Agile working at SYNAOS: More freedom and better results

Contemporary approaches enable quick adaptations to changes as they occur and therefore ensure long-term success in a fast-paced work environment. But for this to work, companies need to adapt and change their inflexible processes - not an easy path.

SYNAOS - that's more than 90 people from 15 countries. They work together with our three founders on one vision: to push the boundaries that stand in our way today in logistics automation - towards a software-driven future. To achieve this, we set the course early on so that we can rely 100 per cent on agile working. For many, the buzzword par excellence!

Agile working is probably best defined in one sentence:
‍"If you work in a team that changes its priorities based on learning, you are agile."Mark up: em - Jeff Gothelf

But why does SYNAOS go this way, despite all the pain it causes?

OUR INSIGHTS INTO AGILE WORKING

From our many years of professional experience as process facilitators, we can say: Nothing is easier than bringing a consultant into the company, "making all the departments that are not high on trees happy" with Scrum and then shouting loudly to the world "Hey, look everyone, we are so agile!"

But of course it's not that easy. The truth is more strenuous, because agile working means work - a lot of work and hard work. At SYNAOS we are aware of this. We go this way anyway, stoically and with all the setbacks, feedback loops and pain. Many organisations go through all of this when they open the space for developments, diversity of change and dynamics through an agile mindset. Because working according to agile principles is different from decades of Tayloristic companies with endless status report meetings, command and control, silo thinking and management by helicopter. Just to name a few of the excesses of this way of working.

AGILE WORKING IN CONCRETE TERMS

With around 50 employees, the Development department is the largest at SYNAOS. Here, we work daily to optimize our SYNAOS Intralogistics Management Platform and trim it for maximum transport performance. With more than 250,000 solutions per second, our AI algorithms calculate efficient and hardware-independent routes for transport vehicles and robots - without pauses for thought. Here it becomes clear: We operate in complex to chaotic environments. In these work environments, causalities can only be interpreted in retrospect, if at all. No best or good practices help us here; we have to check, recognize and then react (keyword: CYNEFIN framework by Dave Snowden).

And agile working is perfectly suited for exactly these environments. Some teams at SYNAOS IMP work with the Scrum framework in two-week iterations; the entire company and customers are invited to the review meetings to exchange feedback. Others work with Kanban, try to achieve optimal flow efficiency, set WiP limits and proceed according to the pull principle.

WORKING AS A HUMAN BEING - WITH HUMAN BEINGS

But at the core it is about living values and our culture. It is these values and culture that follow our agile processes and structures - not the other way around. Scrum or Kanban are frameworks and, in our view, are far too often used as synonyms for agile working and mindset. So it's no wonder that there are so many prejudices about "agile".

At SYNAOS, we review ourselves regularly. We give ourselves feedback and use the so-called P-D-C-A cycle for continuous improvement. The acronym stands for Plan-Do-Check-Act. This is a control loop that frames process and management tasks. The so-called continuous improvement process (CIP) means the same thing.

We want to achieve the optimum through experimentation without forgetting people as individuals. At SYNAOS we are deeply convinced that we can make a difference through community and togetherness. Because we are curious to see what great achievements our SYNASIANS are capable of with the right development spaces.

AGILE AND ALWAYS ON

Even outside of software development, we strive to be and act agile, rather than just doing agile. Areas like HR regularly improve their process through retrospectives. In Sales, the sales department has recently started working closely with our product colleagues to give our customers holistic and realistic assessments of their needs in perspective.

In addition, we continuously evolve across departments through experiments, whether in people management or marketing. Our colleagues have a concern and are encouraged to implement the changes directly as part of a curated experiment. In the process, we record the learnings, establish termination criteria and also present the results afterwards to ensure transparency - and this works amazingly well. In the recent past, we were able to further optimize our frontend in an eight-week experiment with cross-team collaboration.

SOUNDS GOOD?

If our experiences sound exciting to you and you might also want to get creative in such a great environment - write to one of our Agile Coaches personally! Via mail, on Xing or LinkedIn. We will take the time to talk to you in more detail about agile working at SYNAOS. Or you can take a look at our vacancies. We want to use agility to push today's boundaries towards a software-driven industrial future - ideally together with you!

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