Challenge
An international consumer services organization was struggling to develop quality software for their constituent companies with predictable timelines and budgets. The root-cases of their troubles were all common issues leading to unpredictable delivery: unclear priorities, hidden dependencies, poor or non-existent metrics and a lack of team ownership of the vision for the product.
The organization engaged WWT to help them improve their software development practices by drawing on our years of experience advising, coaching and practicing agile software development.
Solution
WWT provided on-site coaching and mentoring to identify and address the key issues affecting predictability. Our coaches and mentors embedded within the organization's development teams to get a hands-on understanding of the issues.
We used process modeling techniques to help them understand the delays and inefficiencies in their development workflows. We introduced tools, such as physical Kanban boards to encourage collaboration and help the development teams learn and apply agile principles and practices. Finally, we helped them understand the challenges their legacy systems were causing through dependencies and showed them how careful backlog grooming could help them overcome those barriers.
Through traditional coaching, process improvements and side-by-side mentorship, WWT helped the organization's developers improve their processes and increase capacity.
Conclusion
We were able to help the consumer services organization complete a key project on time and under budget with their existing development staff, while sharing repeatable patterns and practices they can now use in future projects to achieve the same levels of predictability.
The initial coaching and mentoring work has led to further partnerships to help them continue to adopt and maintain sustainable development practices that improve predictable delivery.
