Culture eats Agile for Breakfast: BMW Case Study

The Case Study: May to December 2019 we worked with the BMW Retail Sales team to build the first end to end Online sales website for BMW globally. 75 people and 9 teams delivered across 3 countries, a website that went live in January 2020 - where a customer can buy, trade in and book a test drive without leaving their lounge. Why did they approach us? There was a clear deadline and a lot of global visibility for this initiative but the team had not been able to get traction, or really get started for 4 months. This experience taught us that a successful Agile transformation is simply about 3 steps...
1. Business & IT leadership in it together
2. The Value stream that put the customer first
3. A Culture that embraces collaboration

The Agile coaching team started by engaging the IT and Business leaders to ensure their joint support for the new approach and what it meant - we had this but it was difficult to change entrenched BMW behavior in the teams, it took time. We then had the Value Stream discussion where we mapped teams to customer value, this was rejected in favour of alignment to budgets and BMW departmental structures...it really slowed things down but perhaps this was a necessary compromise. Finally it was about bringing together permanent BMW employees, from Germany, with passionate long term IT consultants and offshore IP Advisors to jointly build this system. We had to get rid of the blame game and all accept we were in the same boat, even when it was sinking. This required a huge shift in BMW's culture, which is build around hierarchy, competition and individual success.

I will discuss the journey, the successes, failures and the ultimate outcome and if it is sustainable if the culture doesn't shift. I have a video of the BMW team PI planning (2 mins) which I would like to show to see the shift in collaboration.