Claudio tell us your professional story:
I have a degree in mechanical engineering, and during college I became interested in Structural Calculation. Out of curiosity I approached Fortran and FEM (Finite Element Modeling) numerical modeling by going so far as to create an entire calculation code by joining various components taken here and there and giving them consistency. For consistency I am going to work for a company, Meccanica Padana Monteverde of Padua, which makes power transmissions for streetcars, off-road vehicles and boats, including racing transmissions. After a couple of years I find that doing calculations all day long bores me by being a repetitive, uncreative process. I wanted more.
I change companies and go to Breton as a designer and from the use of the drafting machine I move to the first workstations to design with CAD and 2D; after a short time I feel that even this job is narrowing me down and I return to the first company that had meanwhile become part of the multinational ZF group with more than 30,000 employees (now it has more than 60,000) specializing in transmissions and gearboxes for various types of vehicles. Initially, they assign me the testing part with the possibility of designing an entire testing department, and soon after, because of the company’s need to give new impetus to product development, at the age of 30, they promote me to Technical Manager of all product development. I find myself managing more senior resources than myself as well as my fellow students, and in 93-94 I get involved in a mega project, futuristic for those times, of Lean Transition. Here I then approach Project Management Waterfall, also enrolling in PMI; I start using Project Scheduler 6 on Mac but without finding the hoped-for benefit. This will be a stimulus in my subsequent goals.
After a few years looking for challenges in complexity, I moved to a company, the Bertolaso Group, that deals with bottling plants leading a team of 50 people. After a short time there is a schism of the two families owning the company, and I find myself managing all the technical part of the company (design, production, information systems) and 250 people.
Things are going well and the trust gained gives me a way to overcome the technological limitations encountered, guiding the company toward the purchase of a web-based PLM system (for product lifecycle management, ed.), a web-based Project Management system always waterfall but with access to all resources, an innovative solution for a company of significant size but still born in the province of Verona. After a few years, as at the end of all magical moments, I realize with the arrival of the young levers of the titular family that it is time to let go, having centralized too much power, too many people and activities on me.
I move to Bologna to a company in the large industrial group, Maccaferri. Here, too, I notice resistance in the use of web-based software that I had brought from previous experience, although I expected a different approach from the people of Bologna. After a short time I find myself involved in a management upheaval and being in the wrong string at age 45 I find myself cut off from the group. I open my VAT number and join Bonfiglioli Consulting, specializing in Lean consulting, galvanized by the positive experience for its use in manufacturing production efficiency.
Actually after a while I find that Lean does not work well in product development. Regret, however, leads me to document myself, read project management books and, around 2007 I am thunderstruck by reading Henrik Kniberg’s book “Scrum and XP from the Trenches” which brings me closer to Agile. I start proposing the use of Scrum Board in a major, fully Lean company, and the owner and the team like it so much that after two years of intensive use of post it, also due to lack of support surfaces after wallpapering all the walls of the technical office, they ask me if there is a software to do this. Obviously not in 2008, so I write the solution specification myself, contact Java developers and finance it, reselling it to the requesting company and providing it free of charge to Bonfiglioli’s Agile Product Development consulting clients. Just as a consultant I come into contact with Breton (Brevetti Toncelli), and after two months, partly due to the passing away of the previous Technical Director in a tragic accident, I am hired in this position. It’s 2010 and I’m still here.
How were you able to introduce Agile into a traditionalist-led company?
The company is led by the founder’s two sons, and the one serving as president is passionate about product development and has a liberal, visionary nature. The company is devoted to innovation and has filed several patents, many of them due to the push of his family and himself. This is precisely why he asks me for a long-term strategy to ensure this innovative continuity over time even after his future exit from the company, and after six months, I come back to him with a conceptual map and a model aimed at balancing the two tensions of an enterprise: Exploitation (i.e., typically Toyota-inspired Lean production efficiency) and Exploration, i.e., the need to innovate in complexity (Apple-inspired); Fundamental condition to allow evolution and do innovation well is to get out of the patriarchal conception (symptomatic as the owner is called, “the owner”) and allow all good ideas to prevail even on the company line, regardless of the initiator. Thus accepting people’s mistakes, taking a risk that will lead to a competitive advantage by having to sift through a multitude of ideas from different people instead of a narrow oligarchy.
Tell us how processes have changed by resolving the Lean vs. Agile dichotomy.
The company was innovating the product but not so much the processes. I thus convince entrepreneurs to introduce a Lean consultant while I bring in Giulio Roggero who was developing industrial software in Agile mode for Siemens. I take over the workflow governed by my planning software developed during my consulting years and we start using a hybrid system aimed at optimizing production time through intensive use of Lean and innovating the product through Agile Scrum.
It was precisely this last tension that allowed us to improve the design by developing, in collaboration with Marketing, Portfolio management, another great passion of mine. I make a premise: in hardware there are constraints that cannot be easily broken down. MRP, which is the system for managing construction based on component lead time, cannot be altered. If you don’t have component x in the assembly pad at the right time, the process implodes. Therefore, since we could not work on production with iterative cycles resulting from small-scale planning, we worked upstream, reducing the cost of the accumulated delay in product design.
