Experience

Delivery Acceleration for a Tourism Organisation

A digital image of Australia
Delivery acceleration with truly cross-functional teams

The Challenge

Faced with a demanding business strategy, conflicting priorities and a new workforce after significant departures during COVID, a leading tourism body was challenged to deliver across multiple fronts. Historic delivery cycles were measured in months, ill-equipped for multiple streams of work and seen as expensive and only moderately successful. Something had to be done urgently.

Our Solution

EPiC was also working with the customer to build a strategy and roadmap for digital transformation. The client had been working on business agility practices and agile ways of working for some time, but commercial agreements with vendors remained fixed price engagements and followed traditional project patterns.

The vendor also used agile ways of working internally, but client interfaces reflected the fixed price engagement and waterfall phases.

EPiC suggested an experiment for the client and vendor to ‘step all the way in’ to agile delivery. We would attempt to push past historic grievances and establish high-level Agile behaviours for a few months:

  • T&M commercial agreements
  • Cross-functional teams including vendor developers and client
  • A single backlog of remediation, improvement and strategic features
  • Vendor given access to client Jira project and Microsoft Teams
  • Jira workflows configured to support vendor SDLC, devops & release management
  • Executives agreed to empower the Product Owner and utilise sprint review for feedback

We proposed project inception followed immediately by our first two-week sprint.

Outcomes

  • Continuous delivery to production from sprint 1, with high-value upgrades from sprint 2
  • Progressively faster and easier delivery with each sprint
  • Demonstrably massive uplift in value delivered, speed-to-market and quality
Achievements
Backlog Exhausted
Designs were proposed, iterated on, approved, built and deployed far more quickly than they ever had before. Remediation and priority improvement backlog was soon exhausted.
Cross-functional Delivery Teams
The client now engages vendors on commercial terms that support agile ways of working and insists on integrated cross-functional delivery teams.
Mindset Shift
Behaviours changed as trust and respect emerged. Collaborative decisions replaced formal approvals. Early testing provided fast feedback and better quality. 

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