At Agile Tour Vienna 2025, Christian Gusenleitner and Christian Eis from Untis (yes, a company older than Microsoft and Apple!) shared how they rebuilt the way their organization manages work – not by adopting a new framework, but by making work visible, limiting WIP, and following flow principles.
The result: more focus, faster delivery, and far more reliable promises to customers.
Founded in 1970, building timetable software for schools on punch cards, long before “agile” was even a word.
That’s Untis. And a few years ago, despite all that history, the company hit a very modern problem: too much work in progress, too little focus, and almost no shared picture of what was actually going on.
At Agile Tour Vienna 2025, two coaches from Untis – both named Christian – walked us through exactly how they fixed it. Not with a new framework. Not by telling teams “you’re doing it wrong.” Just four simple, deliberate steps, applied with a lot of patience over one to two years.
Before the change, Untis (around 150 people across 10 product teams) was dealing with:
If any of that rings a bell, you’re not alone. And that’s the point.
Instead of imposing a new way of working, Untis started by mapping what already existed. Every team got a clear kanban flow – visible start and end points, work-in-progress limits, cycle time, and work age.
The goal wasn’t to redesign how teams worked. It was to make the existing reality visible, even when that reality was uncomfortable.
Once daily work was under control, the next question was: what is all this work actually for? Untis introduced “goal” boards – bigger chunks of work (think epics) following the same principles: visible flow, WIP limits, and aging.
This is where it got real. All the team-level goals were pulled onto one shared board. For the first time, Untis could see, across the whole organization, how much was genuinely in flight.
The number? 74 major initiatives in progress. 63 more are already planned. 59 waiting behind that.
The team introduced a weekly 30-minute cross-team alignment meeting around this board – and over the following one to two years, brought that number down from 74 to 26. Same teams, same people, radically more focus.
The final piece was making sure strategic goals actually matched what teams were doing day to day – using the same visualization, the same flow principles, just applied at the top level too. The result: a “Flight Level” system, where each layer – team, goals, strategy – moves at its own pace but stays aligned with the layers above and below.
Here’s a number that says it all. Before Untis introduced a “zero open backlog” policy for defects, the best they could tell customers was: with 85% confidence, your bug will be fixed within 836 days.
After the change? 15 days.
Same team. Same tools (Jira and Actionable Agile – nothing exotic). Just radically clearer flow and focus.
No framework was imposed – not Scrum, not Kanban, nothing off-the-shelf. The underlying principles (Little’s Law, flow metrics, WIP limits) stayed constant; each team chose its own structure on top.
What it did take: patience. About one to two years of consistently facing uncomfortable data, falling back into old habits, and trying again. As the speakers put it – this isn’t about managing people harder. It’s about managing the work.
