Y Soft is an organisation under market pressure and in a stage of growth. Instead of heavy complication of structures, processes and structures, Y Soft simplifies their organisation. Together with Co-Learning Y Soft is in the process of setting up a system that will prevent them from becoming the next whale in a pool of enterprise organisations. Together we address typical growth issues in a Lean and Agile way, keeping organisational complexity to a minimum, autonomy to a maximum, and enabling rapid growth at the benefit of new market innovations. Today Y Soft is still moving forward in their change process towards LeSS Huge and is considered work in progress.
The client
Y Soft is a multinational software and electronic hardware company founded in 2000, operating world wide. The company’s headquarter is in Brno, Czech Republic with other offices around the world. Their product development is centered in Czech Republic with offices in Brno, Prague & Ostrava and at the time of this writing having about 150 out of the 300+ total employee count within R&D. What we would call a technology organisation.
Their main product, at the time of this writing, is called SafeQ and has 20.000+ customers including 42% of the global fortune 500. We call this a successful business in a stage of fast growth, the kind of customer we like to work with and drive serious impact.
The challenge
The challenges set forward are, to us, very common for an organisation in the stage of fast growth and come back to the following questions:
- How can we enable hyper growth without having too much fat on the muscle?
- How can we keep our employees engaged, motivated & innovative?
Growing for the sake of growth is easy: you keep adding people that will drive growth on your top-line / revenue. Doing this without eating up your profit / EBITA is less easy and the challenge ahead for the Y Soft - Co-Learning collaboration. Keeping a culture of innovation, creativity and engagement when growing larger than 200 people within product development is another challenge high growth organisations have to deal with. Keeping the startup culture and spirit as much as possible. Y Soft is being proactive in this matter, the drive for growth and its balance with process, structures & technical health is not an easy challenge and one that will take its time.
What we did
We are helping the organisation its formal and informal leaders to simplify structures and processes in order to achieve an unseen level of transparency on the product development progress. At the same time levering their internal capabilities to self-manage. Having access to good data ensures empirically-sound, fast and distributed decision making which is a prerequisite to acquire organisational agility and enable fast growth. We use our A-B-C cycle to increase awareness and desire for the necessary change in the organisation; we provide courses which enable people to see new options and possibilities; and apply our tandem based coaching in combination with multiple Co-Friends to put it all in practice.
While simplifying organisational structures, we collaborate on more advanced DevOps and XP practices for fast feedback on their product quality in order to enable innovative solutions to be build without increasing risk and overall maintenance costs. We find this a crucial part of an Agile adoption as it ensures that the organisation can keep maintenance costs down (OPEX) and benefit fully of investments made (CAPEX), providing end customers with high quality and innovative solutions to their problems and needs.
Business agility shouldn't be constrained by your technical agility.
Make no mistake, the main efforts and achievements are at the credits of the Y Soft people driving this forward! We share our experiences and are supportive in their journey.
The results
With the strong support of the founder, Vaclav Muchna, the organisation is in progress of adopting LeSS Huge from within the principles not only practices. His strong leadership and the amazing people we work with in the organisation are the driving factors to create a highly simplified organisation that is capable to deliver on their commitments to high performance. They are engaged in a journey without an end, continuously uncovering better ways to deliver their products into the market and as such become leaner, even more customer-centric and ready with each successive change wave to build its greatest products yet.
Their commitment to high performance combined with our experience, skills & practices enables them to find ways and setup systems to engage in hyper growth without growing organisational complexity at an equal pace. In July 2020 the organization did an extensive presentation about their 1,5 year journey, you can check it out at the Y Soft website here. Today we consider everything as "work in progress" and feel confident about the future.
For organisations that endure simplicity brings it own rewards.
Our services used
We are bringing insights through education and systems thinking workshops while using our tandem coaching practices to enable the people in the organisation get things done. Our inhouse programmes, collaborative coaching and our Co-Friend network are there to support the people in the organisation to move towards the goals set forward.
Start date: August 2018 - End date: ... (WIP)
