EVOLVING TO BUSINESS AGILITYCase Study

EVOLVING TO BUSINESS AGILITY: CASE STUDY 2

THE CHALLENGE In the five years that we have been engaged with our client, a lo-gistics multi-national, we have seen them grow tremendously. Yet despite that growth, three years ago, they recognized their need to evolve their existing delivery agility capability into more holistic business agility across the organization. In many ways, our client's experience reflects that of the general Agile industry, going from Scrum to scaling agility with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and now to business agility. Our challenge was to help the client evolve gracefully without losing any of the momentum they have been building over the years.

The primary drivers for business agility transformation were:

• long delivery cycles at all levels

• poor forecasting and predictability

• unengaged leadership

• silos across the organization that stymied change

AT A GLANCETIMELINE 3 year

THE TEAM 5 Agile coaches

INVESTMENT 6 million dollars

OUTCOME HIGHLIGHTSUP TO 66% FASTER LEAD TIMESAverage lead times for value delivery were reduced from 18 months to 6 to 9 months.

$40M+ ANTICIPATED ROI IMPROVEMENTOne strategic initiative was delivered a year ahead of plan resulting in an additional $40M+ in anticipated ROI.

EVOLVING TO BUSINESS AGILITY: CASE STUDY 3

THE APPROACH The first course of action was to reveal the client system to itself, including its strengths and weaknesses, where it was effective and where decisions about the organization as a whole, its culture and technological capabilities were limiting further success. In the years that we were establishing a strong relationship with our client, their leadership tried to execute their transformation using siloed steering committees across Business and IT that were not yielding the anticipated results. We evolved this approach into our transformation model (below), which created more effective feedback loops and team empowerment at every level.

To suit our client's unique needs, we adapted our existing transformation delivery model by dividing the Transformation Leadership Team into two layers: a strategic SVP layer and a more tactical layer composed of VPs and MDs. This was in addition to the Transformation Enablement Program layer we also established. The complexity and size of the engagement inspired our delivery team to adopt SAFe patterns like big room planning, team breakouts, and mapping dependencies to support effective planning, execution, alignment and transparency of the transformation program. This proved to be a great way to keep energy up and keep leadership informed.

EVOLVING TO BUSINESS AGILITY: CASE STUDY 4

Another primary focus throughout the engagement was change management and communication across the organization. Key to this effort was helping the client establish a Coaching Office – a hub for growing the people and teams that would together drive our client's overall transformation. They called it “the Agile Transformation & Enablement Office.” By aligning to the vision, strategy and goals as identified and championed by leadership, coaches and change agents were more effective in their roles. The Coaching Office also radiated learnings and feedback to the Enablement and Transformation Leadership Teams.

A third key element was cultivating people, helping them absorb the responsibilities and possibilities of their new roles and also helping the client and employees co-create new career paths. To support this growth, we provided training, coaching and consulting on a wide range of topics to help our client achieve proficiency in areas like:

• Portfolio management & governance

• Value stream alignment

• Modern architecture

• Organizational change management

• Scaling agility with SAFe

THE BUSINESS VALUE OF FACE-TO-FACE COLLABORATION

In every engagement, there is a dynamic tension between how we as consultants deliver value and what the client sees as adding value. One such source of tension is face-to-face vs. virtual collaboration. For our client, we implemented in-person Quarterly Planning sessions, which offer room for everyone to add their unique value, in addition to business results like the following:

Collaborative planning across the account team creates a consistent approach for our clients.

A holistic understanding of the client’s needs across internal organizations allows us to come up with innovative solutions to organizational problems.

Diversity of thought and experience helps us deliver higher-quality results more efficiently and effectively.

EVOLVING TO BUSINESS AGILITY: CASE STUDY 5

OUTCOMES • Reduced lead times for value delivery from average of 18 months to 6 to 9 months

• Delivered one strategic initiative a year ahead of plan resulting in an additional $40M+ in anticipated ROI

• Created more alignment with other portfolios, breaking down silos between them and uniting under an enterprise-wide vision of business agility

• Established new values around adaptive planning over sticking to a plan, steering the change, and small batch org changes, which significantly improved alignment, adaptability, and success of changes

• Evolved an “install SAFe” mindset into an “achieve business agility” mindset

• Improved planning, forecasting, and tracking of progress

• Opened up communication channels between Strategic Planning, Finance and different parts of the client organization

• Established reliability, predictability and transparency into program planning, execution, and delivery

• Improved communication and collaboration across Business and IT

• Eliminated several organizational silos

• Established a team-based culture

• Increased flow of business value delivered to internal and external customers

• Improved software quality and customer experience via reduced escaped defects

• Built sustainability into the transformation initiative with an internal coaching office and mature ScrumMasters

EVOLVING TO BUSINESS AGILITY: CASE STUDY 6

LEARNINGS • Agile transformation needs as much investment and steering as any other

initiative. Leadership didn’t know how much time they would need to effectively start transforming.

• SAFe – or any framework - is not the goal, but a means to achieving the goal. Many of our business agility clients, the goal is business agility transformation across the enterprise to enable our clients to delight their customers and improve the lives of their employees, stakeholders and communities.

TESTIMONIALS

"SolutionsIQ has been instrumental to the success of the Business Agility [Transformation] Program. I appreciate their guidance and support of our journey, as our [transformation] partner in designing and implementing the governance program to improve business outcomes."

- VP OF BUSINESS AGILITY, DECISION SCIENCE & PROCESS ENGINEERING

“Our meetings have been cut in half and it is much easier to manage our offshore counterparts with our new workflow...”

- AGILE TEAM MEMBER

“Our team continues to see positive impacts sprint-over-sprint by gaining more control over our work-in-progress and by implementing Agile techniques, which have been extremely helpful.”

- SCRUM MASTER

“Our feature development and prioritization processes have improved as we have setup our feature board to provide better transparency into how we create value and make decisions. This has reduced stress on the team and allowed us to more effectively focus on delivering value to our customers."

- SAFE AGILE RELEASE TRAIN PROGRAM LEADER