Christian Glück
Christian is a father of three kids with a passion for software development, geeky/techy stuff, personal as well as team collaboration and development and lean thinking.
He is part of the ERNI team since November 2017 as Principal Consultant and Service Leader “Agile Transformation and DevOps”. His professional career started off as Software Developer with various programming languages with scope ranging from measurement equipment to standalone internal development tools, joining the first Scrum Team. Later he changed to Project Management, leading software as well as interdisciplinary teams and transforming them into Scrum teams. Based on those experiences he changed to the role of an Agile Coach, supporting teams as well as organizations.
Tanja Neuenschwander
Tanja, being with ERNI since September 2018 as Professional Consultant is an eternal optimist who finds happiness in the little things. She is passionate about helping people and businesses grow and achieve their goals.
She started her career with an apprenticeship in software engineering. After this, Tanja focused on test automation and test management for a while to broaden her horizons.
Having finished her bachelor’s degree in computer science she was looking for a new challenge and joined ERNI in 2018. Since then she has had multiple mandates in various roles like test manager, business analyst and product owner.
In her leisure time, she loves to watch a movie or tv show from her ever-growing collection.
Joffrey Zehnder
Joffrey joined ERNI in May 9 years ago. He started his career as a security and network consultant, then went on to systems engineering and finally became a developer again.
Since being with ERNI, he worked as Requirements Engineer and Requirements Manager in Pharma projects, Business Analyst and Agile Coach in government projects and right now as PO at a large telecommunications provider. Joffrey is always eager to learn something new and to pass his knowledge on to others. He likes to read a good book, ride single trails in the forest and work with his hands as a balance to his head-heavy work.
What expertise do you have in regard to agile?
Tanja:
I’ve worked in agile teams for about 7 years, in various roles. At first as a developer, then I moved on to testing and business analysis. Currently, I’m the product owner of a scrum team.
Christian:
I also started as a developer in a scrum team approximately 7 years ago. During that time, I got my scrum master certification. Then I worked as a scrum master of several teams and held a short-time PO role. Furthermore, I helped to roll out SAFe® (Scaled Agile Framework) at an enterprise and got my first SAFe® certification. Later on, I became a certified SAFe® Program Consultant. Now I work as an agile coach on the enterprise level.
Joffrey:
My first mandate at ERNI was a customer’s team transitioning from waterfall to agile. This was 9 years ago. Since then I worked as a scrum master and currently as product owner. I’m a trainer and give trainings together with Christian. I have multiple certificates to prove my knowledge and a track record of introducing Scrum and SAFe® at various companies.
What do you think is the best about agile?
Tanja:
For me, it’s implementing a continuous learning cycle. Like that, the team’s agility evolves over time.
Christian:
The collaborative approach, where everyone works towards a common goal.
Joffrey:
The ability to react to changing circumstances of the project or the company. Always having the business and the end customer in mind. And that testing, development, requirements, business, security and operations are all working together and not just on their own.
Why should a company become agile or adopt scrum?
Joffrey:
Because otherwise they will go out of business, sooner or later.
Tanja:
There are several reasons. I think the primary one is the reduced time to market. Because you develop in shorter cycles, you can deliver a product faster – or fail faster. Always with the goal of meeting your customers current needs.
Joffrey:
That summarizes why they’d go out of business otherwise. And for me it’s not fail faster but actually learn faster. The focus makes the difference.
Christian:
You bring all departments together and work towards a given common goal, which provides value to the customer, and also to the company itself.
Can you think of any reasons why a company shouldn’t become agile or adopt scrum?
Christian:
If they only use it as a buzzword.
Tanja:
Also, if they only do it in IT, it doesn’t make much of a difference. It might help them to develop more quickly, but it won’t help to reach the company’s goal.
So, it’s basically, do it correctly or just leave it?
Joffrey:
You can’t do it correctly from the very beginning on. You start and then continuously improve. While doing so, you learn more about how it really works – in general and for your company. With SAFe® we have a blueprint, yet this blueprint needs to be adapted to your company and culture. If you don’t do that, you have your old organisation with new job titles, yet nothing has changed. Like that, it’s not worth it.
