Agile in non-information technology
companies: a KONE case study with
distributed teams

Daniele Fabiola Matsumoto da Silva

International Business Management 2021
Daniele Fabiola Matsumoto da Silva

MASTER'S THESIS
ArcadaDegree Programme:
Identification number:
Author:Title:

Supervisor (Arcada):
Supervisor (KONE):
Commissioned by:International Business Management

Daniele Fabiola Matsumoto da Silva
Agile in non-information technology companies: a
KONE
case
study
with
distributed
teams
Kaj-Mikael Björk
Jia Silvennoinen
KONE

Abstract:
The Agile Mindset, principle, and frameworks have been gaining more popularity inindustries outside the IT world because of its methodologies that encourage companies to
put the customer in the center, experiment, and perform continuous improvement. Agile
was initially encouraged for co-located teams. However, this is not realistic when big
companies want to apply it across an entire organization. KONE is a Finnish market leader
in the People Flow® business who manufactures elevators, escalators, automated doors,and digital services to improve the urban movement, with more than 60,000 employees
globally. This study aimed to understand the practical learnings and benefits that KONE
had gained when teams started to experiment with Agile in distributed teams. This study
also highlights KONE's main challenges throughout this journey and somerecommendations for companies adopting Agile with a distributed setup. The research
provides some understanding of some of the popular Agile frameworks used in the market
and what configures a distributed team. Additionally, it provides some pillars of leadershipand culture as these are critical elements for when companies want to change theiroperating model, with some empirical evidence collected through interviews with nine
KONE employees. The results point that, though a company can benefit by applying only
some Agile tools and frameworks, the most relevant results and improvements come fromwhen corporations go beyond them by incorporating Agile culture, value, and mindset intheir daily lives. This shift requires dedication at all company levels, strong and trained
leaders who know and understand the Agile core principles, and courageous employees
who feel safe to experiment, fail, and learn while applying new ways of working.
Keywords:

Agile, Agile principles, distributed teams, virtual work,
remote teams, servant leadership, Scrum, Kanban, culture,
KONE

Number of pages:
Language:
Date of acceptance:

92
English2

CONTENTS
1

2

Introduction.......................................................................................................... 6
1.1

Background ................................................................................................................... 7

1.2

Motivation for the research ............................................................................................ 9

1.3

Research questions ..................................................................................................... 12

1.4

Structure of the thesis ................................................................................................. 13

Literature review: Agile and distributed teams................................................ 14
2.1
2.1.1

Agile principles and the Agile Manifesto .............................................................. 19

2.1.2

Agile methodologies and frameworks ................................................................. 21

2.1.2.1

Scrum .................................................................................................................. 21

2.1.2.2

Kanban ................................................................................................................ 22

2.1.2.3

Lean Thinking ...................................................................................................... 23

2.1.2.4

ScrumBan ............................................................................................................ 24

2.1.2.5

SAFe, Scalable Agile Framework ........................................................................ 25

2.1.2.6

The Spotify model................................................................................................ 26

2.2
2.2.1
2.3
2.3.1

3

4

The Agile concept, mindset, and values...................................................................... 17

Distributed teams......................................................................................................... 27
Why distributed teams? ....................................................................................... 30
The cultural aspects in Agile distributed teams ........................................................... 31
People’s culture and the working environment ................................................... 32

2.4

Leadership in an Agile distributed environment .......................................................... 34

2.5

Theoretical framework ................................................................................................. 36

Methodology ...................................................................................................... 38
3.1

Research Approach ..................................................................................................... 39

3.2

Data Collection ............................................................................................................ 40

3.3

Data Analysis ............................................................................................................... 45

Results ............................................................................................................... 48
4.1

A basic overview of the Agile distributed ways of working .......................................... 49

4.2

Benefits ........................................................................................................................ 53

4.2.1

Agile mindset and practices ................................................................................ 54

4.2.2

Distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams......................................................... 55

4.2.3

KONE culture and strategy .................................................................................. 56

4.3

Challenges ................................................................................................................... 58

4.3.1

Mindset and practices.......................................................................................... 58

4.3.2

Distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams......................................................... 60

3

4.3.3
4.4

Internal organization matters ............................................................................... 62
Recommendations....................................................................................................... 64

4.4.1

Agile mindset and practices ................................................................................ 65

4.4.2

Distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams......................................................... 67

4.4.3

Leadership ........................................................................................................... 69

4.4.4

Skillset ................................................................................................................. 72

5

Discussion ......................................................................................................... 73

6

Recommendations on further research and conclusion ................................ 77

7

References ......................................................................................................... 80

8

Appendices ........................................................................................................ 87
Appendix 1............................................................................................................................... 87
Appendix 2............................................................................................................................... 88

FiguresFigure 1. Graphs showing the global sales results in KONE from January to June of
2021. KONE Corporation,2021.............................................................................. 7
Figure 2. KPMG Global Agile Survey, 2019. ................................................................. 8
Figure 3. Google trends graphic with the “Agile” term interest search, worldwide, from2006 to 2021 ......................................................................................................... 9
Figure 4. Google trends graphic with the “Scrum” term in software development interest
search worldwide, from 2006 to 2021 ................................................................... 9
Figure 5. Graph with the Agile methodology used by the participants of the survey. 15th
State of Agile report. Digital.ai, 2021. .................................................................. 15
Figure 6. The Agile Onion. Adventures with Agile. Powers S., 2021. .......................... 16
Figure 7. Cynefin model. Snowden J. D., Boone E. M., 2007. ..................................... 18
Figure 8. Example of a Kanban board. Agile Alliance, 2021. ....................................... 25
Figure 9. SAFe business results, 2021. ...................................................................... 26
Figure 10. Agile at Scale model in Spotify, 2012 ......................................................... 26
Figure 11. Allen’s curve of communication from Managing the Flow of Technology,
1977 .................................................................................................................... 28
Figure 12. KONE headquarters building in Espoo, Finland. Across the parking lot, theIT department is located. News.Cision.com (2020) ............................................. 29
Figure 13. Top five challenges during an enterprise Agile transformation. McKinsey &Company, 2020. .................................................................................................. 32

4

Figure 14. Management skills for Agile Distributed teams. Rothman, J., Kilby M., 2019.
............................................................................................................................ 36
Figure 15. Agile distributed teams in non-IT companies. The Author, 2021................. 37
Figure 16. Categorization of the main themes covered during the interviews. The
Author, 2021. ...................................................................................................... 42
Figure 17. Experience in each area by year for each participant. The Author, 2021. ... 44
Figure 18. Visualization of the global representation of interviewees .......................... 45
Figure 19. Process of data analysis. The author, 2021. .............................................. 46
Figure 20. Countries with which the interviewees interact mostly. ............................... 53
Figure 21. Benefits word cloud Wordclouds.com. ....................................................... 57
Figure 22. Challenges word cloud. Wordclouds.com................................................... 64
Figure 23. Recommendations word cloud. Wordclouds.com. ...................................... 73
Figure 24. The most significant barriers in adopting Agile. Digital.ai.15th State of Agile
Report, 2021 ....................................................................................................... 74
Figure 25. Positive impacts in implementing Agile. Digital.ai.15th State of Agile Report.
2021 .................................................................................................................... 75

TablesTable 1. Summary list of interviewees by gender, nationality, work location, role, andindicating if the person is a leader or not. ............................................................ 43
Table 2. Summary of main themes found in this study with sub-themes. .................... 47
Table 3. Summary of the main themes found in this study with sub-themes. .............. 48
Table 4. Top five benefits. ........................................................................................... 53
Table 5. Top five challenges. ...................................................................................... 58
Table 6. Top five recommendations. ........................................................................... 65

5

1 INTRODUCTION
This study seeks to understand how the Agile mindset, principles, and methodologies canbetter support distributed teams working in KONE, a non-information technology
company, and if Agile can provide the aid the company needs to achieve its goals in aworld that is more competitive and fluid than ever. Additionally, this research aims tounderstand what are the practical experiences and recommendations obtained by adopting
an Agile mindset, principles, and methodologies inside some of the IT teams, more
specifically when the rest of the company culture is not aligned with the Agile ways ofworking. Finally, having distributed teams using Agile also requires companies to adapt
their organizational structure and ways of working, from how leaders behave tocollaboration tools, and this study will further discuss this.
Even though Agile could be applied in different fields (e.g., human resources, research,and development, business development), the author will mainly focus this thesis on
product and software development inside the IT area and its main collaborations withbusiness, marketing, and research and development departments, since this is where she
could observe the different experiences closer and acquire hands-on experience.
The researcher classifies KONE as a non-IT company because, although KONE has somebusiness initiatives in the software development area (e.g., DX class elevators and the24/7 Connected services), and an important part of the company belongs to the KTI team
(KONE Innovation & Technology), the core business of this Finnish enterprise is still inthe manufacturing and maintenance areas. As demonstrated below, in the Interim Reportof June 2021, the KONE focuses the vast majority of its attention on the new equipment,
modernization, and maintenance operations. The digital services sales are embedded into
these core services:6

Figure 1. Graphs showing the global sales results in KONE from January to June of 2021. KONE Corporation,2021.

1.1 Background
Agile methodologies are not something new in the Information Technology (commonly
known as IT) world, and its origins are possibly two. The first one is the article “The newnew product development game” (Takeuchi and Nonaka, 1986). In this study, although
the authors did not name the new process as “Agile,” they already formulated processes
and principles that are still the fundamentals of all Agile methodologies until today. The
authors already raised the challenges faced by software companies – but not only
restricted to the software development area since they mention other cases, including
examples from 3M, a company which is specialized in a wide range of physical products– to thrive with customers that are demanding corporations in being increasingly moreinnovative and respond fast to changes. Also, it is mentioned in this text how this
proposed new way of working could, quoting Takeuchi and Nonaka (1986 p.3), “act asan agent of change for the larger organization,” indicating that purely changing ways ofworking and labeling them with different names from the more traditional practices (e.g.,
the waterfall project management) would not be sufficient. The second possible beginningis the “Agile Manifesto” (Beck et al., 2001). The manifesto touches on the same issues
appointed by Takeuchi and Nonaka’s study. However, it was Ken Schwaber with Jeff
Sutherland along with other fifteen contributors who, in 2001, used for the first time theAgile name to officially describe the proposals of this new way of working with softwaredevelopment.

7

Since then, the Agile methodology and its different frameworks have gained space inareas outside of IT. For example, the “How Agile Principles Built Trillion Dollar
Companies” Forbes article (Denning, 2020) discusses if it is fair to affirm that the trilliondollar companies Amazon, Apple, Microsoft were built on the pillars of the Agile
principles. The text mentions seven points on why these companies are successful, andthe first one argues on the customer obsession which surrounds Agile principles and how
adopting Agile requires fundamental changes in different areas in a project and productdevelopment.
In 2019, KPMG conducted a Global Agile Survey where they listed all the frameworks
mentioned by the participants:

Figure 2. KPMG Global Agile Survey, 2019.

As seen above, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, LeSS are some of the most popular Agile
frameworks used by some companies, and they all propose great changes from how teammembers do meetings to organizational core values challenges, and one particular
proposed change which can be more outstanding is, because of its power to resonate inany department today: to deliver some type of value early and often to the customers
continuously and incrementally (Beck et al., 2001). This will be more covered in the
Literature Review part of this study. Moreover, some recent empirical studies (Rothman8and Kilby, 2019) have shown that more important than applying the Agile methodologies
and frameworks by the book, the companies and projects should learn and embrace its
principles and adapt the framework following the culture of the corporation, which canmake its adoption more challenging, and this also will be further covered in thiscomposition.
Finally, Agile has its ground rules built on face to face interactions (Beck et al., 2001), its
dynamics are highly impacted when the company or project setups have distributed teams,
and this is specifically relevant since 2020 when the entire world was impacted by theoutbreak of the new coronavirus1 and was forced to work remotely, regardless if thecompanies were ready for it or not.

