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MY APPROACH

Initially, I undertook a 3-week discovery phase, holding several interviews with senior leadership, product managers, program managers, architects, and delivery teams. Through the interviews, I was able to assess:

• the culture – did the culture support and demonstrate agile values? Did leaders lead from behind or did they command control? Was there trust between the leaders and team members? Did the leaders and teams have a project or product mindset? Did teams adapt to change easily? What happens when a team is late? What about a program?
• the agile maturity – where was the agile journey the teams and leaders were taking? Was agile something that teams did, or did the leaders model and adopt agile mindsets as well?
• the current way of working – were the teams consistent? how did they manage dependencies across teams? how transparent were the leaders? what about the teams?
• the painpoints – what were the pain points? what was getting in the way of high performance?
• key stakeholder needs – what were the needs of leadership? of the leaders? of the teams? Why did they need these things?

The teams were already utilizing lean-agile mindsets, values, principles, and best practices but the product, program and solution architecture leaders across the 8 development release trains needed a way to stay aligned, get rapid feedback from key customers and stakeholders, and also manage the portfolio and product backlog.

Co-Create a New Culture and Way of Working
In close collaboration with the head of product delivery and the portfolio management team, we came up with the following improvements to help the organization succeed:

• Created a Culture of Collaboration: Worked with key senior stakeholders, product management, program management and solution architecture to plan MVP and quarterly releases utilizing PI Planning workshops where teams can make critical decisions around capacity and value being delivered.
  
• Enabled a Product Mindset and Adopted Healthier Product Backlog Hygene and Management: Created and executed training with Product Managers and Product Owners on how to manage backlogs, manage priorities using a value driven/ data driven prioritization approach, established a taxonomy on how to break down strategic objectives into smaller more manageable value packets and write stories that had clear acceptance criteria.
  
• Instilled a Culture of Continuous Improvement: Co-created a continuous improvement culture & backlog to strengthen the program and product management team maturity.
  
• Created a Culture of Transparency: Co-created with program managers an aligned way to report status in the scrum of scrums and monthly readouts. Updated Tableau Portfolio Status Dashboard Report to radiate status information clearer.
  
• Created a Culture of Continous Learning: Introduced a Program Level Inspect and Adapt (Retrospective) workshop at the end of each quarterly delivery to ensure we capture accomplishments as well as learnings to be applied as continuous improvement activities in the next release.

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