Presentation Recap: The story of NEC´s leap towards agile. Achieving organizational transformation through management by harmonizing team autonomy and organizational discipline

 

By: Claudia Alcelay
PMI Staff

I had the honor to co-present at the PMI Virtual Series 2023 together with Ohuchi Takaaki, a transformation team member at NEC. Over 60000 project managers, team leaders, innovators, and professionals from all over the world had the chance to discover the main challenges that this Japanese multinational had to overcome to shift from waterfall to agility.

In this presentation, we went through interesting aspects of an agile transformation. The adaptative approach proved to be a must in a fast-changing market, where there is a rapid integration of digital technologies in all aspects of life. We also learned about the importance of team alignment with the overall organization to gain agility and deliver value faster to the market.

NEC presented us with three main challenges in their transformational process: the first one related to sharing the vision, how a company has to share the why with their teams and leave them to choose how to proceed. This approach reinforces team autonomy and helps a company gain the right balance between teams' guidance and their freedom. The second challenge has to do with the importance of the contexts and how it conditions a team's way of working. Presenting flexible options for diversity in the way teams work helped NEC respond to diverse environments. The third challenge has to do with the realization of customer centricity and ensuring maximum performance by teams by putting customer needs first but also developing a flexible system to deal with their diversity.

Ohuchi also stressed some of the most needed skills in NEC´s journey: communication, team building, adaptation, teams help, guidance, problem-solving… We must be aware of these concepts which help us better understand NEC´s success and by extension any organizational transformation process.

We received many interesting questions during the presentation. Since not all of them could be answered live we have selected some of them for you to enjoy reading about agility:

• Question 1. (Ohuchi) Would love to know the recommendation on fitting in QA. Our sprints are delivered by the devs and many points aren't released until the last day leaving no time for testing. So technically our sprint isn't done but we declare it done.
  • Answer. (Ohuchi) I recommend that developers and QA work together as one team. In addition, I recommend defining a Done definition and including test completion in it.
• Question 2. (Ohuchi). What are the limiting factors contributing to the length of time required to transform?
  • Answer. (Ohuchi) Misunderstandings between the parties involved can easily become a problem. I believe that it is important for both the organization and the teams to have the same awareness that the organization's business strategy needs to change.
• Question 3. (Ohuchi) How do you control the costs and the time development of the projects?
  • Answer. (Ohuchi) I think that it is better to decide the cost and development period of the project by referring to past similar cases before starting development. I also think that cost and development time should be spent on some high-priority product backlogs.
• Question 4. (Ohuchi) Why did it take 20 years for NEC to change to agile?
  • Answer. (Ohuchi) This is because we have maximized our contribution to society by responding to changes in the Japanese market environment.
• Question 5. (Claudia) What’s the most important success factor when implementing agile methodology?
  • Answer. (Claudia) Although the context counts and scenarios can be very diverse, in my experience, the companies that have succeeded in an agile transformation process have combined at least these three variables: 1/ an agile-approach awareness, knowledge, and understanding before any transformational process started or was even designed; 2/ teams buy-in, they have to acknowledge the value of a new way of working; and 3/ agile has to be linked with the organization not just with teams, which implies a commitment of the board, long term high investment levels, agile strategic thinking, training…

If you’d like to watch the presentation, it is available on demand through 31 January 2024 at no cost. Visit the PMI Virtual Experience Series for more details.