The customer intended to accelerate the delivery of cash register software for its further implementation. To that end, they moved the team to Scrum, a framework for solving complex problems, but the effort did not pay off.
The delivery speed was unsatisfactory, and the number of unfinished tasks kept growing.
There were organizational barriers and resistance to change in and around the team: everyone was disappointed with the failed transition.
The customer turned to ICL Services for expert help in resolving the situation.Key Challenges
- Accelerate product delivery to the end user;
- Reduce task downtime Optimize teamwork and make it transparent.
Implemented our solution
Project launch
The project kicked off in September 2020 with a detailed study of the customer and development team dissatisfaction sources.
After familiarizing the customer's business and production departments with the challenges and expectations, the ICL Services team highlighted several apparent problems. The management saw the obstacles preventing the team from delivering releases faster, and the team saw why it was necessary to solve tasks quickly.
The identified problems were prioritized by their impact on the ultimate goal of speeding up deliveries.
Using Value Stream Mapping and STATIK approaches, our experts analyzed and described the work process the customer's team followed.
We identified several "bottlenecks" during the analysis, after which the team discussed options for resolving them with the process participants. For example, there was a strong dependence on the platform's DevOps team and delays by the acceptance testing team. It was decided to solve the first problem by including DevOps engineers in the development team.
Implementation stage
After analyzing the team's entire task flow and clustering the tasks into types, ICL Services specialists concluded that there were three types of tasks: "requirements," "epic analysis," and "bugs," which in turn were divided into critical and others.
We prepared a workflow design for each type of task, describing the rules of transition between phases, and, together with the team and management, formulated and described the general policies and work agreements.
The design was ported to Microsoft Azure DevOps. Together with the customer's team, ICL Services defined rules for tagging cards on the board to highlight blocking and waiting. This allowed us to see the blocked processes and begin systematic work to unblock them.
In addition, ICL Services experts also coached the Product Owner and the team's Scrum Master on the principles and techniques of backlog management, the essence and purpose of Scrum events, and how to use them to achieve business goals.
The project took six months to complete.
Products and technologies
- STATIK
- Value Stream Mapping
- Scrum
- RCA
- Product Owner & Scrum Master Coaching
Results
- Lead Time reduced from 100+ days to 45;
- Cycle Time reduced from 60 days to 30 days;
- Increased management and team satisfaction thanks to clear and transparent rules;
- The management understood at any given time what was going on in the development process and actively helped to remove the "blockers".