Breton when she has a new idea she wants to put it on the market right away, so when she met a customer to sell that product she would develop it. In a short time he was also selling it to others but actually making it extremely costly to set up because improvements had to be made often and continuous changes in production. My idea was to turn the concept upside down, that is, to make a few products, reconciling customer and production needs, but in speed. We went in two directions for this: in order to speed up the design process, it was essential to use important funds from the MISE (Ministry of Economic Development) to undertake a digital transformation of the technical department with the main purpose of effectively and quickly creating new products. We have reduced development time thanks to the many digital twins introduced and the 3D software simulation sw-this phase is comparable to software prototyping even though we are talking about industrial machines-with demos ready every 15 days and allowing us to quickly get 1 or more prototypes into the market while reducing the cost to do so. All this in addition to the use of additve manufacturing to reduce construction time when necessary. Of course, we have added new figures assigned to design by integrating them into the existing team, see Figure 3.
To ensure that new products are designed iteratively, following a positive exchange of feedback, the Group Heads-who oversee the work of the individual production lines-have been paired with the best design experts and skills: we have chosen the most market-aware and courageous people, making them into true POs. These, working with Marketing, have their finger on the pulse of what the market and customers want and can guide design accordingly, bringing out exactly what the market is asking for; hierarchically they are not the leaders of the teams, but they inspire their work. The ability for these people to be in constant tension to find the innovative solution was also accelerated by the User Stories Mapping techniques and the management through my SW of different Boards, with hybrid cycles of linear and iterative development, all connected to each other according to different design groups.
Group leaders (domain leader), who used to do both (i.e., create specifications and direct production), are elevated to Stakeholders and mentor teams for their areas of expertise, sitting in the grandstand in recurring demos that are presented every 15 days. They are responsible for accepting or rejecting the product and the resulting technical debt. In case of acceptance this is put into production.
What business results has this important procedural change achieved?
The establishment of sales engineering with important functions to support sales, what in IT is the area of Pre Sales. No successful Software sells itself, how would it have been possible to do so with such complex systems? In Breton this has been a real revolution: with the same number of salespeople, with the introduction of sales engineering, within four years we double the turnover, in some business lines it has even been tripled. The offerings come out at a rapid pace: to do this we try to rationalize the standard product catalog, which unfortunately is not as meager as Apple’s) and develop some of the options only when a customer order comes in. Questo per me è l’esatto compromesso delle due tensioni, Exploitation (quindi affidabilità e velocità nella produzione) ed Exploration ovvero lo sforzo costante nell’innovare i prodotti senza sovraccaricarsi di costi e ritardi onerosi. To do this, however, it was necessary to change the set-up of the team; using a metaphor, it is like in MotoGP: if you have everything under control you are going slow. Group leaders because of the reputation they have earned over the years are less willing to take risks and in fact may hold back the exploration part, which instead, entrusted to young design jazzies, has been able to achieve results unthinkable under the old set-up.
Agile is thus allowing the knowledge gained to be consolidated and pushed further, even in a difficult and constraining environment as the northeastern province and not the California silicon valley may be
How has the team and its vision changed?
This transition was not painless, especially for senior planners and Group Leaders who regretted the loss of hierarchical role; in this the support of the Scrum Masters was crucial, first and foremost Daniela Rinaldi who now works in Vimar and who, as a consultant, played this role for a number of years making possible the adoption of the right mindset and thus the understanding of a new corporate role (later covered by Giovanni Melis, after a good 4 years of running in the new set-up). They have also learned to take risks and handle error in order to evolve. I find the comparison contrasting the managerial view of product development – seen as a Formula 1 race – where you can optimize all the times but on known and already beaten paths, much more explanatory than a Paris Dakar, where you need to cope with major contingencies, be ready for change and be flexible by focusing on effectiveness to survive the market. Agile also allows self-organization; everyone can prove his or her worth at each Sprint and be focused on the goal. So we look for, in addition to daring, people not necessarily with vertical product expertise so that we can find original and disruptive solutions when diversity is properly channeled.
In the future where do you think Agile will take you?
Last year, in an important step on this journey, we created a new machine tool that started in July 2018 and was fully developed in agile mode even in the construction stages. We physically started machining parts on that machine tool less than a year later: while we were still designing we were doing the machining trials (which are the most severe ones), and it was unveiled at the 2019 Hanover Fair going so far as to sell six machines with final drawings, with an unparalleled speed of delivery. In the future, we will begin to develop and assemble these machines in a dedicated hall (somewhat evocatively we called it the Factory in the Factory) by building departmental offices close to production to bring designers closer to the beating heart of what is being developed. The goal is to create high-speed new machines with an Agile model industrial producing all the documentation to actually allow mass production. I also see potential in High performance Team logics if extended into other departments such as Marketing and Sales. But there is still a long way to Dakar.