1.2 Motivation for the research

Figure 3. Google trends graphic with the “Agile” term interest search, worldwide, from 2006 to 2021

Figure 4. Google trends graphic with the “Scrum” term in software development interest search worldwide, from 2006
to 2021

Business agility, improvements on product or project time to market, tech transformation,
digital disruption: these keywords are not new in the business world, and still companies
face immense challenges to keep themselves modern and ahead of their customer’s needs,
9especially when teams are located any and everywhere, still needing to collaborate toachieve a common goal.
In 2011, Forbes published a news article entitled: “Now every company is a software
company” (Kirkpatrick), where it is discussed that the era where it made sense to separate
traditional and technology industries was over, and companies that take excessive time inunderstanding this would have the risk of becoming obsolete.
I have worked my entire IT career (starting in 2007) in some format of distributed teams.
It started with my job located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and my role required me to interact
daily with co-workers from a big, multi-national company, mainly based in the UnitedStates, but also with colleagues in Argentina, Mexico, Slovakia, China. This didn’tchange for a while until I decided to move to Helsinki in 2016 and started working in
KONE, a Finnish company and market leader in the elevator and escalator industry.
Initially, in my new team, the majority of the members, more specifically software
engineers, were co-located in the same office room working from Espoo, Finland, until it
was decided on a corporate level that we should have more distributed ways of working
and we started having developers who are now located in India.
Parallelly with my change in personal and working lives, from my personal experience,
Agile started to become more popular outside the software development world, and even
before leaving Sao Paulo in 2015, in my previous workplace, we were going through a
massive Agile transformation. Inside KONE, my team was one of the early adopters ofusing the Agile mindset, principles, and methodologies. The main reason why this was
decided was that the project and some of its members did not want to continue to release
only twice per year (following what the common calendar year release was), as manythings could change in six months. We had a clear objective: continuously deliver features
to our users (maintenance salespeople) as early as possible, and Agile suited our needs. It
was not easy to start as an isolated project which was trying something different fromwhat was considered normal in KONE, as this raised and continues to raise manyquestions and concerns with colleagues that do not understand the values that the Agile
ways could bring. On the other hand, this initiative has also enlightened us in different
ways of working as a team (distributed or not) to follow the company’s demands inreinventing itself.
10

Lastly, as previously mentioned, this thesis is being written during the years 2020 and
2021, where the world faced a pandemic situation with the novel virus covid-19 (Sheikh
and Rabin, 2020), forcing many companies to accelerate their digital transformation since
many employees were suddenly forced to work remotely, in a global action to avoid thefast spread of the new disease. As highlighted by Brower (Forbes, 2020), an Agile mindset
can be the way to get through the covid crisis, and also when the new normal gets
established, as quoting the article, “it is especially valid because the world is no longer
based on individual work and the Agile mindset embraces teams. Our current conditions
require a calm response to complexity, and Agile empowers us to be our best in the faceof uncertain times.”
However, in the section of the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al., 2001) principles, it is said
that “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within adevelopment team is face-to-face conversation.” This led Agile teams to organicallycreate ways of working that were shaped for co-located teams. Notwithstanding, in thecovid era, sharing spaces with your colleagues was not only not recommended, but also
seen as a risk to everybody’s health2, and this encouraged relevant people in the area topromote Agile as the best alternative for this situation as well. For example, Jeff
Sutherland wrote an article in Scrum Inc. (2020), highlighting that “Agile distributed
teams can be as productive as collocated teams” if aspects of communication andcoordination are correctly taken care of. Furthermore, even though there is an increase in
the academic research on Agile with distributed teams, and techniques on how to
implement the methodology from a distance have been more extensively available, stilltechnological and empirical advances happen at a faster pace than this research canfollow.
In conclusion, this paper is the author’s way to share with a broader audience what she
had to learn by doing, with a package of materials, references, and cases that she wishedshe could have had access to when she started working more deeply with Agile distributed
teams.

11

1.3 Research questions
According to Gil (2002), a research project needs to start with a clear definition of theresearch problems and questions. Based on the author's experience and observation on
the adoption of Agile by big corporations, and how many difficulties were found by theauthor herself and her colleagues, it was defined that the objective of this research is topresent empirical evidence and share experiences, learnings, and recommendations onwhen Agile ways of working are adopted by teams working in a company that does nothave IT as their core business. The idea is to find answers for the research questions
located below, based on the understanding of the dynamics of the company as of now(distributed teams that mostly use traditional waterfall methodology with a legacy ofengineering-oriented mindset to develop and deploy projects and products), looking for
better ways of collaborating to achieve its business goals, and how they are starting to use
Agile for this.
Firstly, an overview of the Agile mindset and principles is covered with a synopsis of thethat are most relevant Agile frameworks in the market and for KONE. Next, it is needed
to understand what configures a distributed team, what its dynamics are, and why
companies like KONE have them. Thereafter, the study will cover some aspects ofleadership and multi-culture teams in an Agile distributed setup. Following this, throughthe perception of the selected group of KONE employees interviewed, an analysis of what
are the highlighted key recommended changes required for KONE in adopting Agile as
the new way of working, and if any benefits on its adoption can be perceived, taking theAgile mindset, principles, and methodologies as the main topics, but having the dynamics
of distributed teams, leadership, and cultural diversity as parallel pillars. Finally, the aim
is to identify constraints and opportunities in these areas.
The research questions are presented as the following:● What are the benefits and challenges of using Agile concepts with distributed
teams in KONE?
● What are the recommendations, from a practical point of view, of using the Agile
mindset, principles, and methodologies in KONE with distributed teams?
12Qualitative research, with semi-structured interviews, was the selected method for datacollection for this thesis. According to Gil (2008), interviews are the best method tocollect valuable data when a researcher is trying to understand aspects of social life andhuman behavior. This information can still be evaluated and quantified by measuring
patterns in answers, emphasis on affirmations, and the voice tone utilized during theinterview. Having semi-structured questions will enable the patterns to be collected,
organized, and analyzed since the set of initial questions are the same for all participants,
regardless of their job roles or teams. Additionally, as mentioned by Gil (2008), semistructured interviews can help the author to have less cause to favor one opinion or
another and can support interviewees to have more freedom to express their ideas.
The plan for the interview was to approach nine interviewees: five leaders in theorganization and four Agile doers, all KONE internal employees. All the leaders havedirect reports in the company. Both Agile leaders and doers have some level of experiencein working with Agile and distributed teams inside of KONE, and some have experiences
outside of the company. More details on how this selection was made and the criteria forthe people to be interviewed will be covered in Chapter 3.
In addition to the qualitative research, a considerable amount of data relevant for thisresearch was collected from scientific articles, other Master’s thesis on the fields coveredin this work, and business magazines that are respected in their areas. It is imperative toconsult adequate material to create the foundations of the literature framework.
Additionally, this helps to understand what has been already published and discussed
regarding the themes of Agile and distributed teams (Gil, 2008).

1.4 Structure of the thesis
The thesis was created having the following six main chapters:
Introduction: the first chapter opens the thesis, where the motivations and reasoning
behind the selection of this theme are presented from personal, academic, and work
perspectives. It is also mentioned that 2020 is the year where the world started to face apandemic situation with covid-19, which might have impacted not only this thesis but allof the ways of working approached in this research. Secondly, the research questions are13

presented with a brief overview of the methodology chosen. Finally, the chapter closes
with the thesis’s basic structure.
Key concepts, literature review, and theoretical framework: in the second chapter,
distributed teams and the Agile mindset, principles, and methodologies are covered indetail, with a focus to understand in both subchapters about some leadership and culture
aspects.
Methodology: the third chapter details the explanation of the methodology used, with thequalitative research as a foundation and semi-structured interviews with nine people. The
set of questions is also presented with a precise explanation of why they were selected.
Also, in this chapter, it is made clear the criteria for the selection of the peopleinterviewed.
Results: empirical data which was collected from the interviews is presented, showing
the pattern of the answers, which builds the foundation for the discussions in the next
chapter. Some quotations are used to summarize the idea of the patterns found. Thissection covers the summary of the results structured in benefits, challenges, andrecommendations.
Discussion: this chapter discusses whether the author could find answers to the researchquestions in the light of the theory presented earlier in the study and the business
implications of the findings
Limitations of this research and conclusion: this closes this work with a summary of
the main findings of this research. Additionally, flaws to this work and indications offurther research that can be done in the future are presented in this chapter.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW: AGILE AND DISTRIBUTED TEAMSFor the author to be able to start answering the questions asked in this research, theliterature review needs to be based on the understanding of two big parts. Firstly, what isAgile, and why companies, specifically the ones who do not have software development
as their core business, are using this methodology. It is needed to cover what the most
famous frameworks say about the ways of working, especially in the scaled format,
considering that KONE is a big company, and what recommended setups the teams
14

should have according to specialized books and articles on this theme. Scrum is going tobe the main focus, as it is the most popular Agile framework worldwide and in KONE.
The graph extracted below from the 15th State of Agile Report (Digital.ai, 2021) shows
the wide adoption of Scrum among the participants of the survey with 4 182 responses.

Figure 5. Graph with the Agile methodology used by the participants of the survey. 15th State of Agile report.
Digital.ai, 2021.

However, it is also relevant to explore some dimensions of Kanban and Lean since they
are often mixed and combined to leverage the best of the Agile possibilities. The
derivations of Agile for scaled teams, including Scrum at Scale, SAFe, ScrumBan, andthe Spotify model, are likewise pertinent as KONE needs to apply the models on its realityof 60,000 employees3 and these are the frameworks inspiring the Agile model being
currently created internally in KONE. Then, a subchapter dedicated to the Agile mindset
and principles is needed for two reasons. Firstly, the principles are the central connectionin the different Agile methodologies, all referring back to the Agile manifesto (Beck etal., 2001) and the “new new product development” (Takeuchi and Nonaka, 1986) article.
Secondly, there might be a certain level of misunderstanding among some of the Agile
practitioners, especially the ones who are starting the journey and beginning to getthemselves familiarized with the Agile concepts, in mixing Agile methodologies with the15mindset and principles. As highlighted by the article “ These are the Differences Between
Agile and Scrum, and How They Differ From Waterfall” (Scrum Alliance, 2021), as an
example, while Scrum is used mostly as a framework in teams who are developing
products and software, Agile is a wider concept which embraces not only teams but also
the leadership in all levels and the company culture values and operating models. The
figure below exemplifies this relationship. Known as the “Agile onion,” this image
illustrates how tools and practices, though relevant, have a smaller impact in comparison
to the mindset and principles. The latter also requires greater changes in companies if theywant to adopt Agile in comparison to the smaller circles.

Figure 6. The Agile Onion. Adventures with Agile. Powers S., 2021.

Secondly, what classifies distributed teams, and why do companies have them. Having
distributed teams spread throughout the world means that culture might play a key pointin the dynamics of the teams. Some literature regarding having teams with different
cultural backgrounds and what are the strengths and challenges of cultural diversity inteams inside companies is also relevant.

16

And, finally, what are the leadership skills required in a distributed Agile setup since
Agile proposes new ways of thinking, and this can require a differentiated set of skills forleaders when guiding multi-diverse teams which are not co-located.

2.1 The Agile concept, mindset, and values
As an umbrella term, Agile is often used to describe different methodologies, frameworks,
and an overall mindset. It is both a set of practices for managing projects while also thefoundation for a culture of experimentation and transparency in the dynamic and fastchanging world we live in (Denning, 2018).
As demonstrated earlier in this chapter, the outermost layer of the Agile Onion is themindset, which indicates in this graph that the mindset is the most important aspect of theAgile concept. It also demonstrates the difference between “being Agile” and “doing
Agile,” whereas being Agile touches intangible aspects from culture, trust, andphilosophical beliefs in the ways of working, doing Agile is demonstrated by tools andframeworks in tangible manners (Powers, 2021).
The Powers’ definition of the Agile mindset (Powers, 2021) divides this idea into threeparts:
The complexity belief: complex adaptive problems do not have predictable solutions.
The people belief: human beings are interdependent and, given the correct environment
where they have safety, respect, diversity, and inclusion, it is possible for them to thriveand self-organize their work since they trust each other and trust the organization they are
working for.
The proactive belief: proactivity is the way for continuous improvement.
To summarize the Agile mindset topic, as it was highlighted by Atlassian (2021), “ Theoriginal Agile Manifesto didn't prescribe two-week iterations or an ideal team size. It
simply laid out a set of core values that put people first”.
A starting point for understanding when Agile would be applicable to a given situation isa model known as the “Cynefin model” (Snowden and Boone, 2007). This model provides
a structured approach to determine when an iterative and experimental mindset is more
17

suitable than a more traditional, more fixed approach to problem-solving or project
management.

Figure 7. Cynefin model. Snowden J. D., Boone E. M., 2007.

