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Dominic van Ewijk: “The benefits for us lie in team improvement”

Large organisations that get bogged down and stagnate. Teams that keep repeating the same mistakes and don’t make any progress. As scrum master, Dominic van Ewijk hates those situations. At a small Wholesale bank he coaches around a third of the 100 IT employees. “I’m an agile coach with an orange drive. I want to improve teams.”

So that’s what Dominic uses the Management Drives software for almost exclusively: team training and team composition. “Once a fortnight we have team improvement sessions, and I always have the team profile ready to hand. I use the input from the MD App to realise behavioural improvements, so we can help each other to continue getting better.” It is particularly helpful to him that he can illustrate the often rather abstract reality with concrete examples. “I’ll mostly use the team profiles, because they allow you to articulate the pitfalls for the team as well. That way you can give examples too, and you can see exactly where you go wrong and how you can improve things.”

”In practical situations the MD App simply makes things easier, I can compare things much more quickly.” 

When asked, Dominic is happy to give an example. “For example, we are quite a blue organisation. If you want to be negative you would call it bureaucratic, because we’re quite into rules. Within the team it’s the yellow that dominates. They are the thinkers and the analysts. The red, the decisiveness and the decision-making, is what’s missing. So when the discussions start going on too long, without resulting in any tangible actions, he intervenes. “I’ll tell them: remember your profile, this is exactly what I’m seeing right now. Those are the kinds of things the MD App is helpful for, as a mnemonic.” The teams are aware of their profile and have had the opportunity to work with their individual profiles and team profiles for a whole day, in a team session conducted by Management Drives.

Dominic rarely uses the Management Drives binders, with all the profiles and theory, any more. “The MD App simply makes things easier in practice, that binder tends to be a bit of a hassle. In the app I can compare things a lot more quickly.” Keeping agile working practices and the scrum framework in mind, Dominic, as a team coach, only uses Management Drives to help teams to progress, not to compose them. “In theory I can do that, and maybe we will use that function in specific cases in the future. But at the moment the benefits for us lie in team improvement. The fact that I can tell a team: this applies specifically to us, this is an area where we can improve.”