How did an IT Network Management Product Company Gain Agility in Product Development?

2014-2015

Leading IT Network Management Product Company, USA

Business Challenges

An IT Product Company headquartered in Austin, Texas, has been delivering a wide range of products related to Network Management, Server Applications, IT Security, Database Management and cloud-based products. The company's software development offices are spread across Australia, the Czech Republic, India, Ireland, Singapore, and USA.

At that time, company's one of the business goal was to improve Agility and continue to be disruptive in the marketplace. Company's leadership and management teams identified the challenges to be more agile, release early by priority, while also managing multiple shore and large product team set-up.

To continuously improve and be prepared for a greater agility, the company started thinking for a change in their current process—an Agile Transformation was called out by leadership for all the shores.

In 2014, the leadership team along with key team members called a search for a trusted provider and they identified Transformation Capabilities of INNOVATION ROOTS and hired us for our Agile Transformation Services.

Solution

INNOVATION ROOTS started transformation coaching with a conversation on identifying company's current business goal and listing the backlog for improvement. With in-detail analysis of the company's current process, priorities and goals, INNOVATION ROOTS presented a transformation plan and conducted an assessment to set objectives for the Agile transformation.

As an outcome of transformation planning step, we found some key challenges related to the company's current process and ways of working

  • The team's knew a little about the Agile except what they have read on the internet

  • Teams were doing various versions of Scrum without much focus on the releasing early and quality

  • Lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities for newly created roles like Scrum Master and Product Owner

  • A gap in envisioning and clarity of product's future roadmap and release plan

  • Product backlog creation and prioritization was not clear to IT teams, and less visibility in progress of delivery for business teams

  • Another challenge was the cross-team dependency, which was due to, most of the team members were functioning remotely, working in different geographical locations

  • Apart from that, managing customer's critical feedback has distorted the flow of regular process and it impacted priorities to change frequently

Subsequently, the management team of the company had a discussion with INNOVATION ROOTS to have their teams trained on Agile and related frameworks. To cater to their requirements, INNOVATION ROOTS came up with strategies accompanied by training and mentoring program and provided

  • Team-level Agile and Scrum training to bring a common understanding for everyone

  • Facilitated training and mentoring to the members on what they need to know to perform the roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner

  • Vision, Roadmap and Release plan coaching, and Product inception facilitation to teams

  • An exclusive embedded support for LeSS and Scrum ceremony coaching and mentoring for teams and enterprise

  • Leadership Education and Metric Organization mentoring

Outcomes

As a result of our training, and mentorship program, the IT Management company implemented changes in the business process, as well as improved transparency and visibility in progress of teams. Moving ahead the teams became more collaborative, become open, creative, and much more efficient than earlier.

  • Teams practiced Scrum, Kanban, and LeSS ceremonies, gained maturity in operations

  • A higher degree of acceptance of new roles and responsibilities, effective Scrum Master and Product Owners

  • Product teams implemented prioritization-driven adaptive planning for releases, this improved the predictability of the enterprise, and given the confidence to plan future releases

  • Teams greatly improved in dependence management with other teams, platforms, and products (product-level) release planning

  • Teams were reflecting by the retrospective workshop to tune themselves for becoming better, continuously

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