Snowden and Boone define five context categories within this model, which are listed
and described below per the article published in the Harvard Business Review magazine
in November of 2007:● Simple: stable and direct cause-and-effect situations are categorized as simple
contexts. They can be solved through best practices already tested in the past.
Commonly described as known knowns, there is no need for questioning as teams
are already aligned on solutions.
● Complicated: contexts of low stability, where multiple answers can be right at
the same time, require experts to sense, analyze, and respond to the different
situations. This is the context of known unknowns, where decision-making often
requires time and novel thinking.
● Complex: this is where systems thinking (Bertalanffy, 1968) comes in as arequired mindset. Complex contexts may have one right answer; however they arevolatile and uncertain, as each time one part of the system is altered, it may
18

influence the entirety of the system, thus changing the context completely at thesame time. Known as the realm of “unknown unknowns,” the complex context iswhere most contemporary businesses and organizations find themselves in.
● Chaotic: within this context, there is no pattern. Every situation feels novel andrequires immediate and urgent solutions. No best practices nor a relationship ofcause and effect can be used to manage a chaotic environment.
● Disorder: the realm of disorder is everything and nothing at the same time.
Participants of this context feel lost and do not know where to start from.
Considering these five contexts, Agile is best applied and has the clearest results within
the complex realm (Powers, 2021). The complex realm requires that teams work together
in order to find answers to problems that have not necessarily been tried before. The
understanding that changes will happen and cannot be predicted, as well as being open toadjusting plans according to what is happening across the larger system, is what makes
Agile a powerful approach to modern problem-solving.
2.1.1 Agile principles and the Agile Manifesto
At a gathering of like-minded people in Utah in 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created,with an initial focus on software development (Beck et al., 2001). These 17 experts indifferent methodologies, which included Scrum, Extreme Programming, and FeatureDriven-Development, had the aim of finding an alternative to traditional and outdated
development practices that did not enable fast enough value creation.
The Agile Manifesto has provided clear direction and guidance to teams for the past 20
years. The key part of the Manifesto highlights what Agile values most:“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan”
19The authors clarify that while there is value in the items on the right, the focus should beon the ones on the left side.
Additionally, the same team of seventeen people has developed a list of twelve principles
that further expand on how the Agile mindset and approach to problem-solving should beconsidered:
1. Customer satisfaction through early and continuous software delivery –customers are happier when they receive working software at regular intervals,
rather than waiting extended periods of time between releases.
2. Accommodate changing requirements throughout the development process– the ability to avoid delays when a requirement or feature request changes.
3. Frequent delivery of working software – Scrum accommodates this principle

since the team operates in software sprints or iterations that ensure regulardelivery of working software.
4. Collaboration between the business stakeholders and developers

throughout the project – better decisions are made when the business andtechnical team are aligned.
5. Support, trust, and motivate the people involved – Motivated teams are more

likely to deliver their best work than unhappy teams.
6. Enable face-to-face interactions – Communication is more successful whendevelopment teams are co-located.
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress – Deliveringfunctional software to the customer is the ultimate factor that measures progress.
8. Agile processes to support a consistent development pace – Teams establish a

repeatable and maintainable speed at which they can deliver working software,and they repeat it with each release.

209. Attention to technical detail and design enhances agility – The right skills

and good design ensure the team can maintain the pace, constantly improve theproduct, and sustain change.
10. Simplicity – Develop just enough to get the job done for right now.
11. Self-organizing teams encourage great architectures, requirements, anddesigns – Skilled and motivated team members who have decision-making
power, take ownership, communicate regularly with other team members, andshare ideas that deliver quality products.
12. Regular reflections on how to become more effective – Self-improvement,

process improvement, advancing skills, and techniques help team members work
more efficiently.
It is important to understand the founding principles of the Agile Manifesto, as they
define why teams operate the way they do in such environments.
2.1.2 Agile methodologies and frameworks
Agile software development methodologies are amongst the most popular (Hoda et al.,2018), and while several different ones exist, this research focuses on the ones mostly
used in the context of the case company. Each of these methodologies present their own
ways of working and best practices, however, they all have common ground with theAgile Manifesto, which was developed after most of these frameworks were invented.
2.1.2.1 Scrum
One of the most known frameworks, Scrum was developed in 1990 by Jeff Sutherland
and Ken Schwaber. The Scrum Guide (Scrumguides, 2020), first released in 2010, andupdated regularly, provides the following definition: “Scrum is a lightweight frameworkthat helps people, teams, and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions
for complex problems.” The Scrum three pillars are: adaptation, transparency, andinspection.
According to the latest version of the Scrum Guide of November 2020, Scrum is basedaround three key team roles:
21

● A scrum master, responsible for upholding the framework;● A product owner, responsible for upholding the vision of the product;● The developers, a multidisciplinary and self-organized team, responsible forturning the vision of the Product Owner and the enterprise into value for endusers. This team can include, for example, software developers, testers, anddesigners.
Scrum is also known for its time-boxed planning cycle, called sprints. Sprints should
usually last from one to four weeks and should contain the following events:● Sprint planning: this is when the priorities for the upcoming cycle is defined,
and the required work for achieving value is further defined;● Daily Scrum: daily checkpoints where individuals update each other on the
progress of work, as well as align possible needs. It is supposed to be acommunication event and not a reporting cadence where each individual sharesdetailed status reporting of their own activities.
● Sprint review: at the end of each cycle, the full scrum team works together toinspect what has been achieved and decide on what is coming for the next sprint
planning. The focus is on how the sprint has added value to the product goal.
● Sprint retrospective: while sprint review focuses on how the teams achieved thesprint goal and increased value to the product, the retrospective looks at how theteam worked together to achieve such outcomes. What practices and ways ofworking the team has in place, what is working well, and what should be changed
for continuous improvement.
2.1.2.2 Kanban
Originally developed in Toyota in the 1940s as a way of visualizing workflows on afactory floor, Kanban has served as a great ally to Agile teams. The direct Japanesetranslation of Kanban to English is “sign board.” The three key principles brought by the
Kanban framework are, as described by (Anderson, 2010):
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● Visualize your workflow: by using cards and a column system, everyone caneasily see where work is and how it is moving. This can often be done in the mostbasic form of “to do, doing, and done” columns, but it can contain other columns
needed by the team, e.g., “blocked” and “test in progress,” as long as the workflow
is clear for all the team members.
● Limit work in progress: As a direct benefit of visualizing the workflows comesthe possibility to understand where bottlenecks might exist within the team or theprocess. Kanban encourages teams to limit work in progress so that value isreleased often through focused work.
● Focus on workflow and continuous improvement: the result of clear
visualization and limited work in progress and allows teams to focus their efforts,
and therefore continuously improve their own practices.
There are no roles in Kanban or strict ceremonies related to it. When combined with
Scrum for single teams, or SAFe for larger portfolios of Scrum teams, Kanban provides
essential tools for the functioning and continuous improvement of team practices.
2.1.2.3 Lean Thinking
Again coming from Toyota, Lean Thinking has been defined as a set of practices thattarget banishing waste and creating wealth (Womack and Jones, 1996). It is based on theseven areas of waste generation outlined by Taiichi Ohno, an executive of Toyota at thetime. They are classified as Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, OverProcessing, Overproduction, and Defects.
When looking at these seven forms of waste, Lean Thinking has been conceived as the
mitigation strategy to avoid the occurrence of waste. It focuses on five principles:
1. Value specified: what you do must bring value to the end consumer;
2. Work in Value Streams: every action within a process must be generating value
to the end consumer;
3. Flow: similarly to Kanban, Lean aims at enabling a flow of activities without
obstacles;23

4. Pull: in Lean, we do not push, rather we let those in need of our products pull it
when they need it.
5. Pursue perfection: continuously and relentlessly improve everything we do.
The Lean mindset is closely aligned with the principle of maximizing work done by doing
less and wasting fewer resources with non-value-adding activities.
2.1.2.4 ScrumBan
As the self-explanatory name suggests, ScrumBan is a mix of Scrum and Kanban
methodologies, supported by some values of Lean thinking. The terminology was coinedin 2008 by Corey Ladas when he published the book “ScrumBan – Essays on Kanban
systems for lean software development.”
As proposed by Ladas, the idea of the ScrumBan is to, supported by the Lean thinking,add elements of Scrum in Kanban and vice-versa, with the goal of limiting work inprogress, maximizing the flow of the team, have a pull system culture. These can be donewith some of the organizational ways for the working groups proposed by Scrum, where
the iterations should last on average up to four weeks, and members can use some of the
Scrum meetings to validate their work and communicate better internally, for example,
by using Retrospectives.
ScrumBan can be a good process to be followed by teams who are using Scrum and needto organize themselves better by, for example, limiting their work in progress, or by teams
starting to implement Agile who do not feel confident enough to adopt all Scrum practices
as they are not so familiar with all the processes or might not have all the team members
assigned to a Scrum role as the product owner and the scrum master (Agile Alliance,2021) since, as mentioned above, Kanban alone do not have specific role divisions.

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Figure 8. Example of a Kanban board. Agile Alliance, 2021.

2.1.2.5 SAFe, Scalable Agile Framework
As more and more companies look into adopting more flexible ways of working in theiroperations, the need for a more structured framework arose. SAFe (SAFe, 2021) was
developed by Dean Leffingwell to address this need, as it provides a line of sight fromthe vision and portfolio management of an enterprise to each of the scrum teams
participating in its system. SAFe embraces the principles of Agile as well as Lean in how
it structures everything in its framework, from resourcing to budgeting and planning
across an entire portfolio of projects.
As described on their own website, SAFe is the world’s leading framework for businessagility. It brings the best of different frameworks and principles together in order to createa more stable environment that enables faster delivery of innovative products andservices. Their own analysis of benefits has shown the following improved indicators:

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Figure 9. SAFe business results, 2021.

2.1.2.6 The Spotify model

Figure 10. Agile at Scale model in Spotify, 2012

Spotify is a Swedish company which, according to themselves, “with Spotify, it’s easy tofind the right music or podcast for every moment – on your phone, your computer, yourtablet, and more.” In 2012, Henrik Kniberg & Anders Ivarsson published a whitepaper
entitled “Scaling Agile @ Spotify – with tribes, squads, chapters & guilds.” This paper

26

introduced how Spotify organized their work internally, using Agile mindset and Lean
principles, as follows:● A squad: it is similar to the Scrum teams, fully responsible for releasing items to
production. Some of them can use Scrum, some of them can use Kanban, or any
other Agile methodology suitable for the team, working as a “mini start-up.”● A tribe: it is a collection of Squads that cannot have more than 100 people.
● A chapter: it is a collection of people with similar skills who do not necessarily
work in the same squad but who are part of the same tribe.
● A guild: it is an informal cross tribe community with similar interests that canshare tools, ways of working, and best practices.
The key to this working model is the sophisticated architecture engineer supporting
Spotify, and, as mentioned in the publication, everybody is technically able to update theproduction system, and it is everybody's responsibility to keep its integrity.
In this article, the authors also emphasize that they did not invent this model, but this wasa snapshot of Spotify’s never-ending journey, which has continued to progress.

2.2 Distributed teams
Powell, Piccoli, and Ives (2004 p. 6-36) define virtual teams as “groups ofgeographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by
information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or moreorganizational tasks.” In the book “From chaos to successful distributed Agile teams,
2019”, Rothman and Kilby use Allen’s curve to explain why even geographically colocated teams can be distributed teams. The curve exemplifies how the distance that teammembers are seated can influence how frequently they communicate - the further they
are, the lesser is the tendency they will speak.

27

Figure 11. Allen’s curve of communication from Managing the Flow of Technology, 1977

Allen’s curve explains that, after 8 meters of distance, the frequency of face-to-facecommunication stays flat and changes little.
In 2018, the global IT (information technology) department in KONE moved to have its
base located in a building across the parking lot from the KONE main headquarter office.

28

Figure 12. KONE headquarters building in Espoo, Finland. Across the parking lot, the IT department is located.
News.Cision.com (2020)

However, even before this move, IT members were located on different floors inside themain KONE building, separated from the rest of the other teams because, like any otherlarge global company, KONE has team members spread everywhere, and one floor cannot
accommodate all employees together.
In this thesis, the terminology for distributed teams is going to be used to describe
KONE’s IT department, where some of its members are co-located geographically in theheadquarters of the company, but working from different offices in Finland, either fromhome but also from the strategic areas defined by the company: Finland, India, China,
Italy, Singapore, and the United States, and it covers KONE’s direct employees and its
sub-contractors.
There can be a variety of reasons why a company would have its teams distribute globally,
and this will be covered in the next subchapter.

29

2.2.1 Why distributed teams?
Nowadays, there is no surprise that any global corporation with an international presence
would have a distributed workforce, and there can be many different reasons why
companies seek out this option. For example, according to Kile (2007), there are mainly
three categories of distributed teams advantages: personal, societal, and organizational.
In the personal category, individuals can feel more empowered with the flexible hours toaccommodate international collaboration and happier due to the fact they don’tnecessarily need to relocate to pursue a desired job position. In the societal category,
distributed teams offer chances to create a multicultural environment with a diversified
point of view, which potentially can increase the team’s overall efficiency. Finally, at theorganizational level, if a company restricts itself to hiring individuals only from aparticular region, it removes a significant potential of finding highly qualified and talented
people with localized knowledge that could provide key competitive assets to thecompany.
Parallelly, distributed teams can also present specific benefits when they are also working
remotely, meaning when people don’t need to go to any of their corporate physicallocations. In Pinto’s study about Global virtual teams (2018), some findings are related
to better work-life balance, as workers don’t need to spend time commuting and canredirect this time in hobbies, personal affairs, and family. Another aspect is the saving
costs a company can have by not needing to maintain a local facility or by hiring
individuals that are cheaper in certain places of the globe due to inflation, currency, orother economic reasons that will be covered shortly.
Additionally to the virtual teams topic, in the years of the pandemic with the outbreak of
covid-19 and the restrictions imposed by governments in an attempt to control theinfection rates, a vast number of companies were forced to change their work to be
remote. According to an article by Choudhury (2020) in the Harvard Business Review,
all the benefits regarding remote work presented in this chapter are reinforced, though not
only from the working from home perspective but from the working from anywhere
angle. Furthermore, the text highlights that it was proved work personnel and their teams
could continue to function well while being entirely dispersed. The real challenge is how
to continue leveraging from the working virtually situation in the post-pandemic era while30

keeping workers motivations and dealing with the uniqueness and different needs of each
person.
As stated by Bajarin in a Forbes article (2020), the main difference between working fromhome to working from anywhere is that in working from home scenario, the employee is
expected to attend occasional meetings, the can be more or less frequent depending on
the companies’ need, but the employee always has a hub they can and need to return to.
In working from anywhere situation, the employee is not expected at all in any of thecompanies’ facilities and can be anywhere in the globe performing their activities.
One other relevant element to be considered is the financial side: some companies may
decide that outsourcing some type of work can be beneficial for the business. Starting bydefining what outsourcing means, we can use this definition of Britannica’s encyclopedia:“Outsourcing - work arrangement made by an employer who hires an outside contractor
to perform work that could be done by company personnel.” In his article, Peslak (2012)suggests that the two main reasons why a company would outsource its IT activities
would be because the costs of maintaining such a department running are perceived as
pricey, and the department’s competency is not part of the core activities of a certain
enterprise.
For example, KONE is not an IT company. It is still mainly a manufacturer of elevators,
although they have been investing more in digital services so, in consonance with Peslak’s(2012) finding, it could be perceived as challenging that KONE would have all thedevelopers working in KONE’s projects as internals, as 30 percent of the companies
outsource their IT work, seeking for cost reduction, but also looking for outsourcing
problems and bureaucracy related to a sector which is not seen as a fundamental
competency. Once jobs are outsourced to other companies, the client needs to understandthat the workforce can be more distributed geographically, following the processes andpolicies existent in the hired service provider, thus creating a distributed team setup
beyond the enterprise’s organization.

