The context
- TV and broadband arm of major UK telco
- Modern digital product development methods coming into conflict with traditionalist ‘industrial’ telecoms mindset
- Teams have been doing ‘agile by numbers’, with good intentions but little deep experience on the ground
- Starting to hit the limits of team-scale delivery, and wanting to roll out more effective ways of working at scale
- Open-minded leadership; keen to try something new; aware that they ‘don’t know what they don’t know’
The impact
- Laid the groundwork for successful multi-year business change programme
- Methods and techniques replicated by other teams within the organization
- The Engineering Director leading the initiative thanked Daniel for his contribution in an experience report presented at DevOps Enterprise Summit
The approach
We ran a multi-day Value Stream Mapping workshop where managers across the business mapped out their product development and deployment processes for the first time.
We coached the managers and led a 2-day Quarterly ‘Big-room’ Capacity Planning exercise to give them a portfolio view of all the work for the next several quarters.
We ran a series of clinics and 1-1 sessions with individual teams and team leads over several months, providing coaching, mentoring and hands-on development and planning guidance.
We gave talks and ran Q&A sessions looking at different aspects of digital product change and business acceleration, so people could air their concerns and understand more about why we were embarking on the journey, and what was in it for them.
We coached the leaders in messaging the change and creating ambassadors within and across teams, so people felt they had some agency in the process.