Strengthening the agile mindset

Abstract

To cope with the ever-changing market conditions, companies are introducing the agile way of working. Many teams use agile practices such as Scrum or Kanban. However, agile experts and scientific literature are aligned on the fact that simply implementing agile methodologies without the necessary agile mindset to back it up, will not lead to the desired results. Therefore, the aim of this master thesis is to design and implement an artefact to strengthen the agile mindset of a company. A requirements analysis is conducted in the form of semi-structed interviews with the employees of a pilot company (Zurich Insurance) to gather inputs of the most important aspects and elements of agile mindset. Further, the interview participants presented with a list of possible artefacts and are questioned on their preference. Based on the outcome of the requirements analysis a shortened Open Space Agility cycle was carried out. Resulting was a list experiments to strengthen the agile mindset. In this work both the method of Open Space Agility as well as the list of experiments were evaluated. Even though the assessment of the experiments was mixed, the overall process received great feedback.