2.3 The cultural aspects in Agile distributed teams
In his book, Primitive Culture, originally first published in 1871, Edward Tylor defines
culture as it follows:31

“Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities
and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
As Tylor mentions, culture is a complex subject, and for this thesis, only two main aspectsof culture will be taken into consideration: a corporation’s working culture and people’snational culture. As described in chapter 2.1, the Agile Manifesto is based on a set ofprinciples (Beck et al., 2001) that can challenge more traditional ways of working. In a
McKinsey article (Jurisic et al., 2020), it is pointed out that, in a study conducted by thecompany, 76% of the respondents who are doing some type of Agile transformation are
facing challenges in transforming their culture and ways of working. Therefore, it
becomes relevant to this study to understand some aspects of KONE’s culture and if
different multinationalism aspects in teams that are distributed can influence the Agile
implementation.

Figure 13. Top five challenges during an enterprise Agile transformation. McKinsey & Company, 2020.

2.3.1 People’s culture and the working environment
In 1991, Hofstede published a study conducted during six years inside IBM. This study
included more than 100,000 employees across more than 70 countries. Hofstede's
findings made it possible for him, in the future, to create the six cultural dimensions(Hofstede et al., 2010) and how important of a role culture could have in the behavior of
the employees. The six cultural dimensions are as follows:
The first dimension is the power distance: this comprises the overall societal perception
regarding power. An example is in low power distance societies, where the subordinates
32expect to be consulted on what should be done, whereas, in high power distance, they
expect to be told what to do.
The second dimension is uncertainty avoidance: this measures how societies behave
when there is uncertainty. Societies that avoid uncertainty need clear rules, andtechnology advances slower because people do not want to take the risk of experimenting.
On the other hand, when the uncertainty is more accepted, de-regulation is perceived andtechnology advance is better welcomed.
The third dimension is individualism versus collectivism: in this dimension, whensocieties have an individualist behavior, there is competition between individuals,
communication can take longer, and confrontation is healthy. In collectivism, thecompetition happens between tribes, the communication is perceived as more obvious,and confrontation is avoided since there is a wish for harmony inside the group.
The fourth dimension is masculinity and femininity: though the name might indicate,
this dimension is not gender-oriented but compiles the emotional role expected inside thesociety. In masculine societies, work prevails over family, people admire the strong
examples, and they disdain weakness. In feminine societies, work-life balance is
expected, people tend to be more jealous of the high fliers, and there is empathy withweak individuals.
The fifth dimension is long versus short-term orientation: this measures societal
behavior for achieving goals. In short-term orientation societies, good and evil are always
the same, and this cannot change; people are proud of their traditions, and these traditions
are long-lasting. In long-term orientation societies, good and evil are irrelative and canchange, individuals should learn from other countries, and traditions can change.
The sixth dimension is indulgence versus restraint: this refers to the subjective feelingof happiness or unhappiness and freedom inside societies. Indulgence groups perceivethat friends are important, they are more optimistic, and the guides of morals are flexible.
In restraint societies, friendship is less important, individuals more cynical, and there isstrict moral behavior.

33

According to Hofstede, these societal values inside the six dimensions which aretransferred from parents to children seldomly change during an individual’s life.
Therefore, some key aspects for creating functional and high-performing teams should beconsidered. Coyle (2018) proposes three pillars for establishing a culture where teams
could thrive; building safety, sharing vulnerability, and establishing a purpose. Building
safety refers to how important it is to have a psychologically-safe environment where
workers feel safe to trust each other and to collaborate, minimizing bureaucracy andhaving leaders closer to their teams. The sharing vulnerability part is discussed and ismore relevant for leaders. However, Coyle also suggests that sharing vulnerability is aloop in which employees and leaders need to be involved, where mistakes are accepted,
and instead of punishing people, the group should learn and grow from them. Finally, inthe establishing goals area, Coyle argues that companies should make heavy use of what
he calls ¨corny catchphrases¨ that are simple, but that actually work, and employees caneasily relate to them.
Summarizing, even though human beings are essentially the same, every individual is still
different because of the culture they were raised in, the working environment where theylearned their social clues, and every human being has a unique set of values andpreferences, and leaders should know how to navigate these cultural codes and coach theirteams in understanding when a behavior is a personality treat or if some misunderstandingis happening simply because of cultural differences (Meyer, 2015).

2.4 Leadership in an Agile distributed environment
All Agile methodologies described in this study suggest a particular key element is needed
to function: a leader that serves the team. Servant leaders build trust, enable teams,
encourage initiatives through experimentation, and have no fear of failure (Lundström
and Yusuf, 2021, p. 69). Being a safety net for the team makes servant leaders an essential
part of any Agile team that needs the space to fail fast and fail often to learn quickly anddeliver value even faster (Sjödin et al., 2020).
Dierendonck (2010) states that servant leadership focuses on people empowerment anddevelopment whilst being humble, authentic, and inclusive. A servant leader enables trustin teams and encourages self-actualization. Dierendonck also suggests that stewardship34

provides a vision, and guiding the organization towards the desired direction is a trait ofservant leaders.
In the study of Melchar and Bosco, 2010, the organizations studied have demonstrated
exemplary performance and are led by what they define as servant leaders. Successful
servant leaders, according to the same authors, have the ability to influence other leadersacross the organization, resulting in consistency of expectations and a psychologicallysafer and stronger organizational culture.
Regarding the distributed setup, there are several challenges that employees and theirleaders could face. Some of them are, as listed by Gleeson in a Forbes article (2020), lackof face-to-face supervision, lack of access to information, and enhanced issues withalready existing silos. These particular obstacles require that leaders are prepared to serve
their teams, taking into consideration their locations, cultural background, and, in the
Agile case, that the team is able and encouraged to keep the rhythm and cadence of theAgile meetings (Rothman and Kilby, 2019). Additionally, according to Rothman and
Kilby, leaders should create a management culture that is adapted to the distributed setup,
encouraging team members who can meet face-to-face to do this on a regular basis
throughout the year, maintain acceptable overlapping hours for teams collaboration,
allocate sufficient money so the teams can communicate efficiently in the virtualenvironment, having access to modern tools which can make remote collaboration seem
effortless. Rothman and Kilby also suggest a set of working with distributed teams
principles and what management skills would better reflect them.

35

Figure 14. Management skills for Agile Distributed teams. Rothman, J., Kilby M., 2019.

2.5 Theoretical framework
As a result of the review of the literature demonstrated above, the following frameworkhas been developed, showing characteristics that can be important in the successful
implementation of Agile concepts with distributed teams. The idea behind the framework
is to understand the dynamics between Agile and distributed teams and how culture andleadership behaviors play a role in them. Agile needs to be broken into framework,mindset, and principles, as their adoptions have different elements to be considered.

36

Figure 15. Agile distributed teams in non-IT companies. The Author, 2021.

As demonstrated in the Agile Onion (Powers, 2021) in the literature review chapter, tools
and frameworks are easier to incorporate by teams in comparison to values and mindset.
Therefore, the literature review was based on articles and journals relevant to the Agileand distributed team sectors, seeking to find empirical evidence of this theory, particularlyin the practical field of companies' businesses.
KPMG (2019) and Digital.ai (2021) have demonstrated the variety of different Agile
frameworks being used by companies. The most common for teams is Scrum, and when
there is a willingness for companies to scale the practices, SAFe is frequently cited. In
KONE, both methodologies are under experimentation. However, there are many internalteams utilizing Lean, Kanban, ScrumBan, and the Spotify model as a basis to create theirown practices. That is why in the literature chapter, an overview of these frameworks wasgiven as a basis to understand KONE’s current ways of working with Agile.
Despite the Agile mindset, methodologies, and values being adopted by different
companies for more than twenty years, corporations still struggle when they try to change
the outer layers of the Agile Onion (mindset and values), even when there are practicalexamples in the field with empirical evidence of how Agile practices can improvedifferent aspects of the enterprise. One research done in 2010 in the Journal of Operations
management displayed how Agile methodologies were partly responsible for marketing37and financial performance inside the corporation. The State of Scrum 2017 – 2018 has
demonstrated that 54% of the participants perceived an improved satisfaction with whatgets delivered by the teams, and 51% noticed a better time to market. Still, in the same
study, 51% of the participants highlighted that organizational design and culture made itdifficult to adopt Scum at scale. In the Culture sub-chapter, a similar finding wasdemonstrated by McKinsey as 76% identify the cultural transformation when adopting
Agile as one of the key challenges in adopting Agile throughout the organization.
Therefore, some study regarding the cultural dynamics and how leaders can impact these
dynamics was added in the theoretical framework. The main attribute of a leader in the
Agile environment is servant leadership (Sjödin et al., 2020).
Finally, KONE has a distributed setup. Hence it was relevant to understand why
companies choose to have distributed workforce and what its implications are in theorganization, especially through the lenses of working with Agile concepts.

3 METHODOLOGY
The purpose of this research is to further enhance the academic knowledge andunderstanding about the use of the Agile mindset, principles, and methodologies incompanies that do not have Information Technology as their core business. The focus of
this research has been on KONE, the Finnish leader in the elevator and escalator industry,
and internal projects that leverage the use of distributed teams, including the practicalexperiences obtained by using an Agile mindset, principles, and ways of working. The
theoretical background has been discussed in previous chapters, clarifying how importantthe theme of the Agile concept is, regardless of what industry field the company isinserted into.
The goal of this chapter is to describe the research process and design, which takes into
account the author’s experience over the past years, as well as the results of qualitativeinterviews. The qualitative research has been done with a set of semi-structured questions
with KONE employees who were involved in projects with Agile distributed teams.

38

3.1 Research Approach
The analysis of such a complex theme requires going deeper into discussions withpractitioners in order to reveal key information that could be then further interpreted.
Agile mindset and methodologies and their use in modern companies are part of natural
evolution which their own principles of continuous improvement support. Therefore it isvital to maintain the research on this field always up-to-date and based on practicalrealities. That said, a subjectivist point of view (Saunders et al. 2009, p. 111) is alsopresent when personal experiences are explored, and therefore are taken into accountduring this process.
Yin (2013) suggests that while case studies, such as this study, have been under higher
scrutiny due to lack of specific academic rigor, it is a valid format for researching concepts
that are current and still evolving, even more so when part of the focus of the research
includes the construct of leadership (Fergus et al. 2015). In the case of KONE, the author
is able to reach key personnel involved in the daily operations of various projects, as wellas the documents produced by their teams, providing a solid base to build on.
The author has decided to utilize exploratory and qualitative research, given that theconstructs of Agile, leadership, teams, and culture can be tangled and very profound(Saunders et al. 2009, p. 482). That is, by exploring this theme via deeper discussions
with a number of experienced professionals, the author is able to find common themes
and learnings that can be further leveraged, professionally and scientifically. The choiceof exploratory research was made over descriptive research, which would require a larger
data set, for instance, via questionnaires, for the author to describe the topic more widely.
(Gil 2008, p. 27 - 29)
To enable a more holistic view on the subject of this research, the author utilized atriangulation strategy (Saunders et al. 2009, p. 154) which brings three data points(internal documentation review, the observer's point of view, and the interviews withmembers and leaders of projects utilizing Agile), at KONE into the light of this researchframework. In this context, the author has also been a key actor in projects that utilize
Agile methodologies and distributed teams, being able to observe first-hand the different

39dynamics it can cause, therefore making observation an important contributor to theoverall approach of this research.
According to Eriksson & Kovalainen (2008, p. 86), observation requires that the
researcher is deeply involved in the area of interest. Hence it brings an additional layer ofcomplexity to data collection. The author has been immersed in this reality from 2016 tothis present day (2021) as part of the case company. Additionally, the author was able toobserve the first steps of the implementation of the Agile mindset and methodologies at
IBM, starting from earlier 2014. At the case company, the author has both observed anddirectly influenced the adoption and implementation of Agile concepts across multiple
projects.
The third data point includes access to internal knowledge materials and strategies, which
influence how teams and projects have adopted and continuously implemented Agile
practices in their daily operations. According to Bowen (2009), document evidence isoften combined with data from interviews and observation to minimize bias and establish
credibility.

