Work

What changed, and what it produced

Three anonymised cases from telecom, international rail and public media. In each one the constraint was in the system around the teams, not in the teams. Client names on request, under NDA.

Large telco

100+ teams in one operating model

Situation
A large telco scaling agile from a handful of pilot teams to more than a hundred, across several business units.
Constraint
No shared operating model above team level. Each domain scaled its own way, and portfolio and funding decisions were still taken per project.
Intervention
We designed a value stream-based scaling framework with Lean Portfolio Management governance, and a training and mentoring approach to roll it out across the organisation.
Result
More than a hundred teams working in one operating model, with portfolio decisions taken at value-stream level instead of per project.

Midsize scale-up

From 10 chapters and 11 teams to 4 and 6

Situation
A midsize scale-up in international rail. Agile events in place, delivery organised as a feature factory with sequential handovers.
Constraint
Teams organised by technology rather than by product: ten chapters and eleven teams managing each other’s dependencies, with capacity lost to coordination.
Intervention
An Agile State of Affairs first. Then a redesign into end-to-end product and platform teams, with governance, leadership coaching, Lean Portfolio Management with OKRs, and HR practices aligned to the new structure.
Result
Four chapters and six teams, without losing capacity and with higher throughput.

Multimedia broadcaster

25% less overhead, more delivery

Situation
A public multimedia broadcaster with twelve product teams and a management layer built for coordination.
Constraint
Management effort went into coordinating teams rather than into customer value, and overhead grew with every team added.
Intervention
We refocused the teams and their management layer on customer value, and simplified roles and the coordination structure around them.
Result
Overhead down by more than a quarter while delivery went up.

Also

Transformations in publishing, government digital services and retail; large-scale planning sessions with up to a thousand participants; training and coaching of agile coaching teams, leadership teams and product organisations, from scale-ups to organisations of several thousand people.

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