Initial Scenario
More than 50 years being in the industry, this Fortune 500 company had been delivering projects using traditional methodologies. Requirements gathering often took more than 40% of their entire delivery time-cycle. Hand-offs between design and technology teams were the norm. As a result, their products were mostly delivered late and were often over-budget.
Business and technology teams were often not aligned with the delivery goals and faced challenges to meet the desired timelines. The technology leadership felt change was the need of the hour. Time to market had to decrease and quality of end-product had to increase to create a stellar experience for their customers. With over 8 billion dollars in revenue and over 20,000 employees, the stage was set for a new norm.
Welcome Agile Brains
The company engaged Agile Brains to assist with their Agile transformation initiative. Our team of Lean-Agile consultants started with an organizational assessment from Senior Leadership teams to middle management to individual contributors. The results of the assessment were crystal clear. Teams needed to be trained in Agile methodologies and pilot implementation for one of their marquee products.
The assessment allowed the client to create and deliver role-based training for the business and technology teams. Agile Brains started by delivering Agile for Executives workshop for combined technology and business leaders. The course allowed the leadership teams to understand value-delivery and made it clear “Agile transformation” is a business initiative and would not work without support of leadership of both group. Subsequently, customized, Agile boot-camp sessions and Agile Program Portfolio management workshops were conducted helping middle-management embrace value-delivery and start thinking about incremental and iterative delivery.
Agile Brains partnered with the client to bring an Enterprise Agile coach on board to assist the client to implement Scrum and Kanban methodologies for their technology teams.
Business Value Delivered
Even though few teams were using Agile but it was restricted to daily stand ups and sprints. After a period of 6 months, the client was able to build cross-functional teams with a dedicated product owner from the business divisions.
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Creation of a central Agile Center of Excellence to identify needs for large scale initiatives
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Improvement in employee morale by over 30 percent
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Reduction in turn-over by over 20 percent
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Over 300 employees trained and certified in Agile methodologies
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Delivery of the flag online portal iteratively with the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) going to market ahead of schedule with projected revenue increase of over 10M over 2 years