6.7: Case Study: Agile Transformation - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Now let's review a key study of an agile transformation.</v> Agile transformations always start with why, and include people in their happiness, organizational culture and mindset. I want to share with you an example of company level agility. This story of agile adoption at a company called Moonpig has been shared by an agile coach, Amanda Colpoys, in her key study published by the Agile Business Consortium. Moonpig is an internet-based business whose head offices are in UK. The company's business model is mainly selling personalized greeting cards, flowers and gifts. Having achieved a measure of success adopting agile practices within their product engineering team, Moonpig's leadership was keen to see if the rest of the organization could also benefit from agile adoption. Business agility at Moonpig started with why. It did not start with scrum practices or kanban boards. It started with the mindset so that people across the company understood why they were making the change and what the benefits would be. The goal was to understand that these changes were not introduced by executives. They were driven across the industry and within the company and were underpinned by solid principles and reasoning. Moonpig started its agile journey focusing mostly on software development. They adopted cross-functional teams. They leveraged agile and DevOps practices and improved delivery capability. They introduced a lean approach to product development, using data to form hypothesis and test assumptions. This way of working allowed them to improve efficiency, deliver better outcomes and overall grow the business. In addition, teams leveraged lean agile practices and showed significantly higher levels of engagement. Software delivery teams were able to realize the benefits of agile, and the business counterparts at that time could not. In marketing and commercial functions, the situation was different. So they did a retrospective and the feedback was as follows. Everyone works in silos. There is no communication within teams. We have too many objectives, lack of trust and people don't do their jobs. There is no collaboration across teams. We have conflicting objectives and so forth. It manifested that the company had two separate cultures, one in software delivery, collaborative, transparent, positive, customer-focused, and one on the business side, siloed, misaligned, and overall lacking trust. So the decision was made to implement agility. To do so, the following mission statement was created. I want to design a tailored system of work that optimizes the entire organization, allowing Moonpig to innovate and move fast at scale, while still ensuring it is a place that people love to work. As the next step, success criteria were defined. It was decided to look for specific outcomes rather than agile maturity levels, which is vanity metrics. It doesn't really tell how pleased your customer is. So they wanted to become better, faster, cheaper and happier, and summarized this into three outcomes. Better equals better outcomes, leading to increased return on investment, faster, reduced cycle time across all value streams, happier, high employee engagement. They selected the following measurements for those outcomes: getting better by embedding a customer-focused, data-driven experimental approach to minimize wasted investment, understanding where we create value and reduce time wasted on low value output, increasing innovation through the collaboration of people with different skills and expertise, getting faster by aligning relevant people around key outcomes and removing conflicting priorities and dependencies, by leveraging lean working practices, visualizing work, reducing work in progress, and focusing on finishing, championing a culture of collaboration and cross-function, working with team successes that come before individual glory, by embedding a continuous improvement mindset, seeking to constantly optimize the working processes, empowering and supporting teams to self-organize, remove dependencies and remove bottlenecks around senior management. And next one is getting happier by developing a safe-to-fail environment where people can take risks. Ensuring our teams have clear goals and are supported to achieve them by creating a culture of autonomy, by encouraging a growth mindset and making learning a central part of the working life. So as the next step, they developed a roadmap that had four steps. First one was alignment and reorganizing around clear goals. Second is working processes, focused on reducing cycle time and removing work in progress. The goal was to stop starting and start finishing. Then the third one was experimentation, creating fail fast culture, very safe environment. And the fourth was the culture of learning, implementing growth mindset and collaborative learning. Each of those steps was non-trivial. For example, one of the key challenges in step one was resource bottlenecks. For example, copywriting was one area in particular where they lacked resources. At that point, they had three immediate solutions. Accept that delivery will be delayed, hire additional people or do fewer things. Another long-term solution was to invest in people and train some of their marketers and U.S. designers to write the copy themselves. This wouldn't remove the need for dedicated copywriting experience, but would provide flexibility, primarily because simpler copy tasks could be handled by other team members. The decision was made to resource the outcomes in the order of their priorities, similar to a product backlog in software development. So once capacity was achieved, the rest of the work remained in a backlog. This allowed marketing and commercial teams to generate the most impact fast. The understanding that was formed was that the faster you deliver prioritized outcomes, the faster you get to the next item on the backlog. Each of the cross-functional teams contained product function, marketing function, creative function and engineering function, true cross-functional teams. These teams implemented daily stand-ups for collaboration and alignment, and they did biweekly retrospectives. They used kanban board to align the activities and dashboards. And for happiness, they measured mastery, autonomy and purpose, according to Daniel Pink's findings in his book the "Drive". A clear purpose lets people know what is expected of them. Autonomy empowers people to achieve their purpose. And mastery gives them the necessary skills to achieve this purpose. And finally they leveraged lean and agile working practices. They introduced to increase speed and also intended to promote a sustainable pace and better work-life balance. With the improved quality of work experience, they were hoping that sustainable pace would provide people with more time to learn and grow. Another opportunity was to develop a clear career progression. To address this, the leaders developed a competency matrix and then they could align roles and provide clear guidance for individuals to develop and to grow professionally. In the first six to eight months, the company was able to achieve success in getting better, faster and happier across the whole organization. Realigning the teams and bringing agility to the business improved cycle times, and especially in the delivery of their marketing content. They saw cycle times reduced from months to days. People were happier and more engaged. Retention was increased. At the same time, the leaders came up with several opportunities for improvement. Those included coaching leaders, defining the outcomes early, having agile coaches in place, and relentlessly focusing on prioritizing their work. This overall was a remarkable experience on how agile culture could turn the company around and made it better for customers and for the employees.