Whirlpool [NYSE: WHR]

Luiza Lima has been associated with Whirlpool for the past four years and is currently the global head of digital products. Technology, agility, and designing the future are some of the things she is passionate about. As an experienced professional in several fields, Luiza has expertise in digital transformation, business agility, and digital product structure. Her previous experience includes working for Telefónica Brazil as an omnichannel manager.

What are your responsibilities as Global Senior Manager at Whirlpool?

In the first three years of my career, I was responsible for digital operations in Brazil. Digitization transformation, specifically a digitized centre of excellence was my primary focus. This was accomplished by bringing agile integration to digital products and our day-to-day work. Upon the successful completion of our operations in Brazil, I was appointed the global head of digital products for agile governance and wearable. As of now, the goal at Whirlpool is to create global benchmarks to help accelerate agile adoption.

Are there any new trends or challenges in the agile space?

According to a McKinsey study published in 2020, 70 per cent of agile transformations fail. A top reason for the downfall at most companies is the inability to design a transformational flywheel framework. Their challenge is that they do not know how to design their transformational journey and guide themselves towards adaptability.

Implementation of agile can take many forms. Recently, some countries have experimented with new scaling and development processes for agile. Brazil has started following the Spotify model of scaling agile that gives emphasis on culture and network. This has helped organizations increase productivity by focusing on autonomy and quality. The trend is to create autonomous teams similar to a model Spotify used a few years back.

Agile is about achieving goals, and companies implementing agile work models should asses their goals before deciding on the targeted process structure like scrum or others. To accomplish this, companies must be aware of the solutions and the measures that are required to value agile transformations.

In order to mitigate these challenges, what are some steps that can be taken?

The first step is organizing the budget needed to meet the agile goal. This budget is not just limited to project lab budgeting but for other purposes where teams have the autonomy to decide the purpose or agenda. By understanding the true value of an employee, companies can change their budget programs to reflect a more outcome instead of an output-based reward strategy. Companies must find ways to incentivize a staff member’s vigor. It is better to have someone who adheres to deadlines and pushes themselves to complete projects faster.

 Agile is about achieving goals, and companies implementing agile work models should asses their goals before deciding on the targeted process structure like scrum or others 

The second discussion going on is about the methods to retain knowledge and fill the voids left behind by employees venturing to other careers. For this, organizations must create centres of excellence to train new people on company culture and operations. This type of approach allows companies to build a culture of system benchmarks, ensuring to retain learning from people who left can be used to educate the next line of the staff.

The final piece for companies to achieve global agility is to also have an active system in place to measure more value-based results and guarantee that all projects are delivered on time.

How the Agile Arena may change in a few years with regard to some of its potential disruptions and transformations?

As far as agility is concerned, scalability is one of the biggest challenges. Agile is currently focused mainly on technology teams, e-commerce teams, and customer-oriented teams. As the next step in the transformation, it is important to focus on agile scalability in a Broadway office. A number of large companies have unsuccessfully attempted to implement agile on a large scale. It is expected that agile's scalability will become a major discussion in the coming years.

A lot of discussions are occurring about the steps necessary to establish agile transformation offices and establishing an agile centre of excellence within the company to facilitate the adoption of agile strategies and tools.

Every norm has an impact on agile dynamics. Agile requires everyone to be in the same place at the same time since so many face-to-face practices and frameworks are involved. The agile process will have to be redesigned in a context where there will be an increasing number of remote teams that work from a variety of locations.. The ability to be present without physically being there is likely to disrupt tools and ways of working.

If you could give our readers some advice based on your experience with agility, what would it be?

Agile has a number of frameworks and a number of ways to implement, a range of tools and processes. At the end of the day, you need to determine if you're bringing value with it. You need to figure out if you're really creating a path where you're learning and changing the rules because it's difficult to be adaptable.

A lot of teams do all of the standings and dailies and mirror bars and all of these tools and processes, but they cannot. They are unable to measure depth, change routes, make decisions quickly, and assess the environment. Leaders need to pay attention to whether the team is actually being agile and what it wants to capture from the agile process.

Experimentation, assessments, learning, and changing again are the only ways to end up with an agile job transformation.