Structuring organisations for the future

Max fell in love with the Norwegian nature, and decided to do his master’s in Norway. A job offer as a consultant for Accenture Interactive after his first year at BI made him stay. Now he helps clients with their digital solutions, and assists them in adapting to a new way of working. He really enjoys talking to the customers and finding out what their pain points are.

 – Here I get to use my background from psychology, which helps me ask the right questions and at the same time analyze what the person means. In addition, I like finding the right balance between the customer needs and the business perspective.

Breaking down the silos

Most organisations today are built up in silos, where the different departments don't communicate enough. This was also the case at the Norwegian Defence, who is one of their clients. His recent project has involved implementing an agile way of working at the Norwegian Defence by breaking up these siloed structures and enabling faster processes.

 – I coached a client team from the Norwegian Defence as a so-called "Scrum Master". In this role I helped the team adapt to the new way of working. I helped the team when they faced challenges and when they were dependent on other teams, so that they could focus on their own work and responsibilities, facilitated coordination meetings and workshops, and I provided input on the agile way of working.

Accenture Interactive starts the projects with an insight phase where they interview the customers, observe them, and facilitate workshops in order to uncover their challenges. They try to spend as much time collaborating with the customers as possible. Then they analyze the collected data and summarize the customer journey as it is today, and identify ways of improvement. 

 – After developing an idea for an improved customer journey, we build a prototype of the idea and take it back to the customer. Like that we get valuable feedback in the very start of the process. We then use this feedback to refine our prototype, and go back to the customer - in a so-called feedback loop.

Ongoing projects with early successes

Transforming a whole organisation at this scale can take several years and the project with the Norwegian Defence is still ongoing.

 – However, we have made good progress, for example by establishing new arenas for coordination and synchronizing several teams to work in a common rhythm, or "cadence". The client has reported that they already found it easier to organize, and that they had more control over ongoing processes.