3.2 Data Collection
The approach used in this research is anchored in triangulation (Yin 2013; Saunders et al.
2009, p. 154), and it includes three data points: internal documentation review, theobserver's point of view, and lastly, the interviews with members and leaders of projects
utilizing Agile, at KONE.
The interest for the development of this research started with the process of observation,
as the author onboarded the case company in 2016 and connected it with initial
experiences at IBM. From the start, the author could observe that there was a different
mindset to adopting Agile methodologies in a big company dealing with projects at scale,and that factor motivated this research to go forward. Since joining KONE, the researcher
has acted in different roles within a globally distributed team environment, made of teammembers of different cultures and experience levels, from junior developers to senior
executives. The author has directly worked with teams from various backgrounds andnationalities, including most commonly from Finland, France, Germany, China, India,
Russia, and the United States.
40

Being part of the research context is known as participating observation (Gil 2008, p.
103), and it requires that the researcher also utilizes their own point of view indetermining the strategic approach for the research, including own perceived dynamics,
which became the focus of the interviews on leadership, culture, and more importantly,
the use of Agile methodologies. The author’s own challenges and successes, as well as
the strategic goals determined by KONE’s leadership, have all contributed to thisdevelopment.
Finally, to complete the triangulation method, semi-structured interviews were chosen to
be conducted to gather deeper qualitative data, directly from actors of the process itself,
which in this case are team members and leaders performing a role in Agile projects with
distributed teams. Semi-structured interviews were chosen instead of fully structured ones
(Eriksson & Kovalainen 2008, p. 82), as they allow for more fluid discussions to takeplace, which enabled the interviewer and interviewee to uncover additional value fromquestions as they progress in such a conversation (Berg et al. 2014, p. 105).
An interview guide with reference questions (appendix 2) was created to support theinterviewer so that the focus areas of the research were systematically discussed anddocumented. Prior to each interview, a shorter version of the questionnaire, as well as key
objectives of the session (appendix 1), were sent to the participants of the study, whichenabled them to come more prepared to the discussions Saunders et al. (2009, p. 485),
thus bringing more value to the responses themselves.
The following graph shows the main areas of interest that were generated both from theauthor’s own experience and observation over the years, as well as the literature review
and theoretical framework developed in this research:

41

Figure 16. Categorization of the main themes covered during the interviews. The Author, 2021.

The criteria for selecting the interviewees was determined with the key principle ofexperience and exposure to Agile projects in mind. The selected people also needed tohave some solid experience in working with distributed teams and who were familiar with
KONE internal operating models. Additionally, for the study to be less culturally biased,
it was relevant that not all interviewees would be from the same nationality. Therefore
the selected people come from different countries, eight of them working in the KONE
headquarters in Finland and one person located in an office in China. As appointed by theliterature reviewed, leadership is a strong pillar when any type of methodology is being
applied in teams, thus for this research to be relevant, the author interviewed both leaders,meaning people who lead projects but also who have people reporting directly to themand formally responsible for human resources tasks with them, and “Agile doers,” people
who are exposed to the Agile mindset and frameworks inside their projects or teams.
A summary table has been developed to provide a view of the participants, including
gender, nationality, work location, job title in KONE during the time the interviews were
held, whether the participant held a leadership role or not. Out of the nine participants,
five held managerial positions within the company, and two were males, and three werefemales.
42

Table 1. Summary list of interviewees by gender, nationality, work location, role, and indicating if the person is aleader or not.

All interviews were carried out, individually with each person, during September 2021,
after a pilot interview done at the end of August of the same year. The interviews wereconducted and recorded using Microsoft Teams, which also enabled the use of advanced
technology for automating interview transcription. However, some manual adjustments
to incorrectly understood words still had to be made by the author while listening to thereplay of each interview. The author also removed words or sentences that did not add
direct value to the question asked so that the focus would be on the key theme. This is
supported by Bailey (2008) as a way to focus on what has been said and what it means,
instead of trying to interpret why certain words were used and their order. None of theparticipants spoke English as their first language, which also increased the level of manualadjusting of the transcripts while looking to understand the automated generated
transcripts. The author removed from the transcriptions any names that were mentionedby the participants in order to protect those people’s privacy. Each interview took from50 minutes to 1 hour and 15 minutes to be done.
Due to the circumstances of the world in 2021, all interviews were performed virtually,
as face-to-face interaction has been limited and not encouraged. This, however, provided
more consistency to the method of interviews in this research, as they were all equally
executed. Though the interviews were done virtually, all of them had the cameras open
both from the interviewees' side and from the interviewer in an intention to create somebonding between the participants.
Additionally, a comparison table has been created to summarize the varying degrees ofseniority of interviewees and their exposure to Agile projects and programs, to KONE,
and to distributed teams:
43

Figure 17. Experience in each area by year for each participant. The Author, 2021.

The figure below provides a visual representation of the nationalities of the participantsof this study.

44

Figure 18. Visualization of the global representation of interviewees

3.3 Data Analysis
The phase of analyzing the acquired data followed a method of thematic and content
analysis. These methods support the understanding of qualitative data in a more structured
and focused manner, mitigating the risk of skipping relevant details and pieces of
information. While this stage of the research process might require a longer investmentof time, because reading through the nine transcribed interviews required careful andsystematic reviewing of the transcripts, it supported finding the needed links related to
the reviewed literature while at the same time developing the codes (further explanation
on what defines a code on page 48), creating themes and sub-themes, that are then finallyused for the analysis of patterns (Braun & Clarke 2006, Gil 2008, p. 152). Following is a
visual representation of the process the author has gone through, from bottom to top:45

Figure 19. Process of data analysis. The author, 2021.

The first step was the familiarization of the data, where after all the interviews were done,
the key sentences were transferred to an Excel spreadsheet. In total, there were 458
sentences selected from the interviews. Next, color coding was created to classify thesesentences into larger groups. The groups selected were:● Gray - Personal background: a set of data to demonstrate why the selected
people were selected for this study. This was already covered in detail earlier inthis chapter.
● Green – Agile definition and methodology in use: a set of answers highlighting
the Agile methodology used by the interviewees, their personal Agile definition,and their thoughts about who should be responsible for Agile in KONE.
● Light blue – Global relationships: an overview of the participants' relationshipwith their colleagues globally, where those people are mainly from.
● Light red - Tools used by the teams: description about different IT collaboration
tools used by people in order to conduct Agile processes, to perform teambuilding, or to organize work in general. This code was later merged together with
the Agile ways of working.
● Yellow - Benefits: the questions were created in a way to encourage theparticipants to talk both about the benefits of working in Agile distributed teams.

46

● Orange - Challenges: to counterargument the benefits, questions related to thechallenges of working in Agile distributed were asked.
● Dark blue - Recommendations: closing, the questionnaire was built to request,from each individual experience and point of view, recommendations to overcome
the challenges presented, specifically in the KONE context.
Next, a filter in Excel was created to categorize the sentences and to ease the results andthe discussion reporting. The initial idea for this research was to have only common
benefits, challenges, and recommendations for the entire thesis, but after the analysis doneby the researcher, it was clear that dividing these main themes into sub-categories would
make more sense, and the study could be clearer on the results achieved:

Table 2. Summary of main themes found in this study with sub-themes.

The main themes have Agile mindset and practices; and distributed, virtual, andmulticultural teams as common sub-themes. The idea of adding virtual and multicultural
terminologies into the distributed teams theme emerged after the discussions with theparticipants of this study and the realization that the challenges, the benefits therecommendations for KONE teams apply similarly into the distributed, virtual, andmulticultural aspects, but the comments were slightly different depending on what was
discussed. Thus, for transparency purposes, the author decided to make it clear that not
only the distributed setup was highlighted by the interviewees.
During the interview, the benefits of working in the KONE company, specifically on
topics related to the KONE’s culture, were brought up in an organic manner since there
are no questions asking this specifically, but this was brought up enough times for this tobe relevant to be pointed out. Similarly, the internal challenges appeared naturally in theinterview conversations.
47

Table 3. Summary of the main themes found in this study with sub-themes.

The majority of the sentences fell under the recommendations category, followed by the
number of challenges and benefits.
Each interview took four hours on average to be transcribed and another five to sevenhours to be categorized, making a total of approximately 90 hours of effort put into thedata collection and analysis. Since the interviews generated a lot of data, it was decided
that only the most relevant aspects of the discussions would be presented in this paper,and the additional information is available as appendixes (Gil, 2008, p.p183). Whenpresenting the empirical data for benefits, challenges, and recommendations, the criteria
for selecting what is considered relevant was determined by how often the code inside thesub-theme was mentioned against how many unique people commented about it. A code
is a category created to group similar sentences given by the participants during theinterview. The more unique people commented about the same code, the more relevant itgets for this study. There was an average of 7.5 codes generated inside each sub-theme.
Thus the top five codes were selected to be presented on this research in the tables, andthe three most relevant were explored in more detail.

4 RESULTS
The aim of this chapter is to provide the answers to the research questions below:● What are the benefits and challenges of using Agile concepts with distributed
teams in KONE?

48

● What are the recommendations, from a practical point of view, of using the Agile
mindset, principles, and methodologies in KONE with distributed teams?
The questionnaire with the interviewees sought to understand and explore the participants'familiarity with Agile concepts and how they were practically using them inside KONE.
It was essential to explore the benefits and challenges of Agile usage. KONE is not acompany utilizing Agile entirely at an enterprise level. However, KONE has many
projects and teams leveraging the Agile mindset, principles, and methodologies, evenwhen people are not familiar with them. Understanding the dynamics of distributed teams
in KONE is also relevant as this could impact the perception of the interviewees on how
they collaborate with their co-workers while using Agile, and if they could notice any
specific difficulties or advantages in the distributed setup, and if Agile can help toovercome any challenges. Leadership and culture are the other themes supporting thisstudy since they can influence how the teams operate. Concluding the results chapter,there are some recommendations given by the research participants, and those are divided
into recommendations for Agile adoption, distributed teams, and leadership and whichskillsets the interviewees considered important to have when people are working in an
Agile distributed setup.

4.1 A basic overview of the Agile distributed ways of working
To set the foundations of this chapter, the statistics regarding the basic understanding ofAgile, frameworks used, and countries with which this study members interact will bepresented. The following nine sentences are as below, defining Agile according to eachparticipant's point of view, and they are divided into two groups.
1) Agile as a broader concept, a mindset:“Agile is one of the most misunderstood words. (Agile) is not a tool,
not a process, not a value. It is a combination of everything. (…) It's amindset. It's a philosophy, so it's a combination of mindset and values,
principles, and the tools and processes, so everything together.” (Int.
02)
49

“Agile is a mindset on how to approach things. (…) It can be even indaily life. If I think very much now on the work-wise, I think agile for
us in a very concrete manner is one development methodology how wevery often preferred to do things and develop our solution.” (Int. 05)“My easy word would be a method, or the answer would be
methodology, but it's more than that. It's a way to approach work. To
me, it's more of a culture and mindset rather than a based methodology
or so-called structure.” (Int. 06)“Agile is pretty much a philosophy. It's also a mindset. How do you
want to potentially maximize value for anything you do that has
nothing to do only with IT.” (Int. 07)“Maybe the mindset and the focus on getting the valuable outcome is
the key. I think that methodology is a way to get out the best fit solution
or the best-fit response to whatever problem you might have.
Sometimes we mix the methodology part with what is actually the aim
for this whole thing.” (Int. 08)2) Agile as a methodology or ways of working:“Agile for me is the principle to help me to manage my work, not only inthe project but also the work, and the way of my thinking in a different
way, which is different from the traditional way that I used to have.”(Int. 04)

50

“Agile for me is basically the ways of working in the team, which allow
you to kind of to bring transparency on the work either within your own
team that everybody knows what the priorities are, what needs to bedone, so, who is doing what, what is the status.” (Int. 03)“(…)Tuning the ways of working of the team as a whole all the time andnot doing such a long term fixed planning, but trying to iterate as we go
and also gathering feedback from the end-users and otherstakeholders.” (Int. 01)“It's the opposite of waterfall. So it's really about taking a challenge
and ambition and splitting it into epics or into bigger entities that you
want to achieve and then being able to prioritize those based on thebusiness need or business benefit or the development resource needed.”(Int. 09)

Next, a gathering of data regarding which Agile methodology is in use in the reality of
the interviewee’s teams was done and, Scrum, Kanban, ScrumBan, and SAFe were theones appointed by the majority of the participants. Still, eight people out of nine werereluctant to confirm that any specific methodology was being systematically followed
inside the company.

