Agile project management extended to all of GEALAN

This can be seen in the visit of the Minister of State for Digital Affairs to the headquarters of GEALAN Fenstersysteme GmbH, as well as in the press reports about the intensive collaboration with Einstein 1, the digital start-up centre of the Hof University of Applied Sciences. Now GEALAN is taking the next milestone.

The agile project management - the dynamic-flexible way of working with only an absolutely necessary amount of bureaucracy. Because nothing hurts a company that has to survive in the conflicting areas of digitalisation and lack of skilled workers more than an opaque mixture of too many individual projects. Change management methods are the order of the day to get the digital transformation through to every department of the window profile manufacturer, which employs over 1400 people. Translated: Modern digital processes have to get into the minds of employees and managers.

A so-called agile mindset must be established. For this purpose, after further training of GEALAN employees from all departments and a pilot phase, working groups meet regularly. Conflicts of interest can arise in the customer-team-employee triangle. If the team is under too much project and time pressure, the cooperation and ultimately the quality of the results will suffer. If solutions are fine-tuned and no attention is paid to marketability, this can endanger the business. In the long run, dissatisfaction follows when personal interests have to take a back seat to team interests.

This is exactly where modern planning strategies, working time regulations and developments from the software sector in the form of apps come in to enable flexible working. The organiser of the working groups Thomas Weinhold: "The most important question for us, as the reactions from the participants have confirmed, is how agile can GEALAN be in practice? At the end of the day, a light work environment without a lot of paperwork cannot be established in a company overnight. It must be lived. "Our colleagues take it as a great relief that the rapid digitalisation not only brings innovations in production or structural expansions, but above all introduces people to a dynamic and progressive way of working," says Thomas Weinhold.