Power of Agile Delivery

Here’s a graph of delivery awesomeness.

Purple is stuff that’s done, Orange is what we want to do. Green is the magic between the two. Compare September to November to… well everything after that.
​
The amazing story
And because behind every good graph there’s an amazing story,  here’s the story behind this graph.
Last year myself and Agile Coach Hīria Te Rangi came together to kickstart a digital transformation that, like many, was having issues.
To us, having been in the digital transformation trenches for a long time, the problems were all too clear.


​The order of this stack is deliberate. Data and integration and poor implementation are often related and will absolutely manifest as bad delivery.

But team culture is the foundation on which all of the above are built. If this foundation is weak, the rest of your stack will start to crumble.

---

Or actually totally collapse - as you can see was the case back in September last year.

Then this happened...an eruption of purple done-ness!

So what did we do?
We’d done a digital transformation benchmarking for the organisation with a resulting strategy that identified culture and operating model problems as key.
We needed the power of a team of equals working in a high-trust empowered environment.
Enter the amazing Hīria, who took the team away for a one-week agile boot camp in the wonderful creative environment of Āpōpō. It was key to take them out of their normal environment and reset.

The team returned with an epic vision on what they wanted to achieve but, more importantly a framework to learn to fly.
In November we added a badass Product Owner and then a kickass Scrum Master to the mix and put in place a change freeze to give the team the space to reinvent their environment.
During this time they built a prototype for a new system and a new way forward. And in December the fledgling agile bird left the nest and has not looked back. They soar with the eagles.

The next big step up in work volume was through Covid where the combination of a tight team and remote working delivered a 30% increase in productivity.
Literally overnight.

True digital transformation
The bottom three of the earlier stack aren’t always visible to the main players in a digital transformation - the business. It’s only when delivery starts to take off like a Tesla on Ludicrous Mode that things get noticed.

For this tipping point I was sitting next to the Head of Marketing at a demo by the team. He turned to me and said:

“In one step technology has just leap-frogged the business - this has never happened. until now.”

Now we are extending agile out to the rest of the business so the whole organisation can truly leverage this delivery powerhouse.
​
So what did we do?
We took the business leaders away for an agile boot camp…
To be continued…