Agile Transformation

Success in today’s rapidly changing and demanding environment requires you to have responsiveness and agility baked into your organisation’s DNA. And central to this is having the right creation process to help optimise or innovate new services at pace.

Our Service

Our Agile Transformation service helps you develop a truly effective and integrated process to speed up delivery and ensure what is produced meets your and your customers’ needs.

We work to understand your pain points and ideal operating requirements, matching you with the correct creation approach, developing a comprehensive and feasible delivery plan and supporting its adoption throughout the organisation-to quickly make a material difference to your business.

Providing impactful change in how your company creates and innovates, where value is delivered incrementally through the programme’s lifespan.

Leonard Vitarana
Partner, Project Management

Leonard Vitarana

Solving these challenges and bringing these benefits.

Challenges

  • Slow delivery of innovation or business-as-usual initiatives.
  • Outputs that fail to meet the needs of the target audience or the objectives of the business.
  • Creation process teams are at odds, producing friction and bad feelings.
  • New urgent demands impact rigid plans and slow delivery further.
  • Overwhelming levels of activities caused by poor prioritisation, impacting team morale and company responsiveness.
  • Reduced return-on-investment through poor quality or time limitations of market impact.
  • Poor visibility of why things are simply not going well.

Benefits

  • Quality outputs that meet the needs of your customers and business.
  • Faster delivery which boosts return-on-investment.
  • Responsiveness and agility are baked into the business’s operating capabilities, providing a competitive advantage when conditions change.
  • More robust and more transparent working practices between teams work together and not against each other.
  • Confidence with your teams that when new and urgent needs emerge, these can be accommodated sensibly and with the right focus.
  • Clear visibility of priorities and resourcing, allowing choices and deployments to produce an optimal level of return.

What We Do

Our methodology is a comprehensive blueprint that allows an organisation to select the right approach and implement it successfully and at a feasible pace. Setting the scope of where changes are needed, what the priorities are, and forming the road-map through delivery:

Your Needs Audit

  • Clarity is generated on what isn’t working and why-highlighting the pain points.
  • We create an ideal future operating approach, giving you a ‘North star’.
  • Finally, an understanding of the ability of the organisation to change is measured, combined with a view of market and performance conditions to help guide the speed of adoption required.
Selection of the Change Approach

  • Using the insight from the needs audit, we carefully assess and select the correct change process for the current and future needs of the business.
  • This could be a pure agile approach, SAFe or an adapted Prince2 Waterfall approach.
  • With clarity of the selection, we can plan the necessary adoption changes within the organisation.
Adoption Planning

  • Using the defined creation process and structure of the selected approach, we use this as a blueprint for what needs to change within the organisation to adopt successfully.
  • This covers senior leadership knowledge, organisation and skills, working practices, governance structures, tools and systems, education, and internal communication requirements.
  • A comprehensive delivery plan and investment schedule are constructed from the changes identified.
Leadership Sponsorship, Engagement & Education

  • Any creation process change is significant, so the senior leadership team must understand and sponsor the change. Education is provided to explain the benefits, how things will operate, and expectations of when changes will be made.
  • In addition to senior leadership knowledge and sponsorship, a core change team is appointed within the business to lead day-to-day change-this team comprises people with senior roles in the change process.
Organisational, Skills & Working Practices, Education

  • Central to the new approach is the need to reflect the new creation processes into the organisation.
  • We identify organisational map, behaviours and skills needed (new and existing), roles and responsibilities, definitions of any new working practices across teams, communications and end reward structures.
  • Outputting clarity of what needs to change, when, and investment required.
Governance & Reporting

  • To support the new organisational changes, modifications to existing governance and reporting approaches are identified for visibility, priority, resourcing and progress. Allowing a clear picture of what is being worked on and critical success measures.
  • Changes are made to help select new initiatives, mechanics for adding them to the roadmap and roles and responsibilities for who does what.
Tooling & Systems

  • We review the tools and systems necessary to support, automate, define and control the end-to-end process.
  • Tools are recommended and selected to provide a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for the process to output measurement and metrics and provide visibility of status, performance and risks.
Training

  • To control and de-risk the initiative, appropriate and feasible training is provided to all levels of the organisation involved in the new process.
  • Ensuring familiarity of how it all works, working practices, roles and responsibilities, terminology and expectations.
Communications

  • Aligned with the training programme, we develop a clear and benefits led internal communication plan.
  • Providing all parties with clarity on the change, the benefits and reasons for the activity and evidence of early success and improvements.

