Squad goals at Vodafone
Spark was first to adopt a trendy new way of working. Vodafone has followed suit – but, unlike its rival, won’t put jobs on the line.
Telecommunications company Vodafone New Zealand has joined rival Spark in adopting a new way of working called Agile across a large part of its business.
However, unlike Spark, it says it won’t be asking staff members to sign new contracts or timing the change to coincide with a restructure.
Agile involves organising employees into small, self-managing teams called ‘‘squads’’ who are tasked with working on projects that typically last for a few weeks at a time.
Spark was criticised by some employment lawyers last month after requiring about 1900 workers to sign new contracts agreeing to the new way of working or leave the company.
Vodafone NZ business manager Luke Longney said it was not following suit. ‘‘The squads from a contractual point of view are not all that different to project teams ... There aren’t any changes from a contractual standpoint for staff.’’
Nor was it laying off employees, he said. ‘‘This is about setting ourselves up to deliver better experiences with new technology. It is not timed or lined up with needing less people in the organisation in order to do that.’’
For Spark, the switch to Agile coincided with a restructure that saw an as-yet undisclosed number of workers – believed to be in the region of 200 – take or get offered redundancy.
Longney said Vodafone employed a little under 3000 people, of whom about 150 had been organised into Agile teams.
He forecast that over time that number could grow to about 500.
The company said its goal in adopting Agile was to respond faster to customer feedback and to cut the time it took to bring new products and services to market. Those objectives are similar to Spark’s.
Longney said Agile would create an ‘‘empowered and autonomous’’ workforce by pulling together product, marketing and technical staff into ‘‘cross-functional’’ teams who would take tasks right through from an idea to implementation.
It was thanks to Agile that Vodafone NZ had been able to create a ‘‘chatbot’’ for its contact centre within two weeks that helped resolve customers’ queries about roaming services, he said.
But he doubted Agile would become the dominant way of working for most people within the company.
IBM has been contracted by Vodafone to help with the implementation. London-based IBM Agile expert Matt Candy said it unleashed people’s creative energy.
‘‘It is more of a philosophy. You are empowering teams to work across boundaries and silos. Probably one of the biggest strategic imperatives that most encumbent organisations have is how to change culture and ways of working.’’
But Candy did not believe some of the larger projects that had tied up Vodafone for years, such as integrating the billing system it inherited during its 2012 acquisition of TelstraClear, would necessarily have been faster with Agile.
More traditional, ‘‘waterfall’’ ways of working were still right for those types of projects, he said.