Customer Success Story
BOSCH Legal Services Mobility share some of the key improvements and learnings from their recent Digital Agile transformation journey powered by POLDERON.
Customer: BOSCH Legal Services Mobility
Industry: Automotive
Business Function: Legal
Technology: Microsoft Teams, Azure Boards & Power BI
Agile Practices: Scrum, Kanban
Agile Scaling Framework: Scrum@Scale
Department size: 70+
Country: Germany
Agile is quite common in software development. However, as with this Success Story that focuses on the Legal Department within BOSCH Mobility Solutions, it is clear that adopting Agile practices is relevant for all business areas. What Polderon does is enable teams with an Agile mindset, combined with the gift of short feedback loops, data and analytics which really helps a team to self-steer and self-improve.
About BOSCH Legal Services Mobility
Lead by Dr. Jean Obst, the Legal Department servicing BOSCH Mobility Solutions has about 70 legal professionals. And with 200,000 employees, BOSCH Mobility Solutions is the largest sector within BOSCH, generating a turnover of around 47 billion euros in 2019.
For BOSCH Legal Services Mobility, it is really crucial to look at speed, time management and efficiency. This is the only way they can serve thousands of buyers globally with many more contracts every year.
Change is also one of the biggest topics on everyone's minds in the department. Both the legal environment and the whole company is constantly undergoing change. And this is why they decided to start on this journey with Polderon. The Agile transformation is one of the most important initiatives running in the BOSCH Legal Department, and their partnership with Polderon was, according to Dr. Dierk Schindler:
“the right thing at the right time”
Becoming More Effective and Efficient with Agile
Agile really gives teams the opportunity to become much more effective and efficient. It creates insights that BOSCH Legal Services Mobility needed in terms of where their time was going and where they needed to put their resources. And it also created the opportunity to let the information flow between them and their internal business partners.
Communication flow was really important to make this Agile journey a huge success for all the teams. Before working with Polderon, BOSCH Legal Services Mobility was just using a team board that was not connected or integrated to anything else, so team members had to update it every morning, which meant a lot of extra work.
Another major problem the team was facing was that – while they knew they had a huge workload – they didn’t have the necessary transparency on what kind of workload it actually was. The team wanted to do more, wanted to become business-centric, and counsel to the business. In other words, be much more proactive. And this is the mindset that Agile gave them. It is about putting yourself in the shoes of the business client and understanding what outcome they are really after. Then you can really help to create business value, and that was why Agile was so important for BOSCH Legal Services Mobility.
A Change in Mindset
What the BOSCH Legal Services Mobility teams observed was an interesting change in the mindset of people. What had been perceived as a burden at the beginning became more and more a habit and was positively embraced by the team. Now they are much more flexible in their work, because it is all connected.
Carolin Schrott, a Polderon-trained Scrum Master, and Dr. Jonas Kotzur, Legal Counsel are both from BOSCH Legal Services Mobility and shared their experiences from playing a major role throughout their team’s Digital Agile transformation:
“when I look back, everything is just as promised”
“The system enables the team to do all work as legal counsels more efficiently and more properly, so everybody was benefitting from the system”
The Agile journey changed team lead’s role significantly too. As soon as the team’s mindset started to change, the leadership role turned into more of a moderator role. The team itself was taking control and designing the new process and the team lead role became more about helping them remove blockers. “I could step away from it and leave the team working”, explains Marton Hagner, Head of Legal Services Mobility, Products at BOSCH who also shared:
“Agile is about a way of working, a way of structuring, a way of thinking, and most importantly, a way of communicating”
Key Deliverables
The Agile transformation helped the team develop a number of additional capabilities:
They are now much more flexible in their ways of working on a daily basis, with home office, working in distributed locations and being closer to the business, wherever the business might be.
There was a phenomenal 50% increase in capacity i.e. in the number of cases that the team could handle, in just 6 months.
It’s now possible for them to approach internal business clients with data – not data about BOSCH Legal or about their work, but data about the clients and about their business. The internal business clients absolutely love the business insights they get and it has completely changed the dynamics between the departments.
“Powerful IT Tools Are the Gamechanger”
An essential part of this Agile transformation was to have it supported by Microsoft Cloud Services (Microsoft Teams, Azure Boards & Power BI) – this was the game changer. From the first conversations that Polderon had with BOSCH, it soon became apparent that scalability of Agile practices, as well as the technology, needed to be architected into the solution from the beginning.
Looking ahead...and around corners
With Agile you are never done. In this Success Story, BOSCH Legal Services Mobility gained the ability to walk, but now they are wanting to run. They want to start being able to see around corners and know what’s coming next. They now have data to enable them to analyse and really start predicting what’s ahead. Polderon is excited by the opportunity to help support BOSCH’s continuing growth.
For Polderon’s founder, Jason Padman says “it’s really about enjoyment of work and innovation. It’s great to see teams embrace their own creativity to solve whatever problems come their way, and that’s what Polderon really stands for”
Video produced by Thomas Gessner | drone film production & photography