Most of my articles are devoted to agile transformations and agile way of thinking. However, since Lucid Bay Digital’s fifth birthday (1.6.) is approaching, I decided to dedicate today’s article to the company.
When Tomáš Reichmann and I founded Lucid Bay 5 years ago, the whole organization and vision of our company was created over dinner in a popular restaurant in Prague. Every week we devoted an hour to the company. The restaurant staff already knew us well. So what happened in those 5 years?
Organization of the company
Even after 5 years, we are still a small company, but we have grown significantly in the number of customers and the portfolio of services we offer. An hour a week has long ceased to be enough for us, so we now employ people who take care of the company and its operation (including me).
What we offer to our customers, we actively use ourselves. Therefore, when founding our company, one of our main tools was Lean Canvas (business plan on one side A4). We had several canvases and our company was founded on the basis of the winning variant. Today, we also train Lean Canvas, where we fill it out with customers at a workshop on their chosen topic.
We have the agenda of the entire company in the backlog and we also regularly prioritize it. Because we also conduct business and operational activities around the company in the backlog, we decided to use the Lean philosophy and Kanban for the organization. We are satisfied with this approach, because we do not mind more frequent changes in priorities as the market situation changes.
Like many other companies, we work with minimalist additions and use them to verify our hypotheses. We learn from our mistakes and successes. In order not to have too many open activities at once, we monitor them using Work In Progress limits. We work with a vision and have also started to plan with medium-term team goals. We use Objectives And Key Results for this.
Services we offer
Agile transformation
Our first service we offered was agile transformations and we still offer them today. It is still the case that we prefer to spend time directly with our customers’ employees and propose new changes with them rather than providing short-term consultations. It also suits us when we see how changes work (and sometimes they don’t 😊) and we have the opportunity to react to the situation.
Mostly it is a long-term cooperation, because changing the corporate culture requires more time. But like any good Scrum Master, we strive to become expendable as soon as possible.
The goal is for our customers to be able to take over the work of our agile coaches and continue to operate without us.
Employment agency focused on agilists
Our second most used service is the employment agency, which we established during the Covid period. The market was changing at that time, some customers wanted to help find agile coaches as employees rather than get help from an external company. So we decided to adapt the situation on the market.
During agile transformations, we have had hundreds of interviews with scrum masters, product owners, but also tribe leaders or members of agile teams. In addition, we work with culture in agile teams every day. Today, this experience allows us to recommend agile employees and assess their agile mindset.
Since we also train, mentor and coach agility, we have learned to supply product owners or scrum masters in business fields where there are none on the market yet. We will select a candidate who has the potential to work in an agile way of working and has the necessary hard skills. Subsequently, we train him in the required agile role and when starting his new job, we provide him with shadowing, mentoring or coaching. Our work ends as soon as this employee is able to work on his own without us.
Hands-on agility training
As I mentioned earlier, we often train our customers during agile transformations. And so we have been offering agile training for some time. It is possible to choose from standard courses on the web, or have tailor-made training prepared according to your needs.
And how are we different from others here? In our courses, we strive to provide as much practical experience as possible from our agile transformations and working with teams. The aim of our courses is for the participant to know what to do after completing them and to be able to deliver a product with their help. For this reason, it often happens that in our training we do not deal with just one agile approach or tool, but their combination, which together forms one functioning whole.
We are constantly innovating the training and adding new and new experiences from agile transformations, what works and what does not.
Where did we leave our marks?
Where have we left our mark in 5 years of Lucid Bay Digital?
- Country: Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Poland
- At least a few representatives from among our customers: Česká spořitelna, T-Mobile, Betsys, Eurowag, Raiffeisenbank, Hasselmeier and others
- Education:
- University of Economics – we regularly lecture at the University of Economics in Prague on agile transformations
- We train junior scrum masters and help them find their first assignment
- We train project managers who want to learn agile management
- We try to help – we support various cultural and humanitarian events in our area
Where do we want to go next?
We are convinced that despite occasional market fluctuations, there is still room for growth in the area of agile transformations in the Czech Republic. And growth is therefore also our goal. In the future, we want to make sure that customers with agile transformations or looking for agile candidates remember us as the first company that comes to mind. We would also like to expand our business beyond the borders of the Czech Republic.
Finally
Finally, I would like to thank you, our customers, but also you, the readers of our articles and the colleagues we work with. Thanks to you, we are here, we can enjoy our work and we can continue to help you to function agile.