Author: Thomas Moreau, Agile Coach

After attending a unFIX Foundation workshop in Amsterdam, I started to wonder “How may I use all this in my everyday practice”? I started by pitching what I’ve learned to my fellow colleagues and the feedback was very positive. Everyone loved the cards and the simplicity of the pattern language. 

I did not have to wait long until the first opportunity to “bullet proof” unFIX came up and I got a chance to apply the model on a real life example.

If you’re French you know about Leroy Merlin and if you’re Spanish, Italian, Polish or even from South Africa or Brazil, I bet at least you’ve something from them in your toolbox. For all not knowing: Leroy Merlin France (28.000 people) is supporting their customers within their stores on how to fix, decorate or embellish their homes.

With new projects and the necessity to reorganise some teams, I knew there were changes in the organisation that had to come. We specifically focused on a IT-oriented part of Leroy Merlin France (DTP HR & CALM Domain) with more or less 200 people organised in teams with a wide range of responsibilities, such as IT Maintenance, Agile Coaching, Hiring, Tool & Service Development or Cloud Operations.

With its large bandwidth of activities this seemed like a perfect candidate for an organisational design test using the unFIX patterns! 

In collaboration with my boss Guillame and our digital leader Alexis we organised a pitch event with all relevant stakeholders (now called the “Governance Crew”). I started by pitching the overall unFIX model and focused on Crew Types as I knew these basic patterns will be the main topic of our following discussions. 

The feedback I got was really good so we decided to move on and I scheduled two workshops to design the DTP HR & CALM organisation. The first one was called the “try & design” workshop with a smaller group and the second one was about “show and give feedback” with a larger group.

I’ll spare you the details but after two workshops of 60 to 90 minutes we had our organisation fully designed! It was looking like this:

At the end, we were facing a Loosely Aligned Base (because of the vast spectrum of activities), in collaboration with other business units (Adeo, Kbane, & Domains (Perf & Reliability), several different Forum Types and a lot of Crews that we want to be involved in.

Our next challenge was: “How will we explain this to 200 people?” 

We decided to plan it as a public event and we invited the overall organisation to a big conference. During our presentation, we had to explain Crew Types again, but it didn’t take long as “it’s logical and easy to understand”. As long as everyone gets the main concept of “What colour is my Crew?” I knew everyone will be able to follow our train of thoughts here.

For the audience point of view,
the use of the unFIX patterns were especially helpful in:

• Asking good questions: What is expected from the team? How do they operate now? How will they operate in the future ? How will the teams adopt the right behaviour (facilitate, give expertise, act-as-a-service, …) to enhance collaboration? 

• The additional use of the “Role Attribute” patterns was very helpful here as it helped to figure out what was needed for all teams to complete their “Job to be done”.

• Using a strong storytelling approach behind the re-design of a new organisation - instead of simply sharing a boring and incomprehensible organigram. By sharing the colourful patterns we are able to give meaning and purpose to the teams.

• Telling to all teams the behaviours that were expected for every team inside the new organisation and the way they will interact & collaborate.

• Forums were really helpful to officialise some practices and meetings that were informal before (because not in a list of “things to do when you have this job”), but much respected by all the teams (including Governance Crew).

• The use of Base patterns enforced the lovely feeling of being part of a community. Not an easy task if you consider that people participating could have jobs or functional perimeters that are strangers to each other. We went with the pattern of “Loosely Aligned Base” even if the term ‘Loosely aligned’ felt a little harsh for our managers who did struggle since the beginning to tighten and reinforce the links between people.
  

On the “down side” we discussed remarks about:

• The use of “Expertise” in a Capability Crew. Ego-wise, we all want to be called an ‘Expert’! Managers asked themselves what makes a team a gathering of experts? Is an Agile Coach an expert in Lean/Agile topics?
  We figured out it was more about how the team should behave and not about the people that were inside. Let’s say that inside your average Value Stream Crew, if your teammate Jean is an expert in some technical stuff, share it! But the main focus of Jean is and must remain: Delivery first!

• The use of Roles was a source of questions: “How is that role related to our job architecture? Is it something that a Product Owner should do?” “I’m not sure the Maven or the Director refers to some job in our payroll list” “Is Franck really our Chief, as he do not have the title of Manager?” Old habits… Again!

My personal learnings and tips for you using unFIX:

1. Always start by explaining the patterns you will work on. You can split your workshop by theory and practice sequence like “First we will design the Crews and after we will look for Forum Types. I will explain Forum later on, so you don’t need to overload your brain with too much things.”

2. You don’t want people to write on your beautiful cards! Always have Post-its AND markers with the matching colour at hand when you’re designing. Buy violet, pink, yellow and whatever colour you’ll need as Post-its and pens. It will ease the process for everyone. You’ve probably spent some time explaining to everyone that Facilitation Crews are a “violet team”, so don’t start to give them blue pens to design a Facilitation Crew on a Whiteboard!

3. In France it is an obstacle that all the unFIX material was in English. I knew there would always be some kind of a language barrier until I could work with translations. So I became pro-active and gathered a team of french unFIX’er and we started to translate all the cards and the course material. You can download it on the unfix.circle website!