Case study: Echometer at Miele
Driving agile transformations in the smart home sector measurably, with a bottom-up approach.
About Miele
Miele is the world's leading supplier of premium household appliances for both private and commercial customers. Founded in 1899, the company operates eight production sites in Germany and one each in Austria, the Czech Republic, China, Romania and Poland.
Miele is represented in almost 100 countries with its own sales companies or via importers. The fourth-generation family-owned group employs around 20,500 people worldwide, 11,050 of whom are in Germany. The company headquarters are in Gütersloh in Westphalia.
Initial Situation
Facilitating the change of corporate culture into agile working methods within the teams
Miele is founding the "Smart Home" division to drive the digitization and networking of its household appliances.
In this work area, appropriately agile working methods should be used in order to
- be attractive to IT talent as an employer,
- strengthen the clear focus on the customer,
- enable iterative further development of the products.
In 2019, Miele is looking for a Scrum-compatible tool to make this cultural change in the Smart Home area, and later also beyond, in the company measurable and more targeted.
The Challenge
- Establish & scale agile working methods
- Measurably drive forward cultural change
- Strengthen self-organization of the teams
Echometer As The Solution
A cultural change that is driven by teams, and is also transparent to managers
Establishing agile working methods
As part of the introduction of Agile working methods, Miele has founded a so-called Agile Center of Excellence (or "ACE" for short). This consists of 15 Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches who support the teams in implementing these methods.
In order to prepare the ACE team for the topic of cultural change, they use Echometer as part of their retrospectives with the teams.
In this way, the cultural change becomes a tangible and measurable process for all teams, which is supported by psychological knowledge and controlled self-organized from within the teams.
"I like to work with Echometer because it gives me a picture of the team's cultural development over time, and thus supports my work as a Scrum Master. The team members value Echometer because the psychologically-based questions enable focused opinion formation, and discussions take place in a targeted manner."
"For me, the most important thing is that the employees feel good, can develop according to their ideas and can do an activity that they enjoy."
Make the transformation measurable
The use of Echometer not only generates important insights within the teams, but also beyond.
Thanks to Echometer, Miele's managers can regularly ask all teams questions that can be evaluated as part of a central culture barometer.
This creates an early warning system that enables managers to identify trends early on and to specifically support the teams in their further development.
At the same time, this "culture barometer" remains compatible with the idea of self-organization of teams.
The Added Value
Cultural change made measurable & sustainable
With Echometer, the introduction of agile working methods was promoted sustainably and measurably by accompanying cultural change. At the same time, with Echometer, the teams play a more active role in shaping continuous change.
The Results
- Sustainable & measurable cultural change
- Support of the Scrum Master & Agile Coaches
- Development of targeted bottom-up approaches from within the teams
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