We're here to coach your teams & work alongside your leaders to drive outcomes - not outputs.

Here's a small sampling of how we've helped bring productive & impactful change to teams & organizations.

Opportunity: After a self-described "traumatic" transition to agile (a quarter of the development team resigned) that focused only on technology teams, a biotech firm needed to create trust between the business and technology groups, align product management practices with the agile model, and ultimately unite business and product development partners to create an engaged product organization.

Approach: After an initial assessment, we agreed that what we needed to bring about was a shift in culture. We needed to create an approach that brought once separate teams together, to act as a single customer-focused product organization. We used lean and agile product development models as our guiding framework.

Actions: After observation and conversations, we created a high level roadmap for the work ahead. We brought each product team together for a series of day-long workshops, aimed to build team engagement, create opportunity for discussion, allow for divergent thinking, and educate the group on a common pattern and language. After the workshops, we worked on-site with each team as a coach and an advisor to roll out supporting processes, common tools, and communication patterns across the portfolio. Along this journey, we kept true to creating tight alignment with the organization's vision and the needs of the customers, coupled with flexible patterns of execution that honored individual expertise and team dynamics.

Opportunity: We are falling behind our competition and spending too much time on internal reporting and stakeholder juggling. We want to streamline our development practices to focus on results that matter. These were the core issues that an e-commerce group was facing as they strived to match the platform offering of their competitors. 

Approach: Start small, build confidence, prove success. We focused on a small rollout of process changes, determined metrics that we'd use throughout the transition, and focused on education and team empowerment. That included helping leaders refocus on their roles in an agile environment.

Actions: After a brief set of interviews and observations, we kicked off with a series of workshops aimed at setting a common language for teams to use around lean and agile practices. Some workshops were for product management teams, others for executive leadership, and the core series for the full product teams. We worked with leaders to plan and manage change to team structure, product planning processes, communication patterns, etc. to create an end-to-end plan for the full scope of the transformation. We started with 2 teams, provided on-site coaching, and worked closely with technology vendors and other partners. After proving success and building the teams' confidence, we began to coach additional teams. 

Opportunity: We have a talented team of seasoned product owners and developers. We know our delivery methodology needs help - there is little transparency to the business, we're constantly wading through large, outdated documents, and spending too much time in meetings creating plans that quickly become stale. An executive in the high-tech industry wanted experienced program managers that were able to operate in waterfall, hybrid, and agile worlds, and with strong soft skills to transition and coach highly-skilled engineering teams.

Approach: Gaining the teams' trust and understanding the organization first was imperative to the leadership team. Before any changes were made, we first worked within the existing processes and gained empathy for the teams and their challenges. After this, we planned small changes together and worked as embedded team members to create positive changes.

Actions: First as project managers, we worked with the teams learning their existing processes and communication patterns. We started slowing making improvements and gaining buy-in. The teams appreciated the extra lift and without an "agile" label, we were able to shift into agile patterns that promoted communication, using Jira and Confluence to improve transparency, and help these remote teams feel more empowered and engaged. After a number of iterations, we had achieved the benefits of agile processes based on the main tenants of empowering teams, experimenting and learning, delivering value regularly, understanding and working with our customers, and creating a sustainable pace focused on improvement. 

We value conversations. Let's talk about how we can help your team be more successful.