In rapidly changing markets, companies need to respond quickly and efficiently, while focusing on new customer needs. To meet these requirements, PostFinance relies on agile working methods in its innovation business. But how do you create agility throughout the entire company, across departments and disciplines, and in collaboration between different teams?

Small work steps to innovation

“We use the Enterprise Agile Delivery process (EAD process) – which describes how we implement new products and services in an agile way – from the initial idea to commissioning”, explains Fabian Probst, product owner of the EAD process. Essentially, the process is based on a customer-centred mindset and allows innovation projects to be continuously adapted to newly acquired knowledge and thus driven forward based on clear priorities through many feedback rounds in small work steps.

Absolute commitment to customer needs

A key aspect of the entire process is consistent focus on the customer.

On one hand, various roles in the process take on the task of representing the customer's perspective. On the other hand, customers are actively involved in the process as often as possible. This ranges, for example, from questioning and observing the target group at the beginning of a project, to the testing of prototypes by customers for user-friendliness, to rolling out a function in two different forms in order to find out which is better received by customers.

The process itself is also committed to agility

When designing the EAD process, PostFinance followed well-established frameworks. These provide a predefined framework in which companies can set up their agile processes. Those familiar with frameworks such as SAFe or Disciplined Agile (DA) will recognize some of the terms, working methods and processes in the PostFinance EAD process. “However, we deliberately only integrated those aspects of the framework that fit the company and the culture, while deliberately omitting others,” emphasizes Fabian Probst. While consistently committed to the principle of agility, the process itself is not set in stone: “If we agree that a desired effect can be better achieved in a different way, the process will be adapted. Every employee can contribute to this continuous improvement – for example by participating in the Communities of Practices.”

“Being Agile” is just as vital as “Doing Agile”

As well as the processes, dealing with values and principles is also of fundamental importance. Olivia Zimmermann, who works on the internal project “Transformation into an agile, project-based operation”, explains: “Without reflecting on our approach and attitude and switching to an agile mindset, processes alone will not achieve the full desired impact.” It requires, for example, a new understanding of leadership that moves away from command and control and towards distributed leadership and distributed decision-making competence. "To succeed here, we must maintain trust, feedback, transparency and continuous learning as the cornerstones of our culture, which in turn require reflection on our behaviour and attitudes.”

Are you curious about how agile working functions at PostFinance?

The video (above) shows how agile working functions in practice. It explains how cooperation works in the innovation business and provides an overview of how a strategy ensures that a product or service goes from the initial idea to implementation and then to the customer. A fictitious example is used. It also shows how PostFinance succeeds in using the process to include different stakeholders, skilfully deal with dependencies, and support the different roles in coming together.

The following are the main terms from the video