We had a BIG business problem to solve. Our marketing team’s backlog was massive – everything from the tiniest of tactical needs to the utmost strategic & only a few hands to manage it all. What to do, what to do?
Well, sometimes the easiest way to solve a big hairy problem is to simply block the time & dive on in…hackathon for the business style. We very simply just applied Agile to the business.
Background
- The backlog was massive!
- Tactical to strategic work (+ everything in between)
- More tactical work coming in every day
- No time to serve the company by delivering results that would actually help us move the needle & meet our customer & company needs
- Bottle-necked, our teams could not get work through the funnel
- We had unintentionally taken empowerment away from the teams, they couldn’t touch things without “submitting a request”
- New leader & we had lost team members
- Very few standards/guidelines so processes lacked definition & defined jobs to be done
How – What Did We Do?
- We prepped – identified all “high priority” work
- Revisited priority & selected the biggest bang for the buck needs
- Ensured we had the necessary skill-sets available to complete the work selected
- Blocked 3 days of our time together & eliminated as many distractions as possible
- Created holding spots for things we knew would come up along the way – allowed a place to put all the great longer term ideas without allowing them to distract us
- Focused our time on work reduction
- Provided remote options for team members who were not able to be present
- Celebrated our successes
- Found any way possible to gather customer input real-time or through proxy
- Created simple standards & guidelines as we worked based on what we were learning along the way
- Inspected, adapted & retro’d multiple times per day
Results
- Completed more than 27 stories/work items
- What previously took us weeks or months to complete, moved to done in days
- Leaned out processes within & for the future
- Quickly trained team members just-in-time while producing
- Built a cross-functional team with relationships that will sustain well into the future
- Taught others how to fish along the way
- Proved to ourselves that we could do this & had fun in the process
What We Learned…
- FOCUS time is invaluable – intentionally carve out time to solve BIG problems together
- Cross-functional skill sets rallied around common goals = powerful
- Walking through the detailed process steps together & just-in-time was a quick way to get a large # of team members up to speed very quickly
- Learned from each others questions
- Pulled work based on subject matter expertise, passion & skill-set vs. “assignment” of work
- The power of teams & pairing
- When you don’t know…ask
- How quickly we can move when we work together
- Virtual session worked well (maybe even better than in-person) – don’t be stopped because someone can’t be “in the office”
- Ask for help & they will come – so many team members, outside of our initially defined team, stepped up to help
- We are so incredibly grateful for our #oneteam
What’s Next?
- Continue progressing & building upon the momentum started
- Lean more processes out
- Set an example for others to follow
- Focus on continual improvement
- Build growth plans based on what we learned throughout
- Measure our impact to our strategic objectives, outcomes & OKRs
- Do it again (after a long nap & a cocktail)
We still have a lot of work ahead but we are all confident, we got this.
Dawn Thiem, Agility Health
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