The team I was working with had a “great problem” – more work than we could deliver. However this success brought mixed blessings as the strain of growing so quickly was starting to show. We had a backlog of work, process issues, resourcing and quality issues and a lot of knowledge residing with one or two of the original start-up team who were now single points of failure.
The innovative, “can do” attitude of the start-up company was still there but we were having growing pains. We knew that what we were experiencing in our market (Australia) would eventually be seen in our USA market if we didn’t find a solution to our growing pains.
We looked to Lean and Agile as a multidisciplinary approach to achieving an effective product strategy, development and delivery capability that could be scaled to the whole organisation.
As a result of our optimisation for lean delivery we had an empowered team, improved quality, know velocity and capacity and an organisation that is learning to deal with changes and project complexity. In the short term we achieved greater transparency of projects, increased collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams and the team now had a better understanding of the “what” and definition of done and a process to handle unknowns and respond to changes. Projects are now managed in programs of work and we now have a product and service delivery roadmap to ensure enterprise aims for product development are linked to implementation strategy and delivery.
Outcomes
Adopting Scrum helped to improve delivery capability and enhance product co-development partnerships and decreased the risk of failure to deliver the Program of work in a timely fashion. This was done through employing a number of methods and techniques, including working collaboratively with stakeholders and end-users, simplifying governance and increasing accountability and employing iterative methods, rather than a ‘big bang’ approach. Encouraging frequent inspection and adaption, teamwork and collaboration between the project’s members ensure that knowledge and skills were shared within and across teams as the process scaled from project delivery to program and portfolio level delivery.
The artefacts and learnings from the Australian pilot were adopted by the global PMO and we are now helping to roll out this framework to other regions. Once clients become a program of work, we had a scalable and proven method to ensure we continue to deliver a quality outcome.
An important part of our aim was to optimise for lean delivery. Scrum’s processes are explicitly engineered to identify and decrease waste and the organisation was able to ensure that through the PRINCE2 governance framework the project was empowered to be responsive to changes in its environment so that delivery aligns with changing user, stakeholder and organisational needs. This ensured that all of the Program’s features delivered were useful and of high-value.
