ThinkLouder: Making Your Organization Agile

Could you elaborate on your company’s training, coaching assessment, and how the whole process works?

We describe ourselves as an outcome-based consultancy which means when we structure contracts, we don't get paid if we don't accomplish those outcomes. There are three pillars our Training is standing on: It starts with training the individual, as we always live by a saying “Every ounce of value created by the company is generated by the people on the bottom.” Even if you have some experience doing something, it's unlikely that everyone has the same experience and knowledge working with teams. We target two kinds of people; one who creates value and two; who supports, leads and inspires that value. So it needs to be level set on a particular concept.

"We choose specific problems a company is struggling with and solve them in real-time, in the shortest time possible, with an actually measurable ROI combined with a post-training support"

The second step is precision coaching. This step is crucial, as we often see that organizations still cannot deliver on the promise, even though they have agile teams, roles, and ceremonies. These team members generally lack engagement, and their managers cannot forecast the value. Precision coaching helps individuals transition to bridge the gap between what you learned in the class and how to apply them within your team or organization in the real world. We also facilitate individuals with actual product backlogs, real customers, managers, and team members. And so not only do you learn the application of those concepts, you end up with a deliverable, since all the way throughout the training, we are dealing with real, existing problems teams have.

The third step is providing ongoing support. One of the biggest disadvantages of a usual training program is when the training is finished, people tend to turn back to their old routines. If you don't provide ongoing support, nor create opportunities for those ongoing touchpoints, many learning and techniques will decline. That is the reason we So we try to package our solution as a combination of these three things. So everything we provide is a combination of targeted, engaging, practical training, followed by precision-targeted outcome-based coaching, with some support component where there's ongoing touchpoints support to those participants.

Can you provide us with a customer success story?

Our training and coaching process is entirely customer-focused, delivering value to organizations in every iteration. We provide a two-to-four-week program, a combination of training and coaching through training coaching workshops, which focuses on helping the team become more problem solvers and opportunity enablers and focus on value. In 2019, we worked with a well-known financial service company, and we went in and provided this agile refresh to six of their teams. At the same time, the organization was doing an enterprise-wide HR assessment, assessing engagement levels across all their associates. The organization scored very low across the entire assessment process, except for one department consisting of six teams which had our agile refresh. Usually, it surmises a data anomaly that is somehow weird, and so they went to investigate what would have caused this anomaly in the data.

That's where they discovered that all of those teams were doing things a little differently than others. We came in and made certain modifications, and all the teams started focusing more on value delivery—not just delivering outputs or widgets—and became far more engaged.

What are the key differentiators that keep you ahead of your competitors' market space?

We target specific problems and specific outcomes. When we structure contracts, we don't get paid if we don't accomplish those outcomes. And so our agreements are not based on how much stuff we do, but rather do we achieve the results that we set forth to accomplish or not. I think that's certainly a very different model in our approach. Moreover, we only target companies who already adopted agile, just not well enough. Another thing that differentiates us is that our coaches and consultants have a depth of knowledge and experience. Our coaches solve specific problems that they are experts in, which means they have practice solving those problems repeatedly than anyone else.