Agile Transformation

Our client struggled to adapt to market changes and meet customer needs quickly, due in part to a project-focused mentality and “Waterfall” development practices that included long delivery timelines for technology projects.

A large retailer struggled to meet customer needs quickly and adapt to disruptive market changes. The company realized that its existing “Waterfall” development practices hindered its ability to deliver products and solutions quickly, which negatively affected the customer experience. The company also realized the need to build a stronger partnership between IT and business units in order to develop products more effectively. The company hired Metis Strategy to help it develop cross-functional teams, train the teams on Agile development methodologies, and coach the teams to develop an Agile mindset, which focuses on rapid, iterative delivery of software to create customer-centered experiences. Metis Strategy led the Agile transformation effort for 200 employees across business and IT.

Metis Strategy worked with the business to lead an enterprise IT Agile Transformation to increase customer focus and speed the pace of innovation.

Metis Strategy’s Agile coaches worked with the company for two years to develop an Agile Transformation strategy and build cross-functional Agile product teams. To get there, Metis Strategy took the following actions:

• Established five cross-functional teams made up of employees across IT and business units
• Provided teams, product owners, and corporate leadership with training initiatives including Agile basics, Scrum, product management, story mapping, and release planning
• Set up an Agile Transformation Office, which ensured:
  • New teams were set up and trained successfully to provide value to the business
  • Organizational change management to drive an Agile mindset across the organization
  • A dedicated place to develop and act on long-term transformation roadmaps
• Led five quarterly “Big Room Planning” sessions to facilitate release planning across teams
• Established a strategic roadmap to build a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline
• Enabled a product management mindset across the organization through multiple product training sessions with leadership and business units

The company established “squads” of product teams and increased software development throughput by 300%.

After Agile teams had been established and trained, the client increased software throughput by 300%, improved transparency and visibility across the organization, and adopted a product-focused mindset for software delivery. Teams reduced their release cycles from multiple months to two weeks. That allowed business units to provide feedback earlier and ultimately led to higher-quality products.