Work

What changed, and what it produced

Four anonymised cases from telecom, international rail, public media and retail. 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 teams and 11 chapters to 6 and 4

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 teams and eleven chapters 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
Six teams and four chapters, without losing capacity and with higher throughput. How the structure was designed →

Multimedia broadcaster

20% lower headcount, 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
Headcount down by 20% while delivery went up.

Food Retail

From output backlogs to customer jobs

Situation
The marketing domain of a food retailer, running a scaled agile framework for seven quarters across on- and off-shore teams. Events in the calendar, quarters planned to the brim.
Constraint
An Agile State of Affairs showed the constraint: products defined by functionality rather than customer journeys, backlogs of tasks and deliverables, success measured by plan adherence. At portfolio level, four big bets and thirteen initiatives had the company as the subject of every sentence; none named a job a shopper actually has.
Intervention
A transformation backlog built on a value-based backlog: every Epic a strategic objective with measurable value goals, every Feature a business outcome, every Story an end-to-end step. Epics rewritten as hypothesis statements around six Jobs To Be Done of a household, such as fixing tonight’s dinner at five o’clock with no plan. The big bets became the acceptance criteria; the initiatives compete as Features against the job they serve.
Result
A portfolio that can be steered on customer outcomes, with leading indicators on customer behaviour and validation through an MVP with real households. The mapping also showed what the output view hid: eight of the thirteen initiatives were acceptance criteria promoted to initiative rank, and two of the six jobs had no initiative at all.

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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