Swisscom Job
In this article, we introduce you to our colleague Christiane Moser. She works as a Lean Agile Leader Teams for HR and describes in the article what agile working is like for her and what a normal Business Day looks like for her.
I am Scrum Master for two teams in the IT, Network and Infrastructure unit in the Enterprise Application Services division.
I start the day with daily stand-ups with my two teams. This brief exchange is like a pulse check: are we making good progress towards the goals we have set ourselves? What is standing in our way? Does anyone need support? I stand in the background. I listen to the team, ask questions and pay attention to what is not said. The questions I ask myself: "How can I best support or enable the team in my role, in their development on various levels, including self-organisation, problem solving, conflict navigation and communication?" These are all factors that ultimately contribute to the good performance we strive for as part of Swisscom. We meet with each team once a week in the office. We use this time to review our activities, plan upcoming activities and discuss in depth any issues that concern us, be they technical, organisational or interpersonal. This is sometimes ad hoc, sometimes structured in the form of retrospectives. I then derive my own steps from the discussions with the teams and my observations. I often observe a need for action due to communication gaps and try to act as a 'bridge builder', bringing the different parties together and offering a suitable format for communication. In addition, coaching team colleagues on professional development, facilitating workshops (which I really enjoy as a creative Process), moderating meetings, finding solutions to Problems and navigating conflicts in teams are also part of my everyday life. Casual and informal dialogue with my team colleagues is also very important to me. Occasionally leaving work behind and having fun together. I like bringing people together. That's why I enjoy lunches together, the odd aperitif and, after coronavirus, our team events again. It gives us strength and confidence for our everyday challenges. And that in turn has an indirect positive effect on our performance.
Whereas traditional waterfall projects centred on meticulous, long-term planning, we now work iteratively, in short cycles. We generally decide at team level when to do what, taking into account general conditions and deadlines set by customers. This enables us to act quickly, adjust course if necessary and minimise risks in the sense of 'fail fast'. We are not focussing on a perfect end result, but are constantly trying to generate added value for our customers (internal and external) with our work. This requires us to communicate quickly and transparently and - perhaps most importantly - to always be ready and open to share our knowledge, learn new things, give and receive feedback.
I would say that Microsoft Teams is our central communication organ. Teams is actively used for chats and calls. We also use Kanban and Scrum boards in Jira to make our activities transparent and to structure them.
Liberating and challenging at the same time. On the one hand, I perceive a great deal of creative freedom, the freedom to use my strengths in a targeted way and to make decisions at team level. We don't have a boss who tells us exactly what to do. However, this freedom requires me and the teams to take a great deal of personal responsibility, self-discipline, all-round thinking in communication and - central to my role - attentive listening and asking more questions than providing answers.
I have learnt that trust and psychological security play a central role in agile work. This makes it possible to communicate transparently and therefore act quickly, to allow a constructive error culture and thus to be innovative.
Want to find out more about our agile way of working? You can find more information on our careers page:
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