SoftEd: New Ways of Working for Digital Success

For organizations operating in any industry, be it health services, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, or banking, software has become an integral part of the way they do business. But digital success requires a digital culture that is underpinned by strong leadership, collaborative practices, and a culture of learning. Helping their customers to fulfil these requirements is SoftEd. With over two and a half decades of experience—fifteen of those supporting organizations in adopting agile practices, the company creates a framework for success that is focused on building adaptive leadership capability and high performing teams.

"We change the way business is done by working with customers to help them to be more adaptive, responsive, and efficient. This includes adopting and embedding the principles and practices of agility, creating an agile culture, and supporting our customers to become a learning-centric organization," says Martyn Jones, Managing Director of SoftEd.

For agility to be ingrained in an organization, a change in culture needs to occur from top to bottom, cascading through all levels of the business. "Our approach centers on building agility at all levels of an organization," remarks Jones. SoftEd recognizes that active executive sponsorship is imperative to sustain organizational change efforts. Hence, the company offers a range of services to support executives, helping them understand and drive the change processes efficiently. Once the executive support is in place, the company works at a team level by providing training and mentoring that assists them in building their capability. As teams may struggle at the outset following training, SoftEd provides team level coaching by deploying and training internal coaches. This accelerates both the learning and the time to delivery.

In addition to team training, SoftEd also provides individual training in agile, business agility, adaptive leadership, project management, business analysis, design and architecture, and more.

Upholding their customers’ primary agility goals of improving customer satisfaction, speed to market and reducing cost and inefficiency, SoftEd uses an adaptive ‘meet you where you’re at’ approach. Appraising the customer organization's context, level of complexity, and level of market disruption, SoftEd designs customized solutions combining its experience with the customer's organizational knowledge.

SoftEd focuses on self-sufficiency, advocating an internally-led approach to transformation whereby it partners with customers to grow their capability. Their delivery encompasses executive training and consulting, agile leadership development, agile coaching, and team training and coaching. "We do this because we believe that the talent of the customer organization should be their competitive advantage," states Jones.

As an example, SoftEd helps businesses harness a culture of coaching to improve communication, collaboration, alignment of strategy, and overall performance. With the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile), they have developed a mentoring programme that includes training, goal-setting, and on-the-job practice to build coaching competency and produce ICAgile certified agile coaching experts.

SoftEd has worked with a number of organisations across a diverse range of industries to transform their operations. They successfully supported Suncorp, one of Australia's largest banks on their agile transformation journey. Using an integrated approach covering the whole agile spectrum, SoftEd has provided agile programs for over 3,000 employees of Suncorp and they continue to support them through Suncorp’s Agile Academy and through Business Agility and Adaptive Leadership programs.

Today, Suncorp has a reduced costs and inefficiencies, improved speed to market, and has a clear focus on customer value. What began as a change program to improve the way the IT team delivered value has gathered such momentum that Suncorp has applied it more broadly across the organisation.

“Our aim is to see all the groups such as information technology, people and culture, marketing, finance, procurement, and customer service benefit from an agile approach and cultural mindset,” concludes Jones.