How it is Delivered

We deliver the Agile Transformation programme based on four core principles; comprehensively evaluate all dependencies, but only do what is needed, achieve benefits quickly, and progress in a planned and agile manner. Delivered through 5 stages:

1. Initial Programme Governance & Delivery Framework

2. Insight & Analysis

3. Creation of Delivery Plan & Roadmap

4. Integrated Delivery & Governance

Prioritised Sprints

5. Measured & Iterated

1. Initial Programme Governance & Delivery Plan

Governance is deployed to speed decision making and enable programme control.

An initial programme framework is created for all stages of the transformation-planning, execution and iteration-to ensure timescales are clear, benefits are delivered, and the transformation occurs at pace.

2. Insight, Future State & Gap Analysis

Using the needs analysis outputs, all areas of the proven blueprint that require change are identified.

Additional analysis also highlights the organisations’ capability to undertake change.

3. Integrated Delivery & Governance

From the analysis, the transformation plan is created.

Identified improvements and change capabilities are subjected to a cost-to-benefit, importance, timeliness to deliver, and interdependency review. Prioritisation helps create the investment case to support the initiative.

Outputting the delivery roadmap. Supported by critical success KPIs.

4. Integrated Delivery & Governance

The delivery roadmap guides the change with planning and change controlled and measured centrally. All plan elements happen at the right time, and transparent reporting informs all stakeholders of progress and success.

While central planning controls the overall programme, delivery is conducted through agile sprints, cross-functional working practices and organisational empowerment to deliver benefits quickly—growing success and momentum. While the selected creation process may not be Agile, our delivery uses those principles for maximum benefit.

All supported by clear and meaningful internal communications to reduce fears and enable buy-in across the full organisation.

5. Measured, Iterated, Controlled & Communicated

For all stages and streams, critical-success KPIs are used to measure outcomes and the success of the process itself, identifying needs for iteration. Baking adaptability into the approach ensures agility to any changing conditions and business goals.

Meet Some of Our Team

DWG is the UK’s most experienced digital transformation consultancy. A team of 50+ senior digital change experts, internationally experienced. Helping you deliver mission-critical change.

Leonard Vitarana
Leonard Vitarana
Chris Poulton
Iqbal Singh
Marco Potesta
Marco Potesta
Andrew Salmon
Andrew Salmon

Previous success

allfunds

A new approach to speed up innovation and change

all funds

  • A planned move to a paid-for set of value-added services, articulated as ‘bundles’ and served through a digital interface experience- the ‘Connect’ service.

  • An existing process which was disjointed, slow, and often resulted in re-work.

  • A backdrop of a regulated industry.

  • A new creation process was needed.

  • A structured Agile approach was used as the foundation. But adapted to have necessary regulatory sign-off as part of the scoping stage for compliance purposes.

  • The creation process was defined with actions and owners clearly articulated.

  • Senior stakeholders were briefed on the why, what, how and when it would be achieved.

  • Organisation change was conducted by a phased use and proof-pointing to established success.

  • With the process articulated into the Aha! Tool to ensure control and efficiencies from all users.

  • A successfully formed and integrated new ‘product function’, working optimally with the internal technology teams.

  • Operating to a process with tools, enabling the delivery of the ‘Connect’ service, which has been a significant commercial success.

    • A 45% growth in revenues to £20mn in 2021, since launch in 2019.

Moving to a SAFe approach
for creation

  • As part of their strategic growth transformation, new digital and data services had increased importance.

  • While the business had implemented some agile techniques within the technology function, this was reflected in the commercial teams.

  • Integration was required, underpinned by a creation process suitable to the needs of the business today and tomorrow.

  • Together we developed the rationale for the change, the selection of the approach, the plan of delivery and costings. Including organisational redesign.

  • Through a series of workshops-with a carefully selected ‘change’ group-the requirements were delivered, covering many business areas to generate insights and buy-in.

  • A SAFe approach selected to deliver incrementally (one squad at a time) across the business, something more feasible than a big bang.

  • Using the plan, senior stakeholders were engaged, and buy-in was achieved.

  • The executive team has now agreed the move to SAFe.

  • Execution is happening in line with the integrated plan, which has also included training support from our partner Advanced Agility.

  • Resulting in a client committed to the approached, armed a comprehensive plan which fundamentally decreases the risk of this significant change going wrong.

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