This Agile success story is drawn from the Agile Experience Report “Making it stick: driving Agile behaviours with influence, not authority” written by Eoin Cannon.
Change is never as tidy as the playbook suggests. Asahi Europe set out to make HR more Agile — faster decisions, smoother collaboration, and a business that could improvise like a jazz band instead of marching to bureaucracy’s slow beat.
But transformation is rarely clean. The challenge wasn’t just adopting Agile; it was making it stick.
1. Context: A traditional structure in need of Agility
Industry: Beverage & Consumer Goods
Company Size: Regional market leader with multiple country-specific operating businesses
Starting Point: A highly decentralized structure where each country had significant autonomy, leading to slow decision-making and limited cross-functional collaboration.
Agile wasn’t just new to them; it was alien. Even the digital teams hadn’t fully embraced it. But HR saw an opportunity: What if they could introduce Agile not just as a process but as a way of thinking?
2. Stakes: What was on the line?
Business risks & opportunities
- Graduate hiring was struggling in key markets like Poland and Czechia.
- The performance rating system was outdated, causing frustration and inefficiency.
- HR projects moved at a snail’s pace, often tangled in layers of approvals and bureaucracy.
Cultural & team challenges
- Leadership had little exposure to Agile, making buy-in difficult.
- Most employees saw Agile as an IT thing — not something for HR or business functions.
- Without full-time Agile teams, there was a risk of reversion to waterfall methods.
3. Challenges: The roadblocks along the way
If Agile were a Hollywood blockbuster, the villain wouldn’t be a person but a mindset, an attachment to the old way of doing things. Here’s what stood in the way:
- Decentralization paralysis: Each country had its own way of doing things, making regional collaboration difficult.
- Waterfall reflex: Even after Agile training, teams defaulted back to long, drawn-out project cycles.
- Leadership skepticism: Many executives weren’t sure how Agile could apply outside of software development.
- Overloaded teams: People wanted to try Agile, but their day-to-day work left little room for experimentation.
4. Approach: How Agile was introduced
Phase 1: Early Agile Experiments (2018)
The first step wasn’t a company-wide overhaul but a focused experiment. HR ran two Agile sprints:
- Graduate Hiring Sprint: A cross-functional team redesigned the recruitment framework in just three days.
- Performance Rating Sprint: A new, simplified evaluation system was created with direct employee input.
Results: The projects delivered concrete outcomes, but the challenge was keeping Agile alive beyond the sprint.
Phase 2: AgileHR training (2020)
With COVID-19 forcing remote work, the HR team rolled out an 8-week virtual training program covering:
- Agile fundamentals and Scrum practices.
- User-focused design thinking approaches.
- Live application of Agile to real HR projects.
Results: HR started speaking the language of Agile, but only a few teams had the confidence to fully embrace it.
Phase 3: Expanding Agile across the business (2021)
The transformation team developed a structured adoption plan using:
- Maturity mapping: Identifying different levels of Agile fluency across the company.
- Executive coaching: Training leaders in Poland, Romania, and the Netherlands.
- Community building: Internal Agile advocates started meeting regularly.
Results: Some business units thrived (Poland led the way), while others stalled due to leadership disengagement.
5. Outcomes: What changed?
Measurable business improvements
- Graduate hiring process streamlined, reducing time-to-fill by 30%.
- Performance evaluation system modernized and adopted across multiple regions.
- Cross-functional HR collaboration improved, reducing project lead times.
Cultural shifts
- Agile gained traction beyond HR, influencing transformation and digital teams.
- Poland became a success story, with senior leadership actively participating in Agile processes.
- However, some teams abandoned Agile when workloads increased, highlighting sustainability issues.
6. Lessons learned
What worked
- Agile succeeds when applied to real business challenges, not as an abstract framework.
- Training is more effective for intact teams than for individuals learning in isolation.
- Agile needs leaders to engage, not just approve from a distance.
What didn’t
- Without follow-up support, many teams reverted to old ways of working.
- Not all countries had an internal Agile champion, making adoption inconsistent.
- Agile was sometimes seen as a side project rather than a core way of working.
7. Reflections
If there’s one lesson from this case study, it’s that Agile isn’t something you install like a software update; it’s a mindset shift. Asahi Europe made strides in transforming HR, but sustaining Agile requires ongoing effort, leadership commitment, and the willingness to evolve.
For any organization looking to follow a similar path, the key is to start small, build momentum, and never assume that Agile can be “finished.” Real agility is a habit, not a destination.
Read the original Experience Report “Making it stick: driving Agile behaviours with influence, not authority” by Eoin Cannon.
