The Challenge
A key new business system development had stalled. Global Radio needed to get the project back on track with confidence that benefits would be delivered as planned against the significant investment being made. Having got in to a position where there was lack of clarity over the requirements, poor progress on the development and absence of a clear plan for completion, Global Radio realised they would need to take a fresh approach.
Our Approach
Agility in Mind was specifically engaged to:
- Implement agile product delivery practices.
- Help deliver the business critical system.
- Achieve better alignment and collaboration between the commercial business and the systems development departments.
- Build the confidence of product owners and support them to make the vital contribution needed for success.
- Support the development teams in adoption of new working practices.
Agility in Mind undertook a rapid initial assessment of the situation, speaking with senior managers and the development team, to gain insight into the needs of the project, the teams and the business.
A plan of action was formulated, prioritised on achieving a common understanding of the scope of the project including its business drivers and vision for success.
Following a brief look into the 400+ requirements that had been written over several months, the recommendation was made to generate a new working backlog from scratch, appropriately shaped and prioritised to meet the current needs of the business. Within a few days, the product was planned and a backlog created through joint working between the commercial and technical teams.
Agility in Mind then supported the newly-formed multidisciplinary team with bespoke training in agile, lean, Kanban and behaviour-driven development.
During the course of the project, Agility in Mind maintained an active involvement with fortnightly input for management and teams, to help keep the development on track. This included review of progress by use of metrics and supporting retrospective meetings to maintain on-going improvements.
Outcomes
For a project that had spent more than 18 months delivering little of any use, the agile product delivery approach meant working product within weeks. Business and IT developed a new partnership, actively focused upon delivering a successful product based upon identified business value. The senior board became more confident that a return would be achieved from the significant investment made in the development and it would achieve the competitive advantage they sought. The full solution was delivered within newly forecast time scales with progress visible throughout the project.
What our client said
Agility in Mind delivered exactly what Global Radio needed – pragmatic appropriate consultancy and training that helped us to succeed in changing our delivery methodology.We’d previously dabbled with Agile software development so knew some of the principles but had lapsed back to waterfall and were inadequately qualified for the large cultural change project we needed to tackle.
They listened to us and gave consultancy on how to proceed, delivered customised hands on training in agile practices appropriate to our knowledge/skill level that enabled the team to make the transition from a waterfall based to a Kanban approach in a matter of days.We’re now comfortable and delivering effectively with the new method which includes continual recursive process improvement. We could manage this ourselves but we value the input so strongly that we have retained Agility in Mind for “drop in” assistance and consultancy for the duration of the project.”
Trevor Howard
Business Systems Manager at Global Radio
