During my time as a strategy consultant at Accenture, I worked with this a utilities client to build a new capability within their renewable energy function to enable the product-aligned scrum teams to work agile while the rest of the organisation was in a more traditional IT set-up.
I was the sole individual contributor on this project, and I worked collaboratively with the project lead to craft the strategy and carry out the implementation. Our client was the Head of Digital and we received additional input and feedback from an Accenture industry expert on energy.
The newly formed digital team within renewables department consisted of six small product teams each aligned to a product. The teams were intentionally set up in an agile fashion to help create more customer-centric, nimble products for the renewables business. The Head of Digital wanted to add a portfolio management capability to her team and needed help to do so.
We spent the first few weeks of the project interviewing as many people involved in the team as possible, in particular the Head of Digital, and the product managers for each digital team, and the key business stakeholders. I facilitated a rose, bud, thorn workshop with those we saw as our main user group within the Digital function, to understand their sentiments around the current workings of the team. The most significant insight was the digital product managers felt unable to keep up with the volume of demands from stakeholders in other parts of the business.
We noticed in our review of the current state of the Digital team that there were no scrum masters, despite there being six product teams set up in a scrum fashion. This for us was a clear opportunity for the Digital team to boost their efficiency. Our proposal to the team was to recruit someone with a scrum master / chief of staff type background who would be mostly focussed on removing obstacles for the product team and supporting the Head of Digital in planning activities. We identified six priority areas for this role (see right).
Based on the needs we identified, we designed and implemented new ways of working to help orchestrate the digital portfolio, we designed a new Chief of Staff role to run these ceremonies, and spent a significant amount of time working with the team to ensure the changes were understood and valued.
This project was quite eye-opening and challenging in terms of managing a complex stakeholder landscape, due to the sheer size of the parent company we were operating within. Though we had buy-in and positive feedback on the service model I designed, I did not feel that we were able to solve some of the root causes of the pain points we identified. A learning I take with me is that changing the stakeholder dynamics relationships is something that takes time. Despite not being in our scope, it would have been a great way to make the solution more effective.