“But then at the same time, we also know that it (Agile framework)
has been adjusted to some extent with KONE requirements and someelements are still missing, so I don't think in KONE at least we have apure framework. (Int.08)”
Only one person clearly highlighted that, currently, there is no Agile framework being
used by their team.
51

Regarding the tools for virtual collaboration, the Microsoft Teams Chat, Teams
Channel, and Teams Meetings are by far the common ones used in KONE, as KONE is
a Microsoft client. Two tools for virtual collaboration in a workshop context werementioned: Mural and Miro. For backlog visualization and organization, Jira, Azure
DevOps, Vison One, Target Process, Microsoft Planner, and OneNote were the cited
tools. There is also a mention about BMC Remedy Force, which in KONE is used for IT
ticket management and, in the past, there was an attempt to use it for Agile processes, but
none of the participants said they still use it. And, only in China was there a mention of
the WeChat tool, used mainly for instant messaging.

“Since we have no access to Facebook, Instagram, my boss, to justmake sure that we could come in contact, she downloaded WeChat.
(Int.04)”
Lastly, in the below chart, there are the countries mentioned by the interviewees where
they have their main counterparts globally, with whom they interact more frequently. The
stronger the color of the country, the more importance it was given to it according to thedescription provided by the interviewer, not according to how many times the countries
were mentioned. The three main countries are Finland, China, and India.
“Primarily, at the moment, in Finland (is where the people I interact
mostly with are located). Then we have some European countries like
Austria, France, Italy. But then one could say that the delivery engine
is in India and in China. (Int. 05)”52

Figure 20. Countries with which the interviewees interact mostly.

4.2 Benefits
As already shown previously, the codes for the highlighted benefits were categorized into
three main sub-themes: Agile mindset and principles; distributed virtual andmulticultural teams, and KONE culture and strategy, and each sub-theme has a set ofcodes:

Table 4. Top five benefits.

As highlighted in green, Collaboration and communication were indicated as crucial
topics in two sub-themes.
534.2.1 Agile mindset and practices
The most commented benefits in this sub-theme were prioritization of work (15mentions, 6 unique respondents), collaboration and communication (14 mentions, 8
unique respondents), and transparency and visibility (12 mentions, 7 unique
respondents).
In the Prioritization of work code, the Agile practices were mentioned as a good way
to organize the teams’ work, and one recurrent theme was the quarterly planning, apractice that has been widely experimented inside the company:“Agile suits to a specific context, for instance, prioritization of workwithin a distributed team on a quarterly basis and there I think themethodologies would suit perfectly. (Int.09)”
Collaboration and communication were frequently commented on in this sub-theme
and also in the Distributed teams one. From the comments, it was clear that interviewees
appreciate the cadence and organization inside the Agile frameworks and that they
enable more communication between team members.
“Just the simple fact of having daily standups every day 15 or 20
minutes means that the communication is better, so the collaboration
is increased. (Int. 02)”
“I would say that agile methodology and that culture and mindset do
tend to support more of a dialogue than waterfall models or any othermodel does. It is about coming to a mutual understanding. (Int. 06)”
These frameworks were also quoted as means to increase transparency and visibility
and a sense of cross-teams common understanding inside the projects.
“From the business side, they were saying that they are happy, that
now they see, they have the transparency. They know what ishappening in the team, what we are doing, and what the planning is.
(Int. 03)”54

Finally, the topics of fast decision making and Agile bringing structure to complex
processes were brought on the lenses of Agile having practices that support these
conditions, but also that its mindset encourages team members to be more open tocomplexity and to needed changes.

“I believe the collaboration in Agile team compared to the traditional
way is that Agile is more rapid and we need to embrace the change.
In an agile way, we treat change as a normal thing. I will not say,“Oh no, change again,” I will say, “OK, here is the request tochange, so what can we do?” We embrace it instead of avoiding it.
(Int. 04)”
4.2.2 Distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams
Regarding the distributed team setup, three topics were mostly mentioned as advantages:
thinking outside the box (11 mentions, 9 unique respondents), collaboration andcommunication (4 mentions, 3 unique respondents), and cost reduction (3 mentions, 3
unique respondents).
In the thinking outside the box code, it was pointed out that when teams have people
from diversified cultures, this can bring more perspectives for problem-solving and that
this is helpful, especially in complex areas. It was also mentioned that local knowledge
is an asset that companies should leverage more as it can also help to improve theperformance of the teams.

“The positive side of course of multicultural is that we get multiple
opinions. We get various aspects on topics and, especially in a global
company like we are, we truly need that. (Int. 05)”
“I think it's fantastic. Definitely, cultural diversity helps the team togrow and perform better. (Int.02)”
Inside the communication and collaboration area, the emphasis of the benefits was notin the distributed setup as such, but more regarding how virtual environments make iteasier to keep in contact with any team member, regardless of where they are located.
55

“Virtual is good, of course, from the angle that you can do it
anywhere, anytime, with anyone. And you can reach out that in any
timeframe, or it doesn't matter the timeline where you are. (Int. 07)”
Finally, only 3 mentions regarding cost reduction were made related to having some of
the work being done in countries where the labor rate can be cheaper in comparison toother available locations:“One short-term benefit, if I want to be very honest, is cost. (Int. 02)”4.2.3 KONE culture and strategy
KONE’s culture and strategy were mentioned as positive aspects, and this was divided
into two codes: KONE’s culture encourages collaboration (6 mentions, 4 unique
respondents) and KONE provides a clear view on strategic goals (5 mentions, 5 unique
respondents).
In KONE’s culture code, it is mentioned how the company has some aspects of a flatand relaxed culture, making collaboration outside of work seems smooth. Also,
KONE has some activities that are created locally (meaning, the headquarters do notmandate this type of collaboration, but they are proactively created in the offices aroundthe globe), which can make its personnel feel integrated:“KONE culture really allows that (collaboration outside of work).
And I think there's also a kind of a relaxed culture, from certain partsof the organization, not all the parts of the whole organization, but if
you look at an even bigger picture, I think yes, it does support it, and I
think it's a good thing to do that. (Int. 07)”
“Locally, we have a lot of activities. Some volunteer activities, andsome sports events, and some other activities are available foreveryone to sign on and to be part of it. So I think Kone’s culture isreally amazing, so that's why I stayed here for a very long time. Morethan ten years already. (Int. 04)”56

Regarding the KONE’s strategy, the respondents emphasized that the corporation
provides clear views on the goals the company wants to achieve and that the strategyof where the company wants to go in the near future is open and visible for all theemployees:“Yes, I think we have a very good view on the goals that we should
achieve. They come from IT when we talk about, for example, thefinancial goals. And when it comes to the goals of what we deliver,like the projects or solutions that come from the business, and I think
we also have a very good view on those too. (Int. 05)”
To conclude, the figure below is a word cloud generated from the 94 sentences inside theentire Benefits theme.

Figure 21. Benefits word cloud Wordclouds.com.

57

4.3 Challenges
Similar to the theme of the benefits, the challenges were also divided into three subthemes: agile mindset and practices; distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams;
and internal organizational matters.

Table 5. Top five challenges.

4.3.1 Mindset and practices
Inside the Mindset and practices sub-theme, three topics were more often mentioned as
main constraints: lack of Agile mindset and no clear internal framework (21 mentions,
9 unique respondents), waterfall oriented processes (11 mentions, 5 unique
respondents), and resisting the change (5 mentions, 4 unique respondents).
The lack of Agile mindset was grouped together with the no clear internal framework
as one single sub-theme because the interviewees were recurrently connecting the two
subjects together, as a way to explain challenges of applying agile mindset and principles
inside the company when there is no clear process or core Agile values to be followed,
and how this can generate confusion for the employees:“There's a huge lack of visibility. There is a lack of visibility not only
to me but between the team members as well. There is no sense ofworking together. (…) There is no common goal everybody is working
towards. A lot of wasted time. (Int. 06)”
58

There are also some negative perceptions from the participants, related to when someteams or some parts of the organization try to experiment with Agile methodologies
without having cross-company guidance, where teams can feel isolated, and somebreaches in the processes can start appearing:“Depending on the activity level of the business, then they are
involved, or they are not involved. We don't really have guidelines forthat. (Int. 01)”
“Company level, I think, we can definitely improve. Companywide,
we haven't done this prioritization, at least from the portfolio level all
the way down, but we are getting there, so that would be a major
improvement. (Int. 02)”
“The fact is that the business organization is not onboarded with thewhole process, right? So there's already a gap. IT cannot alone dothis, or R&D cannot alone do this. This has to be an integral part of
the whole organization to have the same. That's challenge number
one. So as long as the business is not aligned and onboarded, thenthat (problems with Agile implantation) will always be there. (Int.
07)”
Lastly, this lack of a clear internal framework can generate some confusion on having
a common understanding of what Agile is:“Some teams have adopted it (Agile). Some teams claim to haveadopted it, and they just use agile terminology for waterfall projects.
(…) There's no common way how Kanban had been taken into use. So
it's a mishmash of Agile methodologies. (Int. 06)”
The waterfall-oriented processes code summarizes the interviewee’s impression of the
KONE internal processes as something which is restraining some of the teams' agility,
ability to adapt and focus their work better from the lenses of people trying to work inAgile ways. It was clear from the interviewees that there is nothing wrong with waterfall
59

processes. The problem is trying to implement Agile inside a company that created
its operation model based on waterfall practices:“Very often, there are concrete plans required before we even knowwhat we want to do. (Int. 05)”“(…) And then maybe the most important portfolio management, it's
probably critical. Not that portfolio management is not done
correctly. It's done correctly with the current model that theorganization follows. But at least looking from the IT angle, it's a pain
point because it does not bring the perspective of agility in there. I
would say it's a really critical challenge that I see. (Int. 07)”
“We set the priorities at the beginning of the year. We revise themafter the summer holiday, so biannually, but if something would
emerge, then we need to adjust, and then we openly discuss if it's
something to be taken on top and if we have priority for that or
capacity for that, or if we then need to stop doing something else. And
in KONE, I think we actually quite often take on top. (Int. 09)”
The resisting the change code outlines the interviewees' experiences in trying to
implement Agile concepts in teams where other types of practices (most commonly theofficial KONE operating model) were in use, and some opposition to it was perceived:“The challenges that we are facing now it's on the team level ingetting everyone on board with these new practices.” (Int. 02)
4.3.2 Distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams
Regarding the distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams code, two topics werehighlighted: bonding and team building (31 mentions, 9 unique respondents) and timezones (5 mentions, 5 unique respondents).
As a starting point, there are three main topics discussed under the challenges in thecollaboration and communication code. The first one was the perception that it is more60

difficult to have spontaneous conversations and team-building activities when theteams are not co-located. Additionally, people might have more difficulties dedicatingtime specifically for this :“When you have face-to-face (communication), and if you think about
a scenario that we are all in the office, it's easier to reach out because
you are the in a physical format to be able to reach out to someone.
The virtual format will enforce a little bit to chat, you know, or I'm notgoing to maybe connect with someone if I see he or she's busy in a
meeting. (Int. 07)”
“Distributed teams, I think, is much, much harder because then thosesessions (happy hours) would need again, a calendar invite, or we'dbe able one meeting on top of everything else. (Int. 02)”
“Because we have lots of meetings about the project, so we stop it(virtual coffee meeting). (Int. 04)”
The other challenge was on how to create strong connections and empathize with coworkers in the virtual environment and how to make every person in a virtual anddistributed setting feel equally included :“(…) every single event you try to plan or meeting on site you want toplan, when you recognize that you have few individuals who cannot
be there, it's really tough because you don't want to take away theopportunity from others to connect face to face, but still this inclusion
factor is there, and it's a really hard thing. (Int. 08)“Being long time co-located with the development team, for example,
made me actually understand what they are doing and what kind ofchallenges they are struggling with. (Int. 01)”
Thirdly, some difficulties were raised on how to achieve a common understanding
when people cannot see physical signs of human expression inside a virtual and61multicultural environment, especially when team members are not using their native
language to communicate:“We know that English is our working language, but we learn English
in different ways or different books, so we may use different words toexpress something, and that will lead to the misunderstanding. (Int.
04)”“If people don't have the cameras on, you don't actually see what
people are doing, if they're talking, if they're not talking. It's trickier
to see what people are truly thinking. It's trickier to see if somebody
wants to say something. (…) It's trickier to identify if somebody isthinking about something or not agreeing. (Int. 05)”
4.3.3 Internal organization matters
During the discussions on how to implement Agile in a distributed setup, some genericinternal problems were raised. Inside this sub-theme, the top three codes were: notenough human task force (10 mentions, 5 unique respondents), collaboration andcommunication (8 mentions, 6 unique respondents), and the current KONE’s operating
model (5 mentions, 4 unique respondents).
The not enough human task force code comprises two overall challenges: one is toimplement Agile in isolated teams or in some parts of the organization when there areno established Agile roles across the company. Therefore, people need to incorporate
the Agile roles in their current functions. The second challenge is related to the
problem of creating cross-functional teams with diversified competencies, as thosecompetencies are not easily available.
“Sometimes it might be really difficult to get an architect or get adesigner or get a UX expert. (Int. 01)”
“We have PO’s that are extremely occupied with a lot of activities
that they do. They have dual roles, and they are also accountable for62the product that they are the product owner for it, building the visionand prioritizing it for the team. (Int. 02)”
Regarding the communication and collaboration code, it can be generally summarized
as how the company does not provide any clear guidance on how teams can bond andcollaborate better in a distributed and virtual environment, considering not only with
KONE employees but also with the sub-contractors and partners the company has:

“I don't think there's a common practice KONE wide or these types ofactivities outside of work, but team by team is different. (Int. 02)”
“The problem is that our development team, they're external vendors,
so they don't have access to quite many forums, but we try to keepthem up to date. (Int. 03)”
In the KONE’s current operating model code, it was highlighted that, though thecorporation has an official and published operating model, it is not fulfilling the needsof the teams working in an Agile distributed way that are also trying to use the value
stream principles. Additionally, the current teams' ways of working are perceived as
not harmonized:

So I don't think I have ever had the luxury that the full team would
have been dedicated to one value stream or one flow. So always, someelements, particularly around the integration or infrastructure, havebeen shared, and then the rest has been like sort of changing
depending on the case. (Int. 08)
Lastly, the tools and architecture code embraces the situation where the company has
multiple virtual tools in use and how teams have difficulties in following up work ina broader manner:“It's hard to get people aligned with, for example, backlog
management tools if there's no support provided for that. So, this is atleast maybe something that KONE could do. (Int. 01)”63

To conclude, the figure below is a word cloud generated from the 99 sentences inside theentire Challenge theme.

