Context
Our client is a famous retailer of luxury traveler goods with over 9,000 employees worldwide.
Their aim was to re-organise into an independent technology department to develop more quick-to-market digital products to remain competitive in the merchandising industry.
A product team was selected to pilot an agile program but there was little alignment & communication between all stakeholders and departments resulting in slower delivery and development of features unused by users.
Due to the improper implementation of agile, the development team began to doubt that agile would work.
Challenges
As the product was the first of its kind in the market, a competitor had attempted to copy it.
There was an urgency for our client to continuously deliver innovative and customer-centric features to this product in a timely manner.
They needed to maximise business value while maintaining their leading position in the industry.
Outcome
Our consultant, acting as Scrum Master, rebooted the entire Scrum process to correct the team’s way of working. This included reforming cross-functional Scrum teams with clear roles and responsibilities as well as fostering transparency and collaboration among stakeholders, Product Owner (PO) and the development teams.
How they wrote and prioritized user stories, automation testing were also improved. This allowed them to deliver more value-driven features incrementally every three sprints.
Other things we accomplished:
- Team of 15 people including development team and PO became agile practitioners
- The team is able release a new feature to deliver business value continuously instead of at random
- The product team is more adept at responding to changes in the business
- Agile principles are followed, and people in the organisation now believe that agile works
