Working with clients to achieve great outcomes and agile ways of working are what Agile Mind does best
CASE STUDY: helping a startup scale up. Read more here.
CASE STUDY: bring agile ways of working to a large operations division
A global financial services client needed help transforming their operations group towards a more agile way of working. This was driven by the recognition from leadership that the existing waterfall way of delivering was no longer viable in an environment of continuously changing regulations as well as a new business strategy to mange client market demand changes.
The main focus was on coaching teams as well as the senior leadership on matters such as value streams and hypothesis-driven development. Mark McKee was able to leverage his engineering and architecture skills to help teams ask more thought-provoking questions about the business value of what they were being asked to deliver and ensuring that tech debt was being remediated.
Outcomes: the biggest insight gained was the need for a culture of product ownership and the need to re-organise into value streams. Coaching on product ownership was delivered, along with the ability to reduce friction in governance by automating reporting of progress to PMO functions through Jira tooling. That required teams to have the discipline to keep all their epics and stories up to date and apply the governance that agile ways of working demands.
Finally, people became comfortable that user stories were more effective than business requirements documents and aided a clearer mutual understanding between teams and stakeholders to design and build the right thing that reduced rework.
CASE STUDY: help a private equity firm make a decision on a technology investment
A prestigious private equity client was looking to take an ownership stake in a software firm and wanted to get an understanding of whether it was a sound investment. Mark McKee was brought in to conduct technical due diligence of the software firm: their software design, security, deployment, GUI, server technology and customer support coverage. He was also asked to assess the skills of the team, including the management.
Outcomes: after an on-site visit to the software firm in Switzerland, the client received a detailed report and briefing on the findings. The result was that this expert report enabled them to make an informed decision to invest in the technology company.
CASE STUDY: working towards outcomes and not milestones
A financial services client needed to reduce transaction and brokerage costs by making use of automated trading software from another part of the banking group. In effect this was a large systems integration exercise involving teams that hadn’t worked together in the past and had very differing styles. Management wanted a set of delivery milestones to cover 18 months with zero budget slippage.
What Mark McKee advocated for was a set of agreed outcomes that would help achieve business goals. The purpose was to avoid a command & control situation where delivery personnel would have deadlines imposed upon them. By proposing an experiment whereby small steps would be delivered in sprints, the effect was to show progress quickly. This required building trust whilst adjusting to these (at times painful) cultural changes, but people were good enough to agree to these early stages as an experiment. The outputs from these experiments enabled more useful estimates that were based upon delivered features. This meant that the main outcomes had more of a path to delivery and could be extrapolated from the data. We agreed to achieve the main features by financial quarter (i.e. in Q3 rather than on 31 July). This improved confidence when the features landed in those quarters.
Outcomes: In the end, the agreed features that met business goals were delivered within an 18-month period and all was done within budget, bringing substantial savings.
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