Hi there, this is us 🙂 !

Agile Adventures: two girls one journey…What can these two girls tell me about agile beyond IT? Isn’t that your thought at this exact moment? Well, give us a couple of minutes and we will surprise you!

Even though we come from completely different work experiences and personal backgrounds, we both fell in love with agile. And as many, our love affair isn’t just fun and games. This affair takes time, hard work and we sometimes want to give up on it. But we’ve also experienced the energy, results and fun when you stick to it.

Like many companies nowadays, our company made the move from waterfall towards scrum few years ago. That was mainly in the IT departments. Revolutionary? Really? We did think so back then. But were we really that revolutionary? Or were we in fact quite late? But now, we are doing something bold! The entire company is being transformed into agile, inspired by the “Spotify way of working.” That means tribes, chapters and squads where we used to have departments, teams and value chains. No more Marketing, Product management and IT, but end to end responsible tribes and squads. Business and IT working together for a common purpose in the same squad. Major change!

We both found our role within the new organization. Saloua as a central Product Owner, Marijke as a Chapter Lead. What the heck that means? For now you can have a look at the theory in the really nice Spotify video under our About Agile tab. Later on, we will tell you all about it in this blog. So, we jumped into this organizational roller-coaster. Now we are facing its ups – and sometimes downs – on a daily basis. Leaving us amazed, confused, frustrated, enthusiastic and uncomfortable. Mostly all at once the same day or even the same moment! How to deal with the agile theory in a large organization? Even more complex, a bank, with many external stakeholders and regulators. And how to deal with all the legacy? All those questions, challenges and successes astonish us every day. They make us happy, proud and wondering where this agile journey will take us.

Our goal is to share our experiences in this agile adventure, our personal journey towards the new way of working. We are not pretending to know it all. We are on a journey and learning every day.

As Henrik Kniberg put so nicely; this is a journey in progress, not a journey completed.

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