BBC 2017 Speaker Series – Consultant:  Rainer Wendt

In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Orlando, Nov. 6-10, 2017, we asked Rainer Wendt, Managing Director at masVenta Business GmbH, a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled, Robust Hybrid Rather Than Agile or Waterfall – Why There is Finally no Alternative.

Q: In what ways do you help your client organizations handle business transformation?

A: Developing and transforming our clients´ business is exactly our core business. We typically focus on the most effective parts of the clients´ business to support investment decisions for transformation projects and other projects. Investing in the right projects is crucial and this is why we provide our techniques and experiences in the area of strategic business analysis and project portfolio management.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing more robust business transformation capabilities for your clients?

A: The challenges can be mostly found as with stakeholder concerns or hidden agendas. Even senior stakeholders sometimes lack support for strategic transformation initiatives which of course leads to risks. We identify risks coming with such stakeholder attitudes, unleash them and suggest an active risk management approach in order to mitigate such situations.

Q: What are your top suggestions for companies looking to become more agile?

A: Start with coaching the business since the most important role in agile teams is the product owner or “Voice of the Customer”, using a Scrum-like language here. POs must be knowledgeable and powerful and they must be empowered by the business management at the same time so that they are able to quickly decide and prioritise in projects. And one more thing; becoming agile sometimes needs a bit of patience, it is not a good practice to push people on the new grounds. Contrarily, people should continuously convert themselves into pull-people, voluntarily picking up the work voluntarily, intrinsically motivated.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in the past year?

A: That a repeated communication is generally a good thing. Even if you think that several repetitions of the same information might annoy stakeholders, this is sometimes an effective instrument for sending out your messages to all project people. Think about politicians, they repeat their messages over and over and effectively influence the folks by doing that.

Q: What do you see as the most important goal or trend for business analysts and other professionals to keep in mind? 

A: Most important to Business Analysts is probably the skill to integrating classic portfolio and project management with the agile mind-set. People with these skills are definitely sought-after consultants.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you’ve implemented to help your client’s business’s operate more effectively? Have you seen any results yet?

A: Self-steering teams. Once established these teams have a significantly higher output than command-and-control-steered teams. Such teams are not only responsible for the work they do, they even become more accountable.

Q: If you could go back 5 years in time and give some professional insight or advice to yourself, what would it be?

A: Be yourself, be encouraged and stand for your opinion, even in harder situations. But, at the same time, listen carefully to what other people say and analyse and use this information.

Q: What’s one question you wished you were asked in this interview but were not? And how would you answer?

A: What are the things you are dying for? I can give you the answer right away: jazz bass player

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at the Building Business Capability (BBC) conference this year?

A: My presentation is a bit provoking by saying that there is no alternative for hybrid project management. Indeed, I believe that a transformation from classic behaviours to agile methods can only be done by choosing a step-by-step approach, by blending and tailoring classic and agile techniques, by compromising and being adaptive and hybrid. Only the robust hybrids have a high chance to survive!

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Don’t miss Rainer’s presentation, Robust Hybrid Rather Than Agile or Waterfall – Why There is Finally no Alternative, at Building Business Capability on Friday, November 10, 2017 at 11:30 am to 12:30 pm. Click here to register for attendance.