Building a more agile and innovative organisation

Our customer is the leading independent conveyancing and property services group.  It has grown through acquisition and consists of several businesses that are integrated to varying degrees.

Whilst they have grown successfully over recent years it has faced several challenges (including COVID, a security incident and economic pressures) that have reduced opportunities for capital investment and have caused challenges in scaling capacity.

Now with P/E backing, they have an overriding strategic objective to demonstrate it is a new-generation legal process and property move business.  This will be delivered through both process and technology transformation.

The conveyancing and property services group has identified a significant portfolio of change to deliver its business imperatives of enable flexible scaling, being seen as innovative, increasing EBITDA and being demonstrably tech-driven and agile.

However, they had not delivered significant change for several years and there were concerns the current approach and internal capability for delivering change was too slow and risk averse to support the change ambition. There was a desire to adopt a more agile project delivery approach that would allow faster mobilisation of projects, quicker realisation of outcomes and improve the alignment of delivery around customer outcomes.

A failure to address the persistent delivery challenges would undermine the strategic goals and scalability ambitions.

Project One were deployed to help the organisation define an Agile delivery model that balanced their aspiration for Agile delivery with pragmatic considerations. Project One undertook a discovery phase to engage with stakeholders and review the current organisational agility looking at: the current Team dynamics and ways of working, the Organisation environment and Programme Operations.  The stakeholder engagement also built an understanding of the business imperatives, thinking on future organisational structure, operating model and desired culture.

Based on the discovery work, Project One established a baseline for the customer’s current agile maturity. In conjunction with the customer, we explored a variety of agile delivery models and assessed their fit with the current maturity, the change aspiration and the organisational cultural.

A hybrid agile delivery model was recommended that provided a framework for managing the full complexity of the change portfolio, maintained good governance whilst allowing Agile practices to be embraced to ensure faster delivery of value and adaptability to change.

Based on the agreed model, pilot areas were identified for testing the new delivery approach, along with success metrics, a roadmap for the pilot and wider rollout and the outline investment case. The transition to a more agile transformation is much more than simply adopting process or tools and the roadmap considers changes across governance, culture and leadership to create a resilient organisation capable of delivery continuous value.

The work was summarised into a report for the leadership time to support the investment and to proceed with the initial pilot areas.

The discovery work has helped provide clarity around delivery challenges across portfolio, programme and project management. The proposed Agile Project Management approach will increase the organisation’s Agile Maturity, and provides a roadmap for improving speed to market, customer focus and cross-functional collaboration. This change is critical for enabling their change ambition and to supporting the implementation of innovative new technologies.

Project One value Add:

Project One was able to bring a blend of digital transformation and agile delivery expertise coupled with our wider understanding of delivering transformational business change. This enables us to recommend pragmatic changes that are grounded in an understanding of how to make agile transformation succeed and stick.