Delivery of Business Outcomes in the VUCA World

High-impact business problem solving – how to focus your organisational data initiative on critical business need and execute “quick wins”

The Problem

In this recently completed project, Propelius was brought in to review 2 high profile projects that have been in delivery mode for over 2 years and struggling to deliver the business outcomes and realise the expected benefits.

Our initial review quickly identified that the IT tech teams have invested millions of dollars in the latest and greatest data lake tech stack, had ingested data via Kafka pipelining, built the ETL jobs and that data was in fact in the Live / Prod environment. However, when it came to obtain the business acceptance and signoff – i.e. the networking and operations team of this transport sector client, there was significant resistance to sign off and accept the changes.

The newly ingested data was not accepted by the operations support team and therefore the Agile DevOps squads were delivering the work without the adequate Data Warehousing Models.

What went wrong?

1. The business requirements and outcomes sought were incorrectly scoped

2. The IT technology teams were working in silos yet delivering work in scrum and Kanban i.e. Agile ways of working. The squads were having weekly ceremonies, doing all this ‘awesome’ Kafka pipelining, ETL data ingestion with all the latest and greatest tools, funky tech work yet no one will accept it.

At the heart of the problem was a mandate to make changes for the right strategic reasons, without a change management process to enable the business enterprise outcomes to be delivered. Poor business process mapping and impact assessment as well as a lack of effective change management across the diverse business areas left this change portfolio vulnerable.

The change was further complicated due to the recently ingested SQL codes not being supported. The operations team did not accept it and was quickly added to a technical debt register, which has significant financial implications for the CTO suite considering the initial multi-million dollar investment in on-prem infrastructure.

The outside-in approach

The complexity of the projects clearly needed an outside team with the problem-solving skills and background in the best practice IT and ‘ways of working’.

Our approach involved identifying the problem via numerous Agile coaching workshops with stakeholders to understand each individual teams / squads issues. This involved capturing all of the pain-points and designing what would become the re-scoped delivery of outcomes i.e. the newly prioritised solution.

We utilised numerous delivery methodologies, in this case we created a hybrid Agile model with greater Waterfall governance delivery due to the client being a government agency.

We also utilised the highly-skilled ‘push-and-pull’ change management methodology, which has been proven to work for us with previous global clients.

This enabled the business to completely turn around its negative and sarcastic view of the tech teams and Agile ways of working; enabling a more co-operative working style with technology vs the old ‘pointing the finger’ / blame approach.

The Final Outcomes

This was a fixed-term engagement that was completed within 8 months and achieved the following outcomes:

· ETL data ingestion jobs commenced delivery with a proper Data Warehousing Model and the operations teams accepted the change with this newly improved DevOps delivery methodology

· The remaining SQL code was prioritised to be re-written for the Warehousing model

· The Business team received a number of Power BI dashboards that enabled them to receive real-time data from the network and monitor their 3rd party contractors’ SLAs

· The Business started to move from manual collation of reporting to using sophisticated Power BI Dashboards

· Other API delivery solution re-scoped

· One of the projects was closed and capitalised within budget constraints

Why Propelius?

Increasing complexities in business, operational and technology change, as well as the lack of collaboration between organisations, teams and people have led to significantly increased chances of project or programme delivery failure. This case study was one such example

At Propelius we utilise numerous project delivery methodologies, problem solving consulting skills in conjunction with the support of technology to challenge and drive new thinking.

If you’ll like to discuss how Propelius Consultants can assist, please contact us.

We operate from New Zealand but have a proven record of helping clients globally.