Companies are increasingly adopting agile approaches, such as The link will open in a new window Scrum or The link will open in a new window Kanban. Such ways of working are fast, foster creativity and produce more innovations. Agile working is also more enjoyable as everyone can make a greater contribution.

Collaboration is playing an increasingly important role

Strictly speaking, agile working is not really a method but rather a mindset. I’ve noticed that this way of working enables all those employees who want to contribute and make a big impact to flourish. Employees from business and IT work together closely, especially in small teams. And that’s the key to it all. The new collaboration tools allow all project employees to immediately see what the team has achieved – and the contribution of each individual. This provides both an incentive and a challenge. New ideas can be implemented and tried out immediately. However, everyone can also see who hasn’t performed.

Time-to-market requires agile working

Today IT specialists not only need to understand the business, but also the customers. We are not creating software, but rather products that help customers to manage their finances easily. This is something software developers and IT architects must also embrace nowadays. To firmly establish agile working practices throughout the entire company, I also teach this mindset to specialists in other departments. Only if product managers, IT specialists, market managers and communications experts work as a team in an agile way will we get our products to market as quickly as we need to in the financial sector where digitization is continuing apace. I believe that we at PostFinance are on the right track. People who fail to see the bigger picture and nerds will have a tough time in future.