PZU
Andrzej Łach
Andrzej Łach – currently business manager of the Everest project as well as back-office manager, seven years with PZU SA.
Previously worked at Aviva Group, where he was an IT manager responsible for Aviva Direct green-field go-live. He has also thirteen years’ experience in consulting, where he was involved in business process and IT architecture transformation in insurance and banking.
Having worked for 15+ years on successful water-fall implementations, he’s now in agile world for 4+ years already. Still deeply impressed by the potential in people that agile drives as well as the results obtained, in all aspects – “hard” (scope, time frame, quality, budget) and “soft” (creativity, satisfaction, engagement) – he no longer wants to go back to water-fall reality.
Taming the Moloch
Molochs have their beauties – well-known brands, wide product portfolios, huge customer base and, last but not least, … big budgets. And Molochs have their dark sides – bureaucracy, risk avoidance, slow decision process and matrix org structures with inherent tension between managers.
Based on experience from Everest project and still undergoing transformation of a “Moloch”, I will address some challenges:
• How to manage different needs and priorities of managers that sell and service the same product through different channels (e.g. just for retail customer products portfolio - we have three managers for three physical sales channels and branch network manager, and call center manager, and direct sales manager, and … some more)?
• How to manage internal competition between different divisions, different CxOs, different managers that want to change common IT systems (e.g. retail vs corporate vs bancassurance)?
• What process and practices help to define and prioritize common backlog for dozens of managers?
• Who is a product owner in such an organizational model – what responsibilities it has, what are his/her main challenges? what is his/her relation with the organization/ the software house/ the scrum teams?