People…… People are probably the most important ingredient of agile working
These are people…
However, they are not Egg people, who look more like this…
and this…
Qualified Egg Revolutionaries
In late 2002/early 2003, Egg ran its People Programme which was part of the thrust to get fit to take on growth…
…and which focused on two key themes: “Egg Qualified Revolutionaries” and “Great Place to Work”
Agile Egg Culture
As you can see from the ETS Vision, the key cultural tenets were defined for ETS to define the way of “being”:
- Great People
- Great relationship with our customers
- Great place to work – Put our people first
- Add real value
- Strive to improve ourselves and our capability
- Sustainable working week
- Do projects in manageable chunks (~3 months)
- Guaranteed training commitment
- Openness, transparency, honesty and respect
- No blame and OK to fail (not repeated/mis-managed)
- Business mindset
- creating assets
- making investments, not spending budgets
- creating options (faster, cheaper, better)
With a defined outline for Great People:
- Adaptable, flexible, agile
- Passionate
- Open and honest
- Committed
- Straight talking and great communicators
- Creative and innovative
- Team players, respectful of others
- Multi-skilled and capable
- Excellent technical and industry skills and knowledge
That is people who are or have the potential to be Qualified Egg Revolutionaries
Agile People Attributes
The Agile Transformation was defined and led independently of the People Programme as it was a more substantial multi-stream transformation, not just of people, but a whole way of working. However it built on some of the thinking for the Qualified Egg Revolutionaries and also the ETS Vision for Great People to define the key attributes of Agile People which were grouped like this:
- Commitment and Energy
- Leadership and People
- Self Motivated and Achieving
- Forward Thinking and Agility
- Creative Communication
- Relationship Management
- Analytical and Process
- Industry and Technical
This thinking underpinned the robust HR selection process that was developed for the People component of the Transformation, with a well defined and detailed set of target expectations…
…and rigorously defined assessment criteria
Next…