Xebia Articles

Witteveen+Bos is an engineering and consultancy firm with 22 offices in 11 countries. Its global team of over 1,200 engineers is responsible for completing an average of 4,000 projects in infrastructure, water, the environment, and construction yearly. Witteveen+Bos aims to create sustainable solutions, maximum client value, and opportunities for its workforce's ongoing development.

An interview with Otto Schepers, Manager Digital Acceleration & Support Lead at Witteveen+Bos, conducted by Michael Maurer, Principal Digital Data Consultant at Xebia.

Serious Gaming is increasingly used to train teams and to develop effective leadership in organizations. What benefits does this bring over traditional training in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitude? Where can you best apply Serious Gaming in your organization, and when would it be better to opt for traditional training? It is clear that our learning needs are changing. We want it to be faster, it has to be fun and different, and more impactful. What’s more, we want to challenge people and invite them to think and work out of the box from time to time. 

Let's start with a hard and inconvenient truth: transforming your business is a highly complex undertaking with social, organizational, and technological factors at play. Many (research McKinsey 70%) organizations fail to deliver on their transformation's promises.

How to Be Ready for the Future? Invest in Sustainable Growth. Invest in the Workforce of the Future.

Ask CHROs how much time and money they spent on finding the right person for a job - they will admit it's quite a lot. A large part of HR's budget will go towards recruiting and onboarding people to introduce new skills and competencies. But what about developing the capabilities of your current team? Why is that option so frequently overlooked?

Data is the new gold, and becoming a data-driven company is at the top of many companies' change calendars. However, transforming your business proves to be challenging. It requires great alignment across many layers and effective collaboration between Business, IT, and Data Science.

Shifting paradigms unlocks new possibilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a great case in point, showing that being Digital and Agile is what differentiates between those that adapt, and those that fail and become irrelevant as part of a natural evolution process. Still, most companies are not able to take advantage of this shift. Often, a clear shared vision to build a strategy and set concrete goals and expectations is missing, diluting the value delivery down in the organizational trenches. Furthermore, the organization often gets stuck in politics, individual motives, and human biases, also known as a ‘social strategy’, disabling, and debilitating the ability for change to be manifested in the desired behaviors. In many cases, the leadership shies away from making big moves and instead sticks to the status quo. This results in semi-cooked or no digital and agile change. This is understandable, since managing change amidst complexity is risky and requires bold moves and significant time investment from the leadership.

DigiBankASIA and Xebia Forge a Strategic Technology Partnership for the Launch of New digital bank UNO

Data science teams frequently struggle to deliver business value because the results of their work are not embedded in the organization. Often data science teams work somewhat isolated and try to push their output into the organization. As a Product Owner (PO) you are uniquely positioned to pull this work into the organization, thereby increasing the odds of creating business value. To do this effectively, you may need to better understand data science and how you can leverage it to build better products, regardless of the product you own. Let’s explore.

Games can be used for more than just entertainment. Serious Gaming or Applied Gaming combines game craft technique with business, leadership, culture, behavior, or social issues. In Serious Games, you can search for boundaries, experiment, change strategies, and make mistakes without immediately incurring real-life consequences. In this way, you practice skills and build experience with the new behavior, which increases the self-confidence to show this behavior in reality.