A high-profile customer in automotive segment is gearing up for its major digital transformation. Their ambitious plans were to reach their customers digitally. Naturally such an ambitious and high visibility project is also accompanied by high expectation, tight deadlines and complexities. It was a celebration at Brillio when our customer chose Brillio to develop the solution for them. Great so far.
The project started with much fanfare!!
Month 1:
Time started ticking and as usual, devil was in details. Signed for a fixed price, budget started burning with little progress. Some of the keystakeholders in the customer side were imagining and were not helping the cause. Each of these new directions added to ambiguities. It was important for Brillio to focused on eventual impact that be focused on a tight process. Life moved on
Month 2:
Some clarity started emerging. Team had already started spending long hours in office, project manager trying to scope the features and changes, also wondering if we have a possibility to work from Mars, so that we get longer days. Delivery manager is helter-skelter between team and customer. Coach who is guiding the team on excellence is now convinced that this is not the way to work
Month 3:
Team was lagging way behind where they should be. Project manageras usual thought that the team can slog it out at the end. But coach believed this cannot be the case this time. Given that the team is lagging, any effort by coach to show case the chaos will be counterproductive and push the team to defensive approach. Thinking of this coach left the office. He was ignoring calls from his wife and on the way, he picked and blurted that he will be home in 15 minutes. But google map was showing 45 mins. Anyhow coach didn’t meet the commitment, but this was a good enough spark for the coach. He worked on this to show the future state given the progress. This projection made the leaders realize that the team is way behind and cannot be overcome by the slog over tactics.
Convergence came in. Action started flowing. They identified that a separate team must take up backlog work and the primary team should be focused on value creation features so that they can converge. It was tough times, but this timely intervention helped the team to keep the value stream intact and helped to reduce the spill overs.
Month 4:
Voila!! Backlogs started decline, burn ups increased, customer started seeing value sprint on sprint, from average of 16 hours of effort per day, teams started leaving by 6 PM!! Happy customer, Happy teams!! Happiest Project manager !!, Coach smiles as he watches on.
Lessons Learned
- Be wise in presenting data. How data is presented is equally important as facts
- In developing products, if value stream slows down, be on watch. It may be cancerous deep down in the process