Enagas CoP

Photo: Enagas CoP. Credit: Pexels

One of Enagás' key initiatives to advance in this direction is centered around the company's Agility Program, which, launched in 2018, seeks to maximize value delivery and foster a more innovative culture and way of working among professionals.  

With this premise in mind and with the aim of promoting this accelerator of change in a transversal way, Enagás asked Opinno to collaborate with them in launching the Agile Culture Community of Practice (Agile CoP), which has enabled Enagás professionals to work in a more agile and transversal way, promoting constant improvement. 

These initiatives are prioritized for their short-term impact on the company and are designed to provide solutions to the main challenges Enagás faces. 

"We started by defining, with Opinno, what agility means for Enagás and how agile our organization really is. From there, the management team began to reflect on the type of framework we should implement. We aim to instill these agile values and behaviors in the company and to be able to share and adopt different challenges and knowledge", says Lorena Diaz, director of the Agility Hub and manager of International Organization and People at Enagás. 

As a starting point, we established the role of facilitators, a true internal driver of change for Enagás, who, supported by Opinno and the company's Agility Hub, were responsible for dynamizing the Agile CoP, by identifying and solving challenges faced by the teams and management when adopting agile principles and new ways of working. 

Firstly, we aimed to create a sense of belonging and identity towards the adoption of Agile, by answering 2 key questions: What is and what is not Agile within Enagás, and What are the benefits of being agile? In this way, we encouraged them to identify initial proposals for improvement in order to achieve agility within their organizational units. 

In order to disseminate the Agile philosophy in a tangible, practical and transversal way, the facilitators, who were transversal to all of the company's organizational units, developed a 30-day plan. By adopting agile frameworks with incremental results in two-week sprints (improvement cycles), they identified a set of tangible initiatives that had a high impact on the results of 5 "agile challenges". 

The prioritized challenges are based on fostering effective meetings, focusing on adding value and process implementation, configuring value delivery mechanisms, promoting autonomous teams through delegation and decision-making initiatives, and fostering a feedback culture. 

In this way, we are currently obtaining benefits such as the teams' adoption of an agile mindset. This is enabling us to improve our value contribution to the client, increase team autonomy and empowerment in decision making, focus on results and have a positive impact on the attitude, motivation and collaboration of the teams, among others. 

"We are speaking of a process that is still ongoing. Our support will be continued for another month, but this community will stay active. Although Enagás already had an Agile Hub, this is the first time that a tool such as the CoP has been developed to activate an Agile culture within the company, guaranteeing its future sustainability", says Lucía López, Opinno's project manager. 

One key consideration is how to measure the shift to a more Agile mindset over time and whether the transformation is occurring homogeneously throughout the organization. For this purpose, metrics have been defined that will be assessed as the various initiatives are implemented.  

As for the results, so far, we have a total of 43 facilitators, 70% of whom are actively involved. When asked about their level of satisfaction, the facilitators gave an average positive response of 87% and 90% would recommend participating in the CoP.  

The CoP will continue to evolve as Enagás' business needs change. Its implementation has involved a lot of traction, coordination and follow-up; having the backing and support of management; and involving sponsors in implementing the prioritized challenges. The objective is for the CoP to evolve towards a stage of maturity and maintenance in which it will be oriented towards sharing the good practices learned and crystalizing the results achieved.  

At Opinno, we would be delighted to continue collaborating on any initiative which demonstrates that agility is going to be one of the essential business keys in an ever-changing environment for which there is no instruction manual.