Halton is a family-owned, global technology leader in indoor air solutions for demanding spaces. Halton designs, manufactures and delivers indoor environment solutions from healthcare institutions to marine vessels. Their mission is to enable people’s wellbeing in these various environments.
“Halton’s growth strategy focuses on prime quality customer experience, innovative digital products and services as well as employee’s strong know-how and commitment. To further improve our customer and employee experience and streamline our product development we would like to utilize agile methods through our organization”, says Managing Director Anu Saxen.
In this mission, Taskmill and Taskmill’s agile professionals came to help.
Agile learning path
Taskmill’s Agile Coaches ideated and customized a holistic learning program for Halton’s employees, including the designated change agents. The first trainings were held for a large, approximately 40 people group and they were focused on agile values and principles as well as general agile methods like Scrum and Kanban. After that a smaller group of Halton’s change agents went to practice agile roles in Scrum Master- and Product Owner -trainings. The trainings consisted of short modules that lasted half a day and they were held once a week. This way the change agents got to practice things they learned between modules and time for the trainings was easier to find between work.
Four completely different agile pilot projects
Right after the first trainings four pilot projects started to pilot the agile way of working in practice with the help of Taskmill’s Agile Coach. The pilot teams and projects were selected from many different domains, in order to gather learnings from versatile perspectives. Two of the teams focused on solutions overall, one in software development and one in developing the physical products. Because the teams worked on different things, the way of doing things wasn’t same for all. The methods best suitable for every team were chosen. Some utilized Scrum, some used Kanban and some used a Scrumban type of method, however, in such a way that certain core issues united different teams. The uniting issues in Halton’s agile model were for example regular reflection of one’s own doing, making the work transparent and continuous prioritizing of the backlog.
For physical products design, manufacturing and validation are separate phases, each of which must be completed before the next one can begin. Taskmill’s and Halton’s experts focused on making each step of the product process agile.
The transformation is led with agility
The transformation project was also worked on together with Taskmill’s experts and Halton’s management with agile methods. Together, we regularly reviewed progress and prioritized the change-backlog. The feedback from the pilot teams were listened to carefully and the retrospective was naturally used as a tool during the transformation project as well, so that the direction could also be changed if necessary.
“We are very pleased with how Taskmill’s professionals have supported us in adopting and scaling the agile methods through our business. It has been wonderful to see how a new way of doing things has developed eureka moments in our long-term professionals. This is a good way to continue our agile journey”, HR Director Anne-Marie Ruohonen sums up.