Saturday, March 14, 2015

A new start: As NewHire at digitec / Galaxus

In January 2015 I joined digitec Galaxus. This is one of the largest e-commerce companies in Switzerland and for sure the company with the fastest growth. digitec Galaxus is running the two online portals www.digitec.ch and www.Galaxus.ch.

But size is not the reason I hired. After ten years on the road as consultant supporting organizations in the transformation from classical behavior towards lean and agile, I had the strong need to finish something and to be responsible - not only giving good advices and acting a coach, mentor, mediator and lion tamer in a cage.

And well, there was another very essential reason I hired at digitec Galaxus. I had the chance to talk to the two Co-CEO's. These talks created the strong feeling and impression that the mindset at digitec Galaxus is tremendous positive in respect of an agile and lean organization - and that not only in software development.

digitec Galaxus was just finishing a hard period of work. They switched from an old technology to a new system, a complete new developed online-shop and erp-system (enterprise resource planning system). The development of a new system in parallel to the daily business implies:
  • The speed of innovations slows down - a hard issue for an e-commerce company
  • At deployment time, the new system for sure did not have all the features required - and some more complex processes behaved different in reality as expected in development
  • A new system is always a new system. There is a part of the staff members that always remind how easy everything was in the good old times, thus leading to discussions.
But face the fact: In a very short transformation phase switching from the old system to the new system digitec Galaxus succeeded to overcome the most important issues and run a very successfully Christmas business without impact on growth. That is outstanding.

This was the situation when I joined. The CEO´s hired me to preserve and save the flexibility and the agile mindset while still growing. To stay lean, fast and innovative. Well, that is the job I dreamed of, so I signed. When do you get the chance to play an essential part in shaping a lean organization from bottom to top with support of top management for a top Swiss company!

....and yes... the strong feeling and impression that the mindset at digitec Galaxus is tremendous positive in respect of an agile and lean proved to be true :-)