Figure 22. Challenges word cloud. Wordclouds.com.

4.4 Recommendations
This section compiles all the recommendations given by the interviewees on how someof the highlighted challenges could be mitigated and closes the recommendations chapter.
This theme, by far, was the one with the most number of sentences, having 171
statements in total, and it was divided into four sub-themes: agile mindset andprinciple, distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams; leadership, and skillsets. An
observation was made on the focus on team building and trust code, which appeared inthree sub-themes, and the defined common ways of communication and collaboration,
which appeared in two sub-themes.

64Table 6. Top five recommendations.

4.4.1 Agile mindset and practices
Inside the Agile sub-theme, the three topics with most comments were: focus on teambuilding and trust (19 mentions, 6 unique respondents), define common ways ofcommunication and collaboration (11 mentions, 7 unique respondents), andappropriate allocation of people and build cross-functional teams (7 mentions, 3
unique respondents).
In focus on team building and trust code, two main observations were: because of thecadence of how agile ceremonies (e.g., dailies, retrospectives) work, this helps teams
to bond, and trust is built through transparency between the involved parties.
Additionally, it was observed that Agile could work with distributed teams as long as
the Agile mindset is present and companies know how to leverage it and have access tomodern tools as enablers, supporting Agile collaboration.

“These frequent meetings help so people are there every day and, in away, when you have a good frequency, then the topics are smallenough so they can actually be discussed. (Int. 01)”
“Agile would also work for the distributed teams as well because a lotof those practices that you would bring to the teams are just common
sense. For example, we talked about dailies and Retros, right? Sothese are promoting collaboration. I think agile works for the
distributed teams as well, but it's just about how companies do it. (Int.
02)”
65

“We all know in the past it was ideal to have co-located teams (forAgile collaboration). Because why is that? To exactly eliminate thecollaboration/communication challenges that you would tackle that
immediately on the spot. And then also with distributed teams, it has
been seen to be an issue already in the past, that when you havepeople far away, then you don't naturally trigger communication andcollaboration for a bottleneck or an issue that is preventing yourwork. But I think, and this comes again to the cultural mindset,
nowadays there are so many smart tools and smart capabilities thatyou could utilize that it's just about teams to be mindset oriented to
say that there is nothing that can prevent us even if we are distributed,
far away from each other, the speaker can always be on and then we
actually are communicating, or the video screens are always on, andwe can always see each other. (Int. 07)”
The defined common ways of collaboration and communication sub-theme highlightthe importance of how the communication would be more transparent and efficient if
teams would understand in practice the different Agile ceremonies, supported by a setof harmonized tools that were selected for teams to use. These, according to theinterviewees, can lead to open communication inside and outside of a team level, where
team members and stakeholders have a common understanding of what is happening
in the projects. Additionally, the overall importance of personal communication skills
was emphasized by the interviewees.
“This is what we had in the beginning that when we started, forexample, with daily calls, we had some people who were not joining.
(…) And then they started to realize actually it's important for them aswell. (…) people started to get in on a daily basis because theyrealized that yes, actually it works and it brings benefit to them. (Int.
03)”“You could build something from scratch, but if you can't just express
it clearly how it's functioning, how it is used, no one would
understand, even it's really a great design (…). (Int. 04)”
66

“But I think the key point is that at the moment in KONE we are using
very many different kinds of tools for backlog management (…) I'm
strongly favoring in selecting, at least for this higher level backlog
management, just one, allowing us to have the visibility, and then, if
for technical reasons we need something for pipeline management
and so on, that is a different dialogue, at least from my perspective.
(Int.08)”
The appropriate allocation of people and building cross-functional teams, andsharing best practices inside the company to other teams codes emphasize how Agile
teams need to be self-sustainable, meaning they should have enough knowledge
available internally to solve daily issues, and how this can only be achieved if theappropriate allocation is given to people working in such projects and if multi-skilled
talents can be available for the teams to build cross-functional teams. Furthermore,sharing best practices was recommended by some interviewees for teams to be able tobenchmark Agile in areas that are familiar to the teams, with examples that haveworked in practice.
“For an Agile team, you want to have one whole team that can takeone product further down the line a couple of years, so they can build
the vision and of all the skill to run it. (Int. 02)”
“In KONE, we have been super flexible with tools and ways ofworking, and that's also part of Agile, to be flexible. It might still begood to have some recommendations or best practices shared,
especially for people who are starting out with new projects. (Int.
01)”
4.4.2 Distributed, virtual, and multicultural teams
Inside the distributed teams sub-theme, two topics were emphasized: focus on teambuilding and trust (21 mentions, 8 unique respondents) and define common ways ofcommunication and collaboration (7 mentions, 6 unique respondents).

67

In focusing on team building and trust code, the research participants pointed out thattrust can be only built once people start to know each other better, and this often
means that communication should go beyond the work conversation because, as
mentioned in the interviews, it is important to understand the human working behindthe job role, and this can lead to a mutual empathy which is built. The most commented
manner of getting to know better-distributed colleagues were meeting at least once faceto-face. However, some other techniques were highlighted, for example, being selfconscious and taking extra effort when communicating with different cultures,without assuming that the message given was clear to everybody, but making sure,
multiple times, that all people are on the same page regarding what has been discussed.

“It's at least important to get the people together and to talk to eachother at certain intervals, so this team spirit stays there. (Int. 01)”
“Communications. Everybody needs to take responsibility to make aneffort to understand what others are saying and communicate what
they're saying in a way that's more understandable and not assumingthat everybody is going to just understand or that everybody else has
to understand you and you don't have to do anything for it. (Int. 06)”“(…) take the time to meet all of the key stakeholders. Talk on thevery first meeting, talk less about what's your business ambitions andtalk more about how you are as a person. (Int. 09)”
Regarding the defined common ways of communication and collaboration topic, theinterviewees mentioned how modern technology and tools for virtual collaboration have
improved over the years, making virtual collaboration more effortless. Finally, it was
acknowledged that distributed teams should focus on coordinating how to cooperate in
the working environment, having empathy towards time zones and balancing thenumber of meetings booked inside the teams.

“I don't see big challenges (in working with distributed teams)
because we found our ways how to collaborate (…). And especially
nowadays when you can have video calls, and you can have calls and68Team chats and whatever, so you anyway feel that you are close andyou work as a team. So I think it's just the way how you set up thecommunication in the team. (Int. 03)”
“It requires a bit more coordination. We have more meetings in
global roles, definitely, just to have them in the calendar so that you
have the chance to have those systematic catch-ups and there is adifferent rhythm with the different stakeholders. (Int. 09)”4.4.3 LeadershipA sub-theme specifically for leadership was created because a considerable number ofrecommendations were aimed at leaders. Three main topics were raised: have a clear
and transparent Agile transformation vision and build an internal Agile framework(22 mentions, 6 unique respondents), servant leadership and empowered individuals(18 mentions, 7 unique respondents), and leaders should be open, trustworthy, andclose to their teams (17 mentions, 7 unique respondents).
Having a clear and transparent Agile transformation vision and building an internal
Agile framework was categorized under the leadership sub-theme because, though theinterviewees did not mention that these are the sole responsibility of the leadership,
still they trust that the Agile transformation vision and creation of an internalframework, should be aligned and supported by different leaders across the entire
organization, and the leaders should be transparent towards their employees and have aclear purpose on why and how Agile is being taken as a way of working. Additionally,
Agile as a concept should be well understood by leaders. Thus they can guide theiremployees throughout their Agile journey. Additionally, it was mentioned that leaders
should have a clear Agile prioritization strategy between the business department
and KONE Technology and Innovation area.

“If you want to be called an Agile leader, maybe the first thing is thatyou should know Agile. Because Agile is a buzzword or a hot topic. So
if you just go and Google it, there are a lot of things that you can find.
Then you read a couple of them, and then you know Agile, or you
69claim that you know it. But an Agile leader should really know Agile.
(Int. 02)”
“I wish, and I have wished this for four and a half years now, thatpeople at KONE would take the time to put their egos aside and cometogether and find a way to solve this Agile at KONE issue. (…) There
are so many different alternatives to what it can be, but it can't be led
by one department over another. And there has to be collaboration.
There has to be a common framework. (Int. 06)”
“Then the next thing that needs to happen is actually better alignment
on what happens on the tactical and operational level when it comesto road mapping and planning. (…) when it comes to the whole
KONE Way and our development portfolio management, there we still
have a lot to be done. So for me at least, and for IT, I see that as anext step that how to improve this forecasting and planningcapabilities and then create transparency and joint decision making.
That is really the next step and immediate step that we need to take.
(Int. 08)”
In the servant leadership and empowered individuals code, it was highlighted how
leaders should act as coaches and let the decision-making on how to achieve resultson the hands of the teams, even if difficult situations emerge or if some escalatingprocess happens. The leader should have a good understanding of where the teams
are struggling. However, they should not provide ready-made answers or takedecisions on behalf of the team. Instead, guide them towards the desired direction.

“(…) first and foremost to just be very genuine and to be there for thepeople. To help them rather than being a star somewhere and not
realizing that you marched off in some direction and nobody followedyou. (Int. 06)”
“I think the servant leadership is quite often mentioned, and I think
the empowerment starts with that mindset on how can I make others
70

successful and enabling people, rather than being the one making all
the decisions and being there as a blocking factor. (Int. 08)”
“Making decisions over a team member when they are the ones
making the decisions. (…) when I joined four and a half years ago,
KONE had this escalation culture that I always got when a manager,
let's say people reporting to me didn't agree with business or anybody
or something, then they came to one level higher and said that thisperson doesn't comply. (…) I would never wish that an Agile leader
would make a decision based on somebody coming and escalating
without listening, kind of forcing them that decision back. (Int. 05)”
The leaders should be open, trustworthy, and close to their teams and serve as an
Agile model codes highlight some of the needed characteristics leaders, in the view ofthe participants, should have if they want to apply the servant leadership successfully.
Additionally, according to the interviewees, leaders should dedicate and should haveappropriate time to be available for their teams and go through the continuous
improvement process together with them.
“We shouldn't give one leader too much scope so that they cannot
manage with that and need to be too far from the teams' day-to-day
work. (Int. 01)”
“I think, first, an Agile leader is someone who's waiting to facechallenges. So challenges by the misunderstanding, challenges by thechange. (Int. 04)”
“An agile leader that is not present, it's managing again, it's notleading. And this human collaboration, this engagement with anindividual, is important. (Int. 07)”
Finally, a comment from some interviewees related to the leadership aspect is that leaders
should focus on team building and trust in general, regardless of the location or theframework being used by their teams to perform their work.
71

4.4.4 Skillset
Closing the recommendations chapter, a set of skills were mentioned by all participants
as important aspects to have when an individual is working in an Agile distributed setup.
These skills are Agile and growth mindset (10 mentions, 5 unique respondents),
proactive collaboration (6 mentions, 5 unique respondents), emotional intelligence (6mentions, 4 unique respondents), active listening and observation (5 mentions, 4 unique
respondents), and courage (4 mentions, 3 unique respondents).
These recommended skills emphasize the idea of having empowered individuals who
are willing to continuously learn new ways of solving problems, who can connect with
their colleagues, and do not wait to be told what to do, but instead have the courage
to experiment and learn with their achievements and mistakes.

