Anna’s daily work routine is relaxed. She works for an international automotive supplier in production management. Her team plans and controls the production of a product line in 10 mainly automated plants in Europe, America and China as well as the 5 plants in ASEAN and India, which still have a lot of personnel and manual activities.

Jan, on the other hand, works as Change Manager for a medium-sized pump manufacturer and coordinates the worldwide corporate development of the group of companies set up as a “Worldwide One Team”.

While Anna goes down to the bathing area and enjoys her morning swim, Jan sits down at his desk in his home office and turns on his computer. The sun is already shining over the roof terrace into the apartment. Jan has used his smartphone app to pull out the bright awning and move the blinds of the shading system in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the apartment into a position that is comfortable for him. So he now has a cooling shade at his workplace.

His first glance after booting up the computer goes to his MyToDo board, which he always keeps open on one of his two screens. What’s up with him today? He sorts his task cards, re-prioritizes some things, and makes a digital note for each digital card on his personal board. What he intends to do today.
Next, he scrolls through his team’s activity stream and looks to see which of his colleagues has done the next step and contributed to the solution of the respective task. Then he quickly scrolls through the chat messages. Here he finds short messages about the task cards that in the opinion of his colleagues require his special attention.

Nowadays work is on cards and these are clearly displayed on boards. Collaboration has changed completely. Unlike 10 years ago, where all information were always exchanged between people as a principle since prehistoric times. Jan sometimes received more than 300 emails per day with hundreds of pieces of information, which he had to dig through. Fortunately, that is history. Today, communication is only about topics. Digital platform technology makes it possible.

Jan used to have to drive to his office at the Obertshausen plant near Frankfurt Main every morning and first coordinate his work with his boss. Then he would work his way through the mountain of emails and try to extract all the information relevant to his work. He wrote important things for him in his little black notebooks, from which he could always cross out what he had done, which gave him a good feeling of having done a lot during the day when everything was somehow crossed out in the evening.
Over the years, dozens of these handwritten scribble books have accumulated.
Most of his working day consisted of meetings with other colleagues, middle managers like him to discuss various topics. The purpose of these meetings was to supplement his collection of information on his important tasks in his small notebook. Ultimately, it was about knowing to whom he had to pass on or convey which information so that something in the company could move forward.

His work consisted of managing projects somewhere in the world to optimise business processes at his breadwinner’s sites, introduce new IT systems, build new plants in new countries, relocate and ramp up production, build new sales teams and acquire new customers. Globalisation turned the German medium-sized company into a worldwide operating group of companies. In the past, his company used to be rather casual, but today, well organised and fully digitalised, his company is the worldwide market leader in its niche. However, 10 years ago, this was quite different. The competitors were not sleeping even then. The competitive pressure triggered by globalization was enormous, prices under considerable pressure, his company was not really experienced in internationalization and not efficient. The topic of company development was rather left to the local managers in the national companies, which led to a very diverse structure in the company.

At some point, his bosses also noticed that the competitors were more innovative. Their products had better features, they inspired the customers more. In addition, they were significantly faster on the market with new products, sometimes one trade fair earlier. In other words, one year faster. That was probably the trigger for his company to think thoroughly about how to work together and this was called agile transformation back then.
Jan felt the biggest changes when his department was dissolved and everything was reorganised into teams. Since then, his team consists of 7 colleagues who are scattered around the world and work together exclusively remotely, i.e. via video conference and collaboration platform. The organisational form is called collaborative team organisation. Everything has been standardised. The many different IT systems at the various locations had to make way for a single SAP S/4 HANA system. This new real-time system was the entry into digitalisation & connectivity for his company group. Industry 4.0, full transparency across all company divisions worldwide and standardised business processes now allow everyone to work with everyone else worldwide. The database created by this type of collaboration now allows Big Data analysis and thus data-based decisions. Decentralised responsibility in a worldwide jointly developed framework and a worldwide “One Team Culture” have already been considerable progress.
Jan’s company has thus managed to catch up with the large IT groups in terms of efficiency and strategic orientation and has significantly improved its own position in the competition. Two-thirds of middle management was cut back at that time and for the most part, integrated into the teams. Whereas in the past they used to take on the managerial role of coordinating, synchronising, extinguishing fires, and driving things forward, today most of them work in teams and take cards with work and performing real tasks instead of dealing with information and positioning their departments in the hierarchical structure of the organisation.