Executagility® Case Study: Busy IT Department
Introduction
An off-highway powertrain and engine solutions company made up of several business units or “entities” and locations, reached out to Andrea Jones Consulting® to take on the heavy lift of fully establishing the Executagility Model® with their IT department.
Their four person IT team was tasked with supporting all their work and in addition to basic IT activities (email, servers, network, printers, etc.), they were challenged to prioritize the most important requests coming in from three revenue-generating entities. Previous efforts were not always cross functional in nature and there was little transparency in the implementation process, resulting in internal customers feeling unaware of where their request was.
Figuring Out the Solution
The IT team wanted to implement a model that is flexible - allowing them to work on their “day jobs” as well as transparently meeting the needs of their customers in a way that made the most sense to the business and aligned with the expectations of all the entity leaders.
First, AJC worked with the company’s Leadership team to Prioritize using our signature Prioritization Matrix tool, the competing requests of the business on the IT team. AJC facilitated the leaders to develop Impact Categories that articulated the goals of the business, against which each request was evaluated. That evaluation was summarized and sorted into the highest to lowest impacting requests, quickly ordering what the IT team needed to work on first, second, and so on.
To gain traction, AJC trained and coached the IT team initially, and then Supply Chain team on the Executagility Model, the Executagility mindset, and new ways of working that included holding time-boxed Sprints and Standups. Coaching focused on ways to better prioritize their work, manage their IT project backlog, increase visibility of their work, improve communication with key stakeholders and how to work cross functionally.
AJC helped to design an IT Sprint Team and lead the teams through the process of creating and managing their own backlog and running Sprints and regular Sprint Standups.
The Leadership Team, meanwhile continued to re-evaluate the overall request or Technical Debt backlog on a monthly cadence, and found tremendous value in aligning and communicating clear priorities to the organization regularly.
Separately, AJC trained several IT employees and leaders on Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius framework which resulted in a recognition of how individuals prefer to work and how to best structure work to deliver the maximum value by involving participants “genius” preference.
Goals
The IT project backlog was prioritized and through a series of time-boxed Sprints, significantly reduced. As a result, the backlog went from 21 projects in-flight to 12 in 90 days, and further reductions over time, despite continuous new requests also being made over time.
A project manager was coached and elevated to the role of Executagility Project Manager, and now takes direction from project sponsors and runs Prioritization and Sprint meetings. He handles all coordination and facilitation, runs Sprints, navigates blockers, and coaches the team.
Cross functional collaboration and sharing of project information is now the norm.
In the spirit of continuous improvement, the Sprint team participates in Sprint Review and Retrospective Meetings at the end of each Sprint, to discuss achievements, showcase results, and ask questions. From a retrospective standpoint, they discuss what went well and what to adjust for next time.
To promote transparency, the IT backlog was communicated across the organization and is now public.
A new IT Project Intake Process was developed and communicated, with other departments quickly replicating the process for their own requests.
A recommended change management process was mapped out for larger IT projects to capitalize on previous learnings and best practices.
The Leadership team continues to meet quarterly to re-evaluate priorities, shifting the impact categories as the business environment changes, and consistently provides clear prioritization to the organization.
“The degree of specialization within Andrea Jones Consulting, LLC is incredible,
and was such a perfect fit for the overall project.
The level of targeted support throughout the project was amazing.”
Conclusion
With AJC’s support, the client was able to systematically prioritize the needs of the organization for the greatest impact to the business, reduce their IT project backlog and increased the project completion rate by over 30% by optimizing internal operations. Team performance, work satisfaction and alignment with entity presidents improved, and as a result, IT has built a reputation of being efficient, open to change and transparent.
“We were impressed with AJC’s ability to “meet us where we were”
and to be dynamic as our goals changed throughout the year-long engagement.”