolio. And I need your help to progress.

Right now, I need to have this online survey form filled: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MMX8SLG.

Could you please take some time to fill it in? It takes approximately 5 minutes.

Thank you!

Original source of the blog post:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rolling-out-lean-agile-procurement-retrospective-randriamananjara/

Author

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Reeve Randriamananjara

IT Procurement Specialist.
BNP Paribas Asset Management

Linkedin Profile

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

1st 9 LAP Trainers Certified by LAP Alliance

London, October 11 + 12th - Barclays hosted our first train-the-trainer (TtT) workshop and participated actively in parts of the training. We now have a global footprint of Certified Lean-Agile Procurement Trainers, to overcome the increasing global demand.

Participants from all around the world joined in and wanted to become Certified Lean-Agile Procurement Trainers. They want to teach and conduct Lean-Agile Procurement (short LAP) in their home markets. All of the Trainers see LAP as a 'Game Changer' in procurement / sales and partner management. Lean-Agile Procurement, an approach to make complex sourcing simple, attracted these Agile, Lean and Procurement Experts.

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Source: LAP Alliance. Persons on the photo from left: Mirko Kleiner/flowdays, Avi Schneier/scruminc, Lionel Massiera, Céline Stauder/both goood, Pete Schibli/JumpShift Development, Jessica Larsen/scruminc, Sophie Durand, Damien Thouvenin/both goood, Ivan Dubrovin/Scrumtrek, Philipp Engstler/flowdays, missing on photo: Simon Reindl/Advanced Product Delivery Ltd.

The news of being rewarded with the CIPS Supply Management Awards Europe 2018 for the Best Procurement Consultancy Project, was just a great beginn for the 2 days TtT workshop.

“LAP is the answer to what Agile Procurement should look like! Some companies in Russia already want to pilot LAP.”

— Ivan Dubrovin, Certified LAP Trainer & Agile Coach, scrumtrek

The first 9 candidates for Certified Lean-Agile Procurement Trainers were hand picked and on invitation only. They all are experts in their field and have the same agile mindset and values as we have. It turned out, that this awesome experience in one room lead immediately to new ideas.

We have worked on the following topics:

1. Starting to form the tribe, our vision, mission & values

2. the Lean Procurement Canvas in depth

3. Barclays story + Q&A with Phil Thomas, Managing Director - Head of Global Sourcing at Barclays

4. Lean Procurement Canvas & Lean-Agile Procurement applied

5. Pitching the Award-winning CKW Case to the UK management team of Barclays

6. Sharing Exercises & Cases between the trainers

7. Our operation system@LAP Alliance

8. We create our own LAP1 2-days certification workshop based on the Learning Objectives

Phil is well know in the procurement community for his radical reorganization at Barclays Procurement around commodity (digital self-services) and complexity with Pods (cross-functional teams).

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Source: Barclays & LAP Alliance

He and his UK Management Team gave us insights on how they managed the transformation, their current status and future plans at Barclays (3+5). The neo-Trainers have got a lot of insights from first hands and gave their feedback to the folks from Barclays. Both sides agreed, that the two sessions were very valuable and should be continued in the future.

“It was great to work with like minded people to understand a practical Lean-Agile Procurement approach to this critical function. I came away prepared to lead others through this streamlined thorough process.”

— Simon Reindl, Certified LAP Trainer & Professional Scrum Trainer, Advanced Product Delivery Ltd.

From now on we‘ll drive the movement together forward on a global scale with the help of highly skilled agile and lean experts, that will support their customers achieving twice the value in half the time. The countries covered so far are CH, DE, FR, UK, USA, RU. The trainers represent alliances such as Scrum Alliance, Scrum.Org, SCRUM@Scale, Scrum@Hardware, Lean Six Sigma, SAFe, Management3.0, ICAgile etc.

• Find details about the new Certified Lean-Agile Procurement Trainers here:
  https://www.lean-agile-procurement.com/list-of-trainers/

• Their workshops will be published soon here:
  https://www.lean-agile-procurement.com/workshops-events/

Every trainer acts as an agile coach too and will support their customers in establishing their first pilots with Lean-Agile Procurement in procurement / sales / account management. LAP is not just an approach for procurement only, but adds new capabilities to your agile product teams too. Rather, it is a tool to cope with the increasing complexity and uncertainty associated with strategic partners towards true business agility along the entire value chain.

“Complex sourcing made simple”

— Vision of LAP Alliance

We’ve got a lot of new friends and we’re looking forward to their success stories, but much more to the next retreat in Côte d’Azur, France :-)

Some impressions from the TtT workshop