The first step was to confirm what the real issues were, by meeting with the Exec team and key members of the delivery squads. The issues were distilled down into:
Visibility
- Exec frustration that they can’t see what they are getting when
- Conflicting versions of the truth driving bad decisions.
Value
- Gap between business strategy and what’s actually being delivered
- Not doing the right things in the right order
- Finance lens of the world dominating over the wider business lens.
Progress
- Scrum teams hitting the buffers with inter-Tribe dependencies
- Too much happening and slow decision making
Efficiency
- Duplicated work
- Lack of join-up across scrum teams – comms / ways of working
- Unable to get the right skills deployed to the right work.
“Thank you to Project One for enabling us to make great strides with the set-up of our PMO; it’s already bearing fruit.” CIO
The next step was to define a high-level model to show how information and action should flow down from the Exec team and back up again, and how the delivery streams should be working together.
We established a working group, bringing in the delivery leads and representatives from the finance, people, product and tech areas to then work through how to adapt ways of working and use of the Jira toolset to move towards this model. We made sure Project One’s role was one of facilitation and expert advice, with the customer teams driving activity and therefore building a real sense of ownership. This was critical to ensure the new ways of working would embed and endure.
One of the key adaptations to the use of Jira was to introduce the ‘advanced roadmaps’ functionality. This allowed a roadmap to be built both top down and bottom up, using the delivery tribes delivery boards as the input and allowing ‘one version of the truth’ to be built up to Exec level.
We established an Agile PMO team, with a lead and a couple of analysts to work across the delivery tribes and the product teams. This PMO team then adapted the existing governance groups and processes to be fit for purpose. This involved a monthly delivery forum to understand cross-tribe dependencies and blockers and take appropriate action, along with a monthly approvals board to monitor spend and value and approve additional spend required.
The other key process that we introduced was quarterly planning, getting the delivery tribes together with the product leads to assess priorities for the next quarter and map out the roadmap, ensuring do-ability across tribes.
