Agile2014

The organisation had grown from 200 employees to 700 over three years. The Service delivery team were finding it difficult to keep up with the growth. They had a backlog of work, process issues, waste in the resourcing model and quality issues. The innovative, "can do" attitude was still there but we were having growing pains.



To achieve portfolio growth aims for the organisation and delivery for clients, we decided to create a modern, robust and effective product strategy, development and delivery capability that could be scaled to the whole organisation through training and mentoring team in Scrum and Lean delivery.



Our Aim was to:

• Improve quality of product delivery

• Improve trust in the organisation’s products

• Improve capability to manage the value stream of products – from conception through to delivery with reduced risk and improved bottom-line.

• Improve predictability of estimates on costs of product development

• Increase transparency of the value stream and product pipeline.

• Maximise the revenue stream through a focus on quantifying value and removing waste over reduction in costs.



What we did was develop governance, risk and product management frameworks to support and optimise lean delivery while maximising ROI and implement Scrum and Scaled Agile frameworks to assist the organisation to scale its agile capability.

We started with the project teams and then created a roadmap for deployment of the strategy at a program level as well as throughout the enterprise.



To alleviate our growing pains, the resourcing model for the organisation needed to change so we totally restructured the teams. Project managers were replaced by product owners. Focus on billable hours and utilisation was replaced with team sprint goals and WIP limits. We created multidisciplinary teams and removed the functional reporting lines and created feature driven teams that focused on the user's view and use of our products. The team members were at first overwhelmed by starting this process mid delivery of some products, however we employed a Scrum coach to help mentor us through the process and work the product owners and master scrum master.