Embracing change: My three-year Porsche adventure

A little more than three years ago, I added this short description to my XING profile, got invited to an IT career fair by Porsche and signed my contract shortly afterward.

Today it is exactly three years ago that I embarked on my Porsche adventure. I have never regretted this decision, although it did turn my life upside down a bit. I got thrown into a new environment with new daily routines, which required a lot of courage and adaptability. But that's just what digital transformation demands of all my colleagues and the entire automotive industry: the courage to break new ground every day.

The move to Porsche meant more than 40 miles of commuting back and forth every day as a working mom with school-age children. It meant working with 32,000 people instead of 200. It meant getting involved in new processes, new products, and a new IT landscape. Back then, my kids said, “Do it, mom! We have your back.” So I seized the opportunity and with the support of my family and the entire Porsche team, I took on this new challenge.

Reviewing this decision confirms what I have long believed in: I just have to be curious, courageous and open, and then I can rise to any challenge.

Reboot, network and be curious

The biggest challenge in my new job was the network. People are the focus of my work - my customers are internal employees. As an agile coach, I bring teams together and help them organize their own mode of collaboration. For me it is important, even essential, to know the people I work with. That's much easier in a 200-member software company than a global player in the automotive market. So it was right at the top of my to-do list to find out what makes this organization tick, a corporation after all that has been around for more than 70 years. My concerns about the size of the company were unfounded. For those who didn't know it yet: Porsche is a small family ;-)

Change and adapt

I moved from Ukraine to Germany in 1995. I got to know the language, the country, and the people while I studied business mathematics in Karlsruhe and started a family at the same time. Before my job at Porsche, I created IT products myself and worked as a test manager in a SCRUM team. At Porsche, I started in the IT quality department. Now I work as an agile coach for finance and IT. For me, change is nothing to be afraid of. Nevertheless, new situations and new tasks always require personal development. I have adapted - to a new country, a new language, to family, studies, and career - while always maintaining my values. We should always ask ourselves: How can I change the world around me? How do I adapt not myself and my person, but my behavior?

I am part of the set-up team Agile@Porsche. We enable the organization to manage complexity, establish agile working methods and help our employees to find a new, future-proof framework for their cooperation - in theory and practice, with rules and values.

We advise teams on which approach makes sense under which conditions. We care for an agile mindset, the development of working methods and the necessary infrastructure. Wherever there's an obstacle, we help product owners and those who work on the products.

Just give it a try and be courageous

The courage to change things can also start on a small scale: At some point, I stumbled across the hashtag #gerneperDu and found the initiative so great that I wrote it in my e-mail signature and highlighted it in color. I immediately received positive feedback from my colleagues, many of whom now use the hashtag themselves. Basically it's just about that: Just try something, be courageous!

That is what has shaped my work at Porsche over the past three years. I have found that the learning curve here never diminishes - if I just remain curious and courageous.

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A contribution from Anna Roizman, Agile Coach at Porsche AG