Organizational Agility: The Key to Accelerating Innovation in Federal
$7
Million in saving
50%
Product release accelerated
The Challenge
A Fortune 500 financial institution had a new strategic goal to develop and launch a new software product within 2 years. Based on a traditional waterfall estimation technique, the initial estimate for the first product release was 18 months with a budget of USD 13 million. However, there was no real data from a similar development effort for the time and budget estimation required to deploy the product.
Senior business executives and the product management team were skeptical about achieving the goal within the desired timeframe. Due to the high stakes, the product management team suggested using a product model and an agile development methodology instead.
The Capabilities
Custom Agile Training Coaching Workshops
Defining product vision
Prioritization of an MVP product
Refining and sizing the backlog
The Solution
Agilious facilitated working sessions with senior business executives and product management to create a product vision, identify desired business outcomes, and prioritize features using the MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have) method.
Through backlog refinement sessions with the Product Owner, product team, and development teams, large backlog items, epics and features, were decomposed into smaller user stories, which were then sized by the development teams using a points-based estimation scale. Each session had a clear agenda, including refining and sizing existing