Tamás Lakner

Shortly after my arrival, a project to revamp our flagship IT remote support application to transfer its capabilities to a new and lightweight technology stack and to add further features started. We had to carefully and gradually redistribute engineering because legacy support could not be compromised. I combined a manager-driven approach with self-organizing techniques to establish teams that would progressively make the shift and, at the same time, establish a desirable work culture around the new product. We ended up with unconventional team sizes and cutting-edge data-driven processes that I paired with new ways of working together. The result was an agile department adapting to findings on a daily basis.

As part of the transformation process, I selected employees to be retrained into coaches. Furthermore, I trained this group of 35+ coaches and mentored, coached, and managed eight direct reports. With this group, we realized three waves of transformation, each with around 1,000-1,500 employees. We established an agile mode of operation across all departments, including IT, marketing, finance, and HR.

In collaboration with a local online course platform, I created a course aimed at agile professionals to further improve their skills in many aspects of agile coaching. Topics involved agility foundations, team-level frameworks, scaled frameworks, technical, business, and product skills, and soft skills such as facilitation, teaching, coaching, and mentoring. This course has received excellent feedback among other courses running on the platform.