The Challenge
Funding Circle had identified opportunity to better align engineering teams with wider company strategy. Having committed to agility and accompanying practices the business were keen to maximise their efforts and ensure the initiatives success.
identified opportunities to enhance the team’s skills and knowledge in agile and delivery methodologies. We proactively took steps to provide training in areas such as prioritization and backlog formation, which helped us to better understand the impact of these skills on product development and feature delivery. As a result, we have seen significant improvements and are excited to continue building on our newfound expertise.
Solution
To overcome the problem, we implemented several strategies, including coaching for business, product, and development teams, with a focus on pre-development personnel to ensure that the company were working on the right things to help them achieve their key strategic initiatives. Training and coaching were deployed on forecasting, estimation, prioritisation and design thinking to ensure that the problem(s) were fully understood. Afterall, it’s irrelevant how efficiently you build the wrong things.
Across the business we introduced, implemented and matured the use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as a tool to ensure the things being worked on at the Gemba contributed and provided feedback to the various layers of strategy.
So now we’d established that we were building the right things, it was then time to focus on building those things right. Having already worked with development teams to establish OKRs we had worked with them directly to formalise and evolve agility and practices within the teams. A common theme we come across is that people tend to gain an understanding of agile through experience and this percetional learning can lead to misunderstanding and inconsistent knowledge within teams which mean that commonly initial trainings are required. Efforts were made to ensure that the operational side of the business including product worked closely with engineering to, even in pre-development to ensure the best solutions to problems.
A whole package of initiatives were deployed to streamline processes including ensuring tools like Jira were fit for purpose, removing competing sources of truth, making implicit and inconsistent process and policy explicit, creating better documentation for team WoWs, understanding team health through health checks allowing us to identify systemic problems and areas for improvement as well as the aforementioned OKR process which helped better alignment of teams and introducing data to decision-making.
Results
Visualizing our OKRs allowed for better inspection and adaptation, increased team engagement and decentralized control, improved team health, and the coaching efforts directly with teams produced far more confident, data driven and experimental teams. As a result, we achieved a 147% improvement in bottom-line financial objectives and fostered a more experimental and iterative culture right from the inception of an idea or identification of a problem right through to delivery and subsequent learnings.