Fortune 500 Tech Company - Web Marketing Division

A Fortune 500 technology company hired Agility 11 to guide the Agile transformation for their Web Marketing organization: a division with over 200 people producing a complex e-commerce web site with hundreds of pages, selling a broad portfolio of software products, and responsible for billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Business Goals: speed and quality

We guided the executive leadership team to name 2 business goals for their Agile transformation. They selected these:

1. Reduce cycle time (duration from start to finish for designing & publishing pages)

2. Improve quality (reduce defects)

Results

• 38% improvement in cycle time (over 9 months)

• 47% reduction in defects (over 5 months)

*Cycle time is the total duration required to deliver new content or functionality to the web site; including UX, design, production, and Quality assurance. Over a 9-month period, cycle time dropped from an average of 13 days to 8 days.

The Agility 11 approach

1. Leverage the Path to Agility® framework to guide action at all levels of the organization.

2. Reduce silos to foster collaboration and increase speed: Form cross-functional teams including UX, Design, Production, and QA.

3. Conduct Value Stream Analysis to identify the delays and bottlenecks in the workflow.

4. An expert team of Agility 11 coaches trained and coached teams to implement Scrum + Kanban (‘Scrumban’).

5. Measure teams’ true capacity, and use this data to improve predictability in the quarterly planning process.

6. Establish and facilitate an organization-wide cross-functional Agile Community of Practice to accelerate learning and empower long-term process improvement.

7. Facilitate Agile Leadership workshops for the senior leadership team to develop skills and tools for guiding organizational change.

Path to Agility® Transformation Roadmap

Agility 11 leveraged that Path to Agility® (P2A) framework to establish a roadmap for the transformation, at all levels of the organization from executive leadership, to product areas, to individual delivery teams. We also used P2A to track progress and improvement in Agile practices over time.

Ericsson Mobile Core: Agile Transformation Success

The Starting Point

Ericsson Mobile Core, a 2000-person division of Ericsson responsible for developing the mobile soft-switch solution used to carry signals across a mobile network, recognized the need to fundamentally shift their way of working. Ericsson Mobile Core realized that their projects were taking too long, had variable quality and were fundamentally unpredictable.

Ericsson leadership embarked on an Agile journey to solve these problems.

Ericsson’s Results

• 83% reduction in lead time (start to finish for new features)

• 71% cost reduction for system builds

• Quality improvements

• Higher overall employee satisfaction

• Enabled a new business model: Network as a Service

• 130 agile teams across 5 global development centers

Results are compiled from interviewing Ericsson execs and from www.infoq.com/articles/agile-transformation-ericsson

Learning & Practicing, Coaching the Coaches

Agility 11 Founder and Principal Coach Brad Swanson worked as part of a world-class team of coaches from agile42 to develop a strategy for sustainable success with the full engagement of Ericsson’s senior leadership team. As external coaches, we guided the transformation effort over a period of five months along with a cadre of Ericsson employees who eventually became internal trainers and coaches to scale the improvements across the organization, to far-flung locations across Europe and China. The outcome was an agile transformation that delivered both short-term wins and an internal agile capability that has continued to evolve in the years since we, as outside consultants, concluded our work.

Accelerating & Optimizing; Sustaining Innovation

Ericsson established measures of success and has achieved concrete improvements in quality, employee satisfaction, customer responsiveness and delivery predictability. For example, Ericsson reduced cycle time for new features from 12+ months to as little as 3 weeks. They previously needed two weeks simply to compile their system and manually run a small number of tests on a network simulator; they now have automated build and test (continuous integration) that runs multiple times per day. These capabilities have enabled them to maintain and grow market share, and enable a new business model wherein Ericsson operates the mobile network on behalf of their customers, which reduces costs for their customers and enables more rapid deployment of value-adding features.

Ericsson’s senior leaders have spoken publicly about their success story in presentations at a number of conferences including the Scrum Gathering in Atlanta, the Agile2012 conference in Texas, and Agile Greece 2018.