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Building an agility based culture in India’s largest FMCG Company
Building Agile Mindset & Culture in One of India’s Largest FMCG Organisations
Client Overview
The client is one of India’s largest and oldest FMCG enterprises, operating nationwide for over a century with a diverse portfolio and a widespread manufacturing footprint. Leadership recognised the need to build a more Agile, collaborative, and innovation-led culture to stay competitive in a VUCA environment marked by evolving consumer expectations, emerging disruptions, and operational complexities.
The organisation sought a consulting partner to design an immersive learning program that would introduce Agile principles to mid-level leaders and equip them to drive cultural transformation across manufacturing units and business functions.
Business Challenges
The organisation faced several cultural and operational challenges that constrained responsiveness, collaboration, and innovation:
Fragmented Decision-Making
Siloed functions across manufacturing, operations,
and business units limited alignment and collective execution.
Leadership Mindset Shift
Leaders required adoption of an iterative, customer-centric approach focused on progress over perfection.
Limited Agile Awareness
Agile principles needed contextualisation beyond IT to suit manufacturing and FMCG operating models.
Need for Continuous Improvement Culture
Organisation aimed to embed faster feedback loops, experimentation, and a proactive problem-solving mindset.
Scalable Transformation Foundation
Required a structured framework to enable scalable Agile adoption across teams, functions, and operational processes.
Cross-Functional Alignment Imperative
Stronger collaboration mechanisms were essential to reduce silos and support unified business outcomes.
Our Approach
NextAgile adopted a structured and contextualised approach to introduce Agile concepts in a Non-IT, manufacturing-led environment.
- Conducted need analysis with senior leadership to understand cultural gaps and transformation priorities.
- Assessed current ways of working, collaboration patterns, and leadership maturity across business and manufacturing units.
- Identified learning themes tied to real challenges such as siloed workflows, slow decision cycles, and limited experimentation.
- Designed a fully customised Agile learning program tailored for a Non-IT FMCG environment.
- Curated content around incremental and iterative ways of working, flow-based execution, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Integrated FMCG examples, operational scenarios, and manufacturing use cases to ensure relevance and adoption.
- Evolved the program iteratively based on participant insights, feedback, and cultural nuances surfaced during sessions.
- Delivered interactive workshops to 120–140 leaders and managers across multiple regional locations over a 6-month period.
- Introduced concepts such as:
- breaking work into smaller increments
- self-organisation and shared ownership
- visual workplace and WIP management
- timeboxed meetings and structured communication
- customer-centricity and empathy-led product thinking
- Used simulations, activities, games, and real discussions to translate abstract Agile principles into applicable behavioural shifts.
- Facilitated structured reflection sessions to identify existing strengths, pain points, and cultural barriers.
- Helped teams align around a shared understanding of agility, one-team mindset, and collective ownership of change.
- Captured feedback related to autonomy, resource planning, recognition systems, and growth—shared with senior leadership to inform Phase 2.
- Outlined opportunities to transition from learning to application through Agile pilot projects.
- Recommended immediate low-hanging fruits such as timeboxing, inter-team syncs, retrospectives, and visual workflow management.
- Established the foundation for a future execution-focused engagement aligned to doing Agile and scaling practices sustainably.
Impact & Outcomes
The engagement created strong momentum across the organisation and enabled leadership to take informed steps toward cultural transformation:
Strong Organisational Engagement
Manufacturing and business teams demonstrated heightened interest and participation in Agile concepts.
Shared Alignment on Agility
Agility was embraced across levels as a collective behavioural shift rather than a top-down directive.
Adoption of High-Impact Practices
Simple practices—retrospectives, timeboxing, flow-based work, and structured communication—delivered immediate value.
Strengthened Leadership Dialogue
More effective discussions emerged between mid-level and senior leaders on workflow challenges and resource planning.
Foundation for Scaling Agility
A unified organizational baseline was established to enable structured adoption in Phase 2.
Readiness for Cross-Functional Application
Teams were prepared to apply Agile ways of working to real operational and cross-functional initiatives.
Testimonial
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If you aim to build Agile culture, leadership capability, and cross-functional collaboration in a Non-IT, operational, or manufacturing environment, NextAgile can help.
