David Bogaerts, ING Bank

From trouble shooting to organizing improvements: a management journey

The ING Bank case study: In 2010 we started working Agile in our Internet Banking department (28 teams & 220 employees) and created nice results. It felt however as if we kept banging our heads against big issues all the time. Introducing technical improvements only helped to solve part of our issues, however we never seemed to get away from trouble shooting.
Slowly we started to realize that if we wanted to make real progress, we had to deal with the real root cause: us as a management team. Organize ourselves as management and have the discipline of not disturbing the flow of our teams. Instead focusing on be a truly servant leader by solving bottlenecks structurally for our teams and facilitating knowledge sharing.
We had to learn a new way of thinking. So we started focusing ourselves: on speed. We started asking with all improvement ideas: how does this contribute to speed in delivery? Doing so we created a consistency in purpose: Speed by increasing quality and craftsmanship. By maintaining our own focus constantly and consistently we helped our teams to focus. We changed our habits (especially in meetings) and our management style and slowly became more and more Lean managers. We started using A3 management to help us solve our problems. Now we can see the results. We improved our time to market in 2013 from more than 120 days to less than 20 days.
This is the story of a manager and a Lean coach and how they got to a continuous learning management team with a focus on speed in delivery.

Biography

David is a Senior Lean Agile Coach at ING Bank in the Netherlands. He started in the Lean Office environment before moving into Lean IT and Agile. At the moment he is working on the Lean Agile transition in the IT department of ING NL. David has worked as a Lean Coach since February 2007. Before working as a Lean Coach, David was a change manager, and business consultant for ING. During this period he was involved in reorganization, outsourcing and risk management projects.