Orbica

Orbica asked 'what's on our plate?', and found their secret sauce Digital geography specialists Orbica are known for solving big problems. They make the complex simple and help organisations and businesses make better decisions through the power of location data. They pioneer geospatial artificial intelligence, smart data visualisation, geospatial development, and analysis to give their clients a near real-time view of their data. For the NZTA, they recently built a web-hosted map tool that can display more than a million vehicle crash records at speed.

A good problem to have "We have a lot of complexity in our world, and we had a huge number of projects happening. We were having trouble gaining visibility over all that work. It was difficult to know where things were at," says General Manager, Delphine Ducaruge.

Delphine contacted Double-O Consultants to help.

"We were thinking about solutions to this problem. We wanted to bring in someone that would have worked in similar contexts and with similar problems. We didn't want to be given a solution, just someone to help us find our solution," says Delphine.

The brief to Double-O was broad and presented an opportunity for a short discovery phase before digging deeper into the work.

"Running multiple projects with a high level of complexity is the norm for Orbica. Delphine and her team wanted to understand more about their work to improve their productivity. It was also important to gain clarity about their capacity for delivery because it just isn't possible to do everything. Sometimes, the more you try to do, the less you get done, so the key is working out what you don't need to do right now," says Double-O Consultant, Joe Kearns.

The devil's in the detail During sessions with Joe, the team talked about specific projects, drilling into past successes and failures. By looking at what went well and what hadn't worked, they established patterns - mapping current processes to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

"We were able to take what we'd learnt working with a range of clients in a range of different areas and apply it to Orbica's unique context. In a short space of time, we were able to understand Orbica's challenges, dive a little deeper to towards a solution that worked for them. Not off the shelf, not cookie-cutter, just something that made sense given their business and their needs," Joe says.

Changing things up Double-O helped the team to work out what needs to happen for them to deliver effectively.

"We were able to define what performance and productivity means for us. The process helped us identify our four key components for successful delivery, allowing us to measure them and improve. I can't tell you what they are though - that's our secret sauce," says Delphine.

To help fix the problem of visibility, they built something.

"We created a new way of visualising our projects. A custom-made project portfolio that shows us how we get work through the funnel. It's tailored based on what we learned from the process with Joe and gives us a real-time view. We now have much greater visibility of what we are doing and what we can do, giving our clients and us much more certainty," she says.

A big tick - but there's more to come "We got the outcome we needed, which is awesome. Having visibility means we can have much better discussions about the work because we know where things are at. And we can measure those key elements and decide what we need work on to improve delivery," says Delphine.

And that's just the beginning.

"Joe's really easy-going, and he gained trust and credibility with the team to help us achieve what we wanted - he's pretty dedicated to the cause. It was a great experience, and we are looking forward to doing more work with him."

Pegasus Health

Having utilised Scrum across its development teams for several years Pegasus Health commissioned a thorough and impartial healthcheck to address the issues it had identified, and uncover any issues that it hadn’t. Double-O’s vigorous assessments and findings formed the basis of a practical plan: an innovative programme of team training, coaching and mentoring that strengthened areas of weakness, gave their teams workable advantages and enhanced performance all round. Pegasus Health’s challenge Issues over team delivery and role responsibilities were an indication that their once sharp lines of Scrum process and practice had faded. The further concern was that these issues may or may not be the tip of an iceberg. Prevention being easier than cure, for the long term good health of their organisation Pegasus Health knew the best course of action would be to diagnose and heal both the known and the unknown at the same time. Here’s how we tackled it:

• Observed Scrum events for each team (daily stand-up, refinement, Sprint planning, review and retrospective)
• Provided feedback to team management and directly to teams
• Provided a mix of training workshops, presentation sessions, team building sessions and one-on-one coaching for Scrum Masters, Product Owners and teams plus other relevant members of the organisation
• Reviewed ways to write better user stories, the Product Owner’s role, mastering the Scrum Master role, and Agile facilitation

• Clear organisational understanding of Scrum areas for improvement
• Teams identifying and behaving as teams instead of groups of individuals
• Better user stories with a greater focus on (and understanding of) value
• Improved understanding of key roles
• Scrum Masters knowing how to keep progressing towards Agile maturity

nib

Double-O worked closely with nib’s IT team to restore their Agile mojo and set their Scrum process back on track. Observation, coupled with Double-O’s insight helped sort out their immediate challenges: the inconsistency of their software project delivery processes and reporting. Extending the engagement into a coaching focus across the technical and business teams also painted a clear picture for the team members, clarifying their role in creating a successful delivery process. The benefits of reinvigorated, efficient and high-performing IT teams are becoming apparent through their work and renewed relationships with the business. nib’s challenge nib’s Head of IT called in Double-O after seeing repeated issues arise in backlog management, prioritisation, progress tracking, and communication across projects. Issues, including how work entered and exited the various project teams existed within the current processes. Making the gains would require an Agile and Scrum reboot throughout the organisation. Here’s how we tackled it:

The initial phase of the engagement involved an assessment of nib’s current process by observing the business, the delivery team processes, and methods of communication.

• Attended Scrum events for each team (daily stand-up, refinement, Sprint planning, review and retrospective)
• Gathered feedback from key staff including CEO, executives, managers, team leaders, Product Owners and team members
• Reviewed projects, user stories, backlogs and reporting for teams
• Provided coaching, support and mentoring for Scrum Masters and Product Owners and the business
• Assessed and identified improvements in the flow of work through the teams from idea, to product backlog, to release

• Improved visibility of ‘in progress’ work
• Clearer view of the pipeline of work feeding into the Scrum teams
• Increased understanding of how the teams’ work fits into the wider organisation’s needs, especially the PMO
• Improvement in transparency, and the use of inspection and adaption of the Scrum process
• Improved efficiencies and productivity throughout the wider organisation
• Improved morale within the project delivery processes

Spark

Spark engaged Double-O Consultants to help implement our enterprise Agile transformation. The objective was to find new ways of working that would keep us ahead of our competitors, to retain our position as New Zealand’s leading Digital Services provider.

Initially, Double-O worked, together with our other consultants, to help build capability where we needed it most, our Agile Coaches. We knew that building the skillset of that group would help ensure the transformation was sustainable. After the big push to transform our core teams was completed, we retained Double-O, relying on their expertise to help us mature and build deeper capability into our key leaders across the organisation.

Partnering with Double-O in this manner was successful due to their ability to work alongside Spark collaboratively. When we encountered opportunities for improvement, Double-O would co-create a solution that fit our needs, rather than prescribing a textbook solution. For example, early in our transformation, a maturity assessment identified an opportunity to develop agile leadership skills for our Product Owners and Chapter Leads. Double-O co- created a series of workshops with us and took the lead to deliver the workshops alongside our own people. This joined-up approach helped our new leads build their knowledge and cement the new skillset, bedding in the transformational change.

Double-O became trusted advisors, mentoring our people and taking the time to listen and understand before offering practical solutions designed for us. Double-O helped us find our flavour of Agile, and importantly, made sure our people were set up with the skills and capability to succeed long term.