“I think you just need to have an open mind and maybe some interestin learning the Agile methodology because there are no difficult
things, you just dig into it, and you just try to figure out what or, if
you cannot figure it out, you just try out the different ceremonies, andyou see what works for you. (Int. 03)”
“Be active, be proactive. Dare to just say what's on your mind, dare
to challenge. Dare to hold others accountable and be the teammember that you would hope the others to be. So if we all just sit on
the side and wait for somebody to take the first step, we will never get
there. (Int. 06)”
To conclude, the figure below is a word cloud generated from the 171 sentences inside
the entire Recommendations theme.

72

Figure 23. Recommendations word cloud. Wordclouds.com.

5 DISCUSSION
Twenty years after the Agile Manifesto for software development was published, KONE
is not alone in the challenges it has been facing when adopting Agile. The Digital.ai
company published, in July 2021, a study that is quite aligned with the results of thisthesis. The figure below, extracted from the Digital.ai research, summarizes the main
struggles the respondents faced in their Agile course:73Figure 24. The most significant barriers in adopting Agile. Digital.ai.15th State of Agile Report, 2021

One interesting mention in the Digital.ai study is that the key challenges perceived incorporations when adopting Agile have remained vastly unchanged in the past several
years.
In this KONE research, it was perceived that often the Agile framework is mixed with theAgile mindset, and people tend to limit Agile as a set of practices of tools andmethodologies, without acknowledging the culture and value parts, which can demand
profound changes in the organization. Additionally, KONE has a current official
operating model which was not built considering the Agile concepts, and this can lead toconfusion when teams try to innovate and adopt Agile, framing it inside the official
framework. It does not work.
Since resistance to change will be faced whenever a new initiative is implemented, it is
crucial that the company has a clear and transparent message towards their employees
where the corporation wants to go and why the change is needed. Also, some official
guidance should be available to all employees, informing that the company is going in acertain direction, what the expectations are, and with guidelines on how individuals canstart with it in their daily lives. This minimizes the impact on when small teams try toexperiment with new ways of working and have the resistance of some of their colleagues
74who are not familiarized with Agile and, therefore, have not had the chance to experiment
its benefits. This can also reduce processes inconsistency. The guidelines do not need tobe perfect and surely should evolve. However, a clear message from the company
regarding the intention towards Agile should be visible to all employees.
The Agile mindset and values cannot only be present in a single sector of the company ora team. Otherwise, these groups of people will face immense cultural clashes and pushbacks once they try to build something. Agile core values should be advocatedcompanywide. In the 15th State of Agile published by Digital.ai, there were some key
benefits that were highlighted when companies adopt Agile:

Figure 25. Positive impacts in implementing Agile. Digital.ai.15th State of Agile Report. 2021

In this thesis focused on Agile in KONE, it has been clearly stated how Agile can bettersupport distributed teams to work better together, and specifically, the cadence of theAgile ceremonies was perceived as a tangible benefit—meaning, having an organizedschedule that often encourages communication with distributed peers can increase
people’s sense of belonging to a team. Another clear positive effect was the improved
collaboration across teams, with the quarterly planning practice being mentioned by theinterviewees, as this is in experimentation by multiple teams. The quarterly planning iswhen teams in KONE can have the opportunity to stop executing work and dedicate
75quality time to think about what they should achieve in the next quarter together withstakeholders who may come from completely different teams.
Although face-to-face collaboration was mentioned as the ideal way to interact with workcolleagues, the existence of distributed teams was not described as a constraint. The main
problem is not having a working culture that embraces the Agile distributed setup andwhich does not allow enough time for colleagues to bond, even if this connection building
needs to be done virtually. Modern tools can support virtual collaboration much better
than in the past. Still, Agile requires that team members trust each other, this builds a
psychologically safe environment that can promote transparency, and this transparency
increases trust in the working collaboration theme.
This transparent and trustworthy culture needs to be supported and fostered by leaders
who are prepared to sponsor their employees when challenges emerge. It was mentioned
in the literature review how important it is for leaders to be a servant of their teams(Lundström and Yusuf, 2021, p. 69). The participants of this research have alsoemphasized, multiple times, that a leader should guide their teams and not take decisions
on behalf of the actual doers of the work. Additionally, Agile should be a familiar concept
for leaders working with Agile. They should not only trust quick guides available on theinternet but also have the core values also intrinsically stored on their minds. Ideally,leaders should have enough time and be close to their teams so they can coach their teams
properly.
Transparency and shared vulnerability should work both ways. As leaders expect
employees to be open about issues, challenges, and ideas, employees also expect theleadership to be transparent in admitting weaknesses, accepting problems during thetransformation journey, and providing constructive feedback to their peers. It is alsoessential to focus on the continuous evolvement of the team. From the perspective of theliterature and from the interviews conducted during this research, it is better for a leader
to be open and assume that answers and solutions are missing than pretend everything is
fine.
Interpersonal skills were regularly mentioned throughout the interviews, and quite rarely
were technical skills commented as a must-have. Interpersonal skills have the power toaffect the employees' social environment directly, and it is something much harder to76

learn than technical skills. Regarding social skills, courage was incorporated as a Scrum
value in 2016, and KONE added this to their values in 2021. The courage to innovate canonly be achieved if working personnel feel they have the support of their leadership in its
most authentic format.
The purpose of this research was to answer the two questions below:● What are the benefits and challenges of using Agile concepts with distributed
teams in KONE?
● What are the recommendations, from a practical point of view, of using the Agile
mindset, principles, and methodologies in KONE with distributed teams?
In conclusion, having company processes that support and embrace agile values with
distributed teams, a talented pool of people with enough available employees who havetime capacity to dedicate themselves into personal growth and balance this with projects,
and capable and trained leaders who can coach Agile distributed teams are the criticalfactors in making Agile in KONE successful.

6 RECOMMENDATIONSONFURTHERRESEARCHAND

CONCLUSION
During the years of this study, mainly 2020 and 2021, the world was affected by a global
pandemic. For future research, it could be helpful to understand companies’ workers'
perceptions of whether the quarantine time, cities lockdown, and anxiety with theuncertainty on how the virus would be developing have affected the perception andbehavior in working with distributed teams. The virus outbreak may be one of the most
relevant social experiments of this era and has redefined people’s perception of jobs, andhas opened opportunities to tackle business problems with different approaches(Jesuthasan, Malcolm, Cantrell, 2020). Additionally, this study focused on the IT
department and its collaborations with Marketing, Business, and the Research andDevelopment areas. More study from outside the IT department could bring interesting
results on how the Agile dynamics work in other fields, such as Finance and Human
Resources. Furthermore, further research on Agile through cultural lenses could be
pertinent because throughout this research, it was often brought to attention how
77companies have been struggling to change their culture, aiming to incorporate the Agile
mindset and values.
In conclusion, this study aimed to understand the benefits and challenges of using Agilein distributed teams and the practical recommendations KONE could leverage when
adopting Agile practices and principles. It was found that the issues KONE has been
facing in adopting Agile are similar to what the general market is encountering in yearsof studies in this subject (Digital.ai, 2021). As shown throughout this study, adopting
tools and practices is easy and can already bring some positive changes. The problem ischanging a company culture that truly embraces the Agile mindset and values, and this iswhere the most meaningful results of Agile adoption can emerge. As described by Rigby,
Sutherland, and Takeuchi in the Harvard Business Review article, Embracing Agile(2016), “Compared with traditional management approaches, agile offers a number ofmajor benefits, all of which have been studied and documented. It increases teamproductivity and employee satisfaction. It minimizes the waste inherent in redundant
meetings, repetitive planning, excessive documentation, quality defects, and low-value
product features.” In addition, Agile can definitely work with distributed setup, and its
ceremonies and cadencies can support employees to collaborate better in comparison toother models of work.
Agile transformation and adoption require dedication from all levels inside the company,
which should have a clear message towards their employees regarding Agile. Equallyimportant, companies need strong leaders who are knowledgeable and fundamentally
believe in such values, capable and courageous employees who are willing to experiment
beyond the traditions pre-established, and a working environment where people trust eachother, so they can dare to be transparent and open with problems and try out creative
solutions for them.
To close, during the interviews, the author asked a question of who should be responsible
for the ownership of Agile. As demonstrated in the course of this study, it is everybody's
responsibility to make Agile a fruitful reality regardless of the company or field people
are working in.

78

“Everyone, everybody should be responsible in adopting it (Agile)and committing to adopting it. (Int. 06)”
“I think first of all, of course the teams themselves. They have to be
responsible because if you don't want to do it (Agile ways of working)they cannot be just forced. If you force them, they won't work. (…) if
they are open to try this out, so then the change happens, because yousee clearly the benefits. (Int. 03)”79

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8 APPENDICES
Appendix 1. Email message: Semi-structured interview questions guideSemi-structured guiding interview questions: Email message
Hi! Thank you in advance for your time. To give you a bit of background, I am writing
my thesis about the practical experience acquired from applying Agile principles andmethodologies in projects with distributed teams and what are the dynamics of culture
and leadership around them.
I have a few questions to go through with you, and the main themes are below for yourreference and preparation.
1. What is your experience with distributed teams?
a. Types of project, types of teams you had, the roles you playedb. Ways of communication, tools, challenges, benefits
2. What is your experience with Agile projects?
a. How do you support your peers and / or team members?
3. What type of benefits have you noticed by working with Agile distributed
teams in KONE?
a. Could you tell one short story?
b. How about challenges of working with Agile distributed teams?
4. How do you define a role model Agile leader?
a. How about the pitfalls an Agile leader must avoid?
I don’t expect you to come with complete answers written down. This is mostly for us
to carry out a conversation around these 4 main questions. Thanks!

Appendix 2. Base script: Semi-structured interview questions guideSemi-structured guiding interview questions: Interview base script

Discussion topic

Examples of questions

Opening and bonding Thanks in advance for your time. This interview will provide
direct input and support to my thesis work on applying Agile
principles and methodologies in projects with distributed teams.
* Are you ok with me recording this interview for later analysis?
Neither the audio nor the transcription will be made available
publicly.
1. To gain some more context, please tell me about yourprofessional background.
2. How long have you been with KONE? What is yourcurrent role?
3. And how long have you been working with distributed
teams? (Interviewer provides the distributed teams
definition used on this research).
4. And how long have you been working with Agile
teams/projects?

Agile methodologies We will discuss about Agile and its principles andand principles

methodologies and we will talk about 3 other themes in parallel:
distributed teams, culture, and leadership role.
1. What is Agile for you?

2. Does your team/project use any specific Agile
methodology? If yes, which one (s)?
a. How do you feel about having or not any
established framework?
3. Who should be responsible for Agile in KONE?
4. What type of benefits have you noticed by using Agilein KONE specifically?
a. Could you tell one short story?
5. How about challenges of working with Agile in
KONE?

Culture in distributed Now talking about working with distributed teams a bit more…
teams
In KONE, you work with people from different cultural
backgrounds.
1. From which countries are the people you talk mostly ona regular basis?
2. What are your thoughts about multicultural teams?
a. What benefits are there to multicultural teams?
b. What challenges are there to multicultural
teams?
c. How do you overcome these challenges?
d. Do you believe that culture plays a bigger orsmaller role in Agile compared to other ways ofworking that you have experienced?

Working

indistributed teams

1. How do you keep in contact with what’s going on withthe team in general?
a. Do you and your team speak about anythingelse other than projects?
b. Do you think this type of communication isimportant? Why?
c. And do you think KONE provides good support
for this type of collaboration?
2. How do you connect teams that are partially co-locatedand partially virtual?
a. Does this hybrid practice introduce benefits?
How about challenges?
3. What do you see as challenges over face-to-facecollaboration?
a. Do you have any ways of overcoming thesechallenges?

Distributed

teamcollaboration

in

Agile

/

projects

teams

1. What do you think about collaboration with Agile
distributed teams?

Leadership

For leaders:
1. How do you prioritize your team/project work,
meaning, how do you make sure they are focusing only
on the important items? Do you and they have visibilityof the goals to be achieved?
a. Can you briefly describe your process forrequirement gathering until having theitem/feature/request available for yourusers/customers?
b. Can you think about any improvements that you
feel could be done in this area?
2. What skills do you believe are needed to work in an
Agile distributed team?
a. Which is the most important to you? Why?
3. How do you define a role model Agile leader?
a. How about the pitfalls an Agile leader must
avoid?
For team members:
1. How do leaders prioritize work in your team/project,meaning, how do they make sure you and the team arefocusing only on the important items? Do you havevisibility of the goals to be achieved?
a. Can you briefly describe your process forrequirement

gathering

item/feature/request

until

havingtheavailable

for

your

users/customers?
b. Can you think about any improvements that you
feel could be done in this area?
2. What skills do you believe are needed to work in an
Agile distributed team?
a. Which is the most important to you? Why?
3. How do you define a role model Agile leader?
a. How about the pitfalls an Agile leader must
avoid?

Recommendations

1. Before we close, regarding the theme of our discussion,
would you have any final thoughts or comments? Whatwould you recommend to a person working in KONE
with Agile distributed teams?

Thanks and closing

I deeply appreciate the time you spent with me today, and thehelp with the development of my master thesis. Once I finish it,planning for early winter of 2021, I will make sure to share theresults with you.