Aligning complex delivery with strategic business outcomes

The situation

To fuel future growth, the organisation sought to implement a consistent Agile way of working across all business groups. This strategic Agile transformation aimed to streamline project delivery, enhance responsiveness to changing market conditions, and ultimately deliver greater value to both the organisation and its customers. By adopting Agile principles at scale, the group intended to improve the prioritisation of key initiatives and align efforts with the organisation’s overarching goals.

The challenge

Cprime Elabor8 collaborated with the client to run a 3-month Pilot program targeting 5 teams from different areas to obtain learnings prior to rolling it out to different business divisions.

Results of the 3-month pilot showed an average improvement of 50% reduction of cycle time.

After the pilot program, Cprime Elabor8 continued to support a business division for 6 months to help uplift and bring consistency to their ways of working. This division had the following challenges to address:

• Visibility: The leadership team wanted a view of what the teams were working on and how they were delivering value to the organisation.
• Metrics: The leadership team wanted to have a better understanding of delivery metrics, especially around capacity.
• Consistency: The leadership team wanted overall consistency with the tooling they used, processes, framework, priorities, and collaboration.

The process

Despite having an existing Agile capability in place, the organisation realised that scaling Agile across the entire enterprise posed significant challenges that would not be able to be resolved without leveraging industry expertise from Cprime Elabor8. Below are the primary challenges they faced: 

1. Project Portfolio Management: The organisation’s rapid growth led to an expanded project portfolio, making it increasingly difficult to balance new initiatives with ongoing BAU (Business As Usual) work. This led to some work being pushed through delivery without adequate discovery or scoping, leading to inefficiencies. 
2. Lack of unified work funnel: The absence of a clear and consistent work funnel process(es) for delivery teams reduced workflow and inevitably affected the realisation of value down the delivery pipeline.
3. Mixed tooling and lack of visibility: Mixed tooling meant that there was no single place to visualise work across the delivery portfolio. This fragmentation of planning and coordination of dependencies made it difficult for teams to align metrics and measurements of value/outcomes with the organisation’s overall strategy. 
4. Prioritisation challenges: The combination of high work demand, mixed delivery approaches, and inconsistent work management practices limited the teams’ ability to effectively prioritise tasks across multiple delivery portfolios. This challenge further strained resources and affected the timely delivery of projects. 

The solution

The first step was to conduct a Discovery to better understand the challenges and opportunities. This was done through conducting Agile Maturity Assessments, 1:1 interviews, synthesis of existing project data and documents and, finally, several workshops with relevant stakeholders to understand the current state.

With a clear context established during the Discovery phase, Cprime Elabor8 implemented its proven Team Launch Patterns across the business division, involving five teams. Each team launch focused on resetting teams with new Agile ways of working, aligned with the overall enterprise strategy. Additionally, the teams were introduced to enhanced tooling practices, improving work visibility and using key performance metrics.

The final but undoubtedly most important part was the ‘Run’ phase, where the newly established Agile practices were embedded into the daily operations. Cprime Elabor8’s experience has shown that many organisations struggle to sustain momentum in this phase, often leading to stalled transformations. Our Agile coaches provided continuous learning opportunities, ongoing coaching, and regular team health checks to counteract this. These efforts were crucial in maintaining momentum and ensuring the business division was set up for long-term success with Agile adoption.

In addition, Cprime Elabor8’s consultants brought their deep expertise and industry knowledge to deliver additional value by: 

• Aligning work with strategy: Ensuring that all processes and activities were closely aligned with the organisation’s overarching strategy through the use of effective prioritisation methods and coordination of dependencies. 
• Enhancing quarterly planning: Improving the quarterly planning process by incorporating reflection points and performance metrics, which supported more accurate capacity planning and resource allocation. 
• Mid-quarter check-ins: Ran mid-quarter check-in sessions in preparation for upcoming quarterly planning readiness
• Agile learning and development: Running several Agile 101 sessions as well as “Lunch and Learn” to support ongoing learning and embedding of Agile principles and ways of working
• Team building: Facilitating multiple team building exercises both with the leadership team and across the delivery teams to strengthen team culture and collaboration
• JIRA uplift and optimisation: Enhancing the use of JIRA through both training and logical consolidation of existing boards to support better coordination of dependencies and visualisation of all work in progress. JIRA was also introduced to teams previously using a disconnected mix of tools, creating a more unified and efficient work environment.

The results

The visualisation of delivery work and consistent capture of metrics within the business division led to significant improvements, demonstrating the impact of Cprime Elabor8’s Agile transformation efforts.. After 6 months of engagement, the business division showed:

• Increased throughput: Three teams reported substantial throughput increases of 61%, 69%, and 12.5% compared to the previous quarter, showcasing enhanced productivity and efficiency.
• Reduced cycle time: Two teams experienced a decrease in cycle time by 45% and 30% respectively, compared to the period before the team launch. This reduction in cycle time directly contributed to faster project delivery and improved responsiveness. 
• Cost savings: There was an approximate $1.38 million in savings derived from approximately 3547 hours saved annually across 4 teams if they continued with the current agile support and ways of working.

In addition to streamlined delivery, based on the latest team health survey, there was a significant improvement in both team health and agile ways of working.

Key improvements included: 

• Quality of output: Teams were proud of what they delivered with recipients/customers generally really satisfied with the quality of output.
• Process and improvement: Teams were happy with the internal processes and felt empowered to make adjustments and improvements where needed, particularly with new/upstream pieces of work.
• Team satisfaction: Team members fostered a safe and open culture for giving and receiving constructive feedback,  which allowed for both personal growth and improved their way of working.

Final Thoughts

The success of this Agile transformation within the business division has prompted the organisation to scale these practices beyond their initial scope. The leadership team, recognising the value delivered, is now planning to hire Delivery Leads to sustain and further the momentum.

The financial savings and time efficiencies achieved have created new opportunities for the organisation to invest in strategic projects, Business As Usual (BAU) initiatives, and innovation.

The remarkable change in results was a testament to the teams’ open-mindedness and willingness to fully embrace an agile way of working.

If you’d like to see similar results for your organisation, explore our Transformations Services to see how we can help your organisation achieve similar success.

Enterprise Agility Transformation Ways of Working