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Agile Center of Competence Munich

We pool and manage all agile project management, consulting and coaching issues methodologically and professionally in our "Agile Center of Competence" (Agile CoC). We have been continuously expanding our portfolio in "agile working" over the last few years, particularly from our Munich site, and now offer our customers a 360-degree package that addresses all their needs and requirements. Our team of consultants is distinguished, among other things, by the fact that it can also tackle problems itself, if need be, and remain until everything is "cleared up". It means that we don't just deliver good sounding concepts, but also the man- and womanpower and experience to implement them in practice.

 

Agile minds.

For some five years, our Agile CoC coaches have been supporting, advising, coaching and teaching major automotive manufacturers and assisting them in the transformation of their process architecture, methodologies and tooling issues. Regardless of the product or service to be developed, the aim of our collaborative partnership with our customers is always to create lasting added value and to focus on maximising customer value. After all, agility is not an end in itself. Agility is much more than that. It is a mindset, a question of attitude and corporate culture that makes it possible to react more flexibly to uncertainties, changes and current challenges.

As part of our consulting projects, we often start with mindset workshops, team-building projects, agile boot camps, or agile leadership workshops for scaled agile operating systems to help everyone understand what agility means. In a next step, these insights need to be supported by methods, frameworks and processes, and then implemented in the company. Theoretically, yet also very practically.

 

Efficient and versatile implementation.

We can do this because we combine strategic change/transformation consulting and organisational development with operational implementation and assumption of responsibility in the new process. Or as Clemens Heiland, Head of the Agile CoC at csi, explains: "We don’t consider ourselves above rolling up our sleeves and turning high-level theory into reality. We develop the new operational processes from the "bottom up" and don't just impose them from the "top down". For example, we can act as scrum master or interim project owner and so see live and in full colour where something is not working or meeting with resistance, and then develop solutions as a team on site."

In this case, "as a team" means that we regularly share our impressions, experiences and challenges with our customers, but also within the "Agile Center of Competence". This guarantees that we can also ideally use the knowledge and expertise, gained at csi over decades from numerous project management and consulting contracts, for our own agile projects. In this – naturally agile-organised – team work we then identify specific recommended measures and organisational actions that we communicate openly and transparently to the customer. Among other things, it allows us to quickly and effectively implement operational adjustments that are necessary due to a measure taking longer or the wider scope of a restructuring process. We have been, and continue to be able to observe this regularly in projects that we have been implementing together with and for major car manufacturers (including AUDI, BMW, RIO/MAN) since 2018. We do so, whether we are working as an external consultant in setting up an in-house "agile project center" for a company or acting as a contact to methodically and professionally supervise all agile "connected vehicle" projects. Or we may be part of the transformation team that is developing an agile collaboration model and the scaled development processes for the body and interior development of a completely new generation of vehicles. Our success and positive feedback from our customers and contacts has contributed to our CoC team now numbering over 20 people and also supporting customers outside of the automotive industry.

 

Agile or traditional? The right way!

Agile work offers many advantages, but is not always the right method. That is why our consultants clarify in advance whether an agile working approach is really suitable for a company or a specific project. There are many cases in which a more traditional approach achieves the required result more quickly. Our experienced CoC experts can also manage projects with a more traditional approach and construct bridges between the two worlds. This makes it possible to integrate agile frameworks and process structures into traditional companies and thus bring about positive change. "Agile or traditional is not the question," explains Fabian Schulze, Head of of the Agile CoC at csi. "We only ever recommend an approach that will really help and take the customer forward in the long term. That might be an agile approach or maybe a traditional approach – or even a combination of both."

 

May we also help to make your company and your processes more agile or future-proof – whether you are in the automotive sector or not? Then we look forward to receiving your initial enquiry!

 

CLEMENS HEILAND & FABIAN SCHULZE 
csi entwicklungstechnik | Munich | Head of the Agile Center of Competence
Clemens.Heilandcsi-onlinede | Fabian.Schulzecsi-onlinede

Clemens Heiland, Head of Agile CoC

Fabian Schulze, Head of Agile CoC


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