Agile Organizational Development

“Agile Organizational Development” was a multi-year initiative in a medium-sized IT service provider with multiple locations. It grew out of a culture change program that made clear organizational debt visible: e.g. lack of room for innovation, too little cross-site knowledge sharing, and unclear development paths beyond classic leadership careers. The goal was to effectively advance company-wide topics such as innovation, organizational design, collaboration, and knowledge and customer management beyond traditional line and project structures.

The approach was based on self-organization, transparency, voluntariness, and iterative learning. The central element was a shared backlog into which employees, managers, and the executive board alike contributed strategic topics. Work was carried out in three-month cycles by cross-departmental, voluntary teams, supported by clear decision-making and feedback loops (ideation, prioritization, reviews, retrospectives). This led to tangible results, faster decisions, and greater ownership, while at the same time improving networking across locations.

The initiative was supported in the form of Agile Coaching and Organizational Development with a focus on effective formats and sustainable structural anchoring. This included facilitating ideation and prioritization processes, designing and supporting sprint and review formats, evaluating the cycles, and further developing the model based on the teams’ experiences. The priority was to establish a practically robust framework that combines autonomy and alignment and enables continuous learning.

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