My story at LEONI
Hello, I’m Alisa. After my master's degree in international business and initial professional experience, I joined LEONI in Kitzingen in April 2017.
My first assignment at LEONI was as Project Manager in Inhouse Consulting. In that role, I supported various optimization and efficiency projects, management initiatives and also restructuring projects. My duties included strategic planning, coordinating, and tracking of the implementation of measures as well as content-related work such as drafting a white book for LEONI plants and preparing analyses and management presentations.
The Agile Management and Coaching team was established in the wake of restructuring in 2021, and for me this offered the exciting opportunity to broaden my project management expertise to include agile project management. Our team has set itself the goal of being the nucleus for agility and new ways of working in product development and in the CTO unit. Three years after this was established, we can say with pride that we have a comprehensive repertoire of agile methods and tools. We have thereby successfully implemented numerous agile projects and OKR initiatives; we have coached far over one hundred colleagues in agile methods, and we have introduced new ways of working as well as an agile mindset in the CTO unit. We have meanwhile twice in succession been given the Agile.Award of the Employers’ Associations of the Metal and Electrical Industry in Bavaria (bayme/vbm) for our work.
This is my job
My task as Agile Management Consultant is to establish agile methods, tools, and knowledge in the CTO unit and to lastingly build up an agile mindset. In agile projects, I work as Scrum Master and coach the Scrum team on the methodology. Furthermore, I plan and run workshops on agile methods within the CTO unit, and I work in cross-departmental initiatives on new ways of working. I support management in strategic matters and take on the management of project improvement initiatives.
What excites me about this? It is that our team gets the opportunity to establish new and modern ways of working in the CTO unit, and that we can thereby also change our mindset over the long term. The cornerstones in this respect are collaboration, transparency, openness to change and focus on what matters.
My daily routine
Start of the day
My working day starts as soon as I have dropped my children off at kindergarten. On days with many in-person meetings, I then head straight for the office. When there are fewer meetings in the schedule or the meetings are to take place mainly online, I take advantage of the option to work from home because this gives me more flexibility in everyday family life.
The first thing I do in the morning is check my calendar for the meetings coming up during the day. Our team works according to a scrum framework. This means that, in each sprint, we have such fixed meetings as dailies, sprint reviews and the retrospective. To organize our tasks, we use such state-of-the-art tools as Jira and MS Teams Workspace. Here I check in the morning which tasks are to be completed next. Then I check my emails.
Morning
A typical morning is then usually filled with various project and coordination meetings:
I participate in the scrum meetings of my agile projects in my role as Scrum Master. Thereafter, again as Scrum Master, I chair a retrospective on the MIRO Board, which means as a scrum team reflecting on and evaluating the collaboration, project workflows and tools used in the last sprint and extrapolating measures that we intend to apply in the next sprint.
What went well? What can we improve? What new ideas are there?
I subsequently meet with my team to plan the next management workshop in one of our Collaboration Rooms. Which agile method from our toolbox is best suited for the subject? How do we go about eliciting creative solutions from management?
Then there is still a check-in meeting with Product Management during which we discuss the results of the Continuous Improvement Initiative that I support.
Between these meetings, I like to use the time for planning work, preparing coaching sessions and sharing information with colleagues.
Lunch
Before our lunch break, I join my team for our Daily Meeting. On our Kanban Board we can see at a glance the extent to which the individual tasks have been completed and we briefly discuss what we will tackle before the next Daily.
As I work part-time, my working day usually ends shortly after 2 p.m. and I therefore of course like to use my time in the office as efficiently as possible. However, I still regularly take the time to visit the canteen for a Team Lunch or a Connecting Lunch to get to know more colleagues from other departments. After work I head straight for the kindergarten to pick up my children.
My highlights
My highlights at LEONI are the various management events in which I was able to participate as workshop moderator. I always found it very exciting to organize and run these workshops because they cover important matters and, by having set them up, I was also able to support their follow-up. I am especially pleased to see that our CTO management is convinced by agile methods and that our approach is so well received.
My view of LEONI as an employer
Thanks to flextime combined with the option of working from home, I have the flexibility I need at LEONI to reconcile my work and our everyday family life. I simultaneously work part-time on exciting projects and subjects. The ability to reconcile career and family is therefore absolutely given for me at LEONI!
We also have a great team; open, relaxed and simultaneously very self-organized and result-oriented. We give ourselves direct feedback and help each other. Communication within the team is also outstanding because, thanks to the regular Dailies and the tools used, all team members are always up to speed on where things stand.
LEONI in three words? Goal-oriented, agile, and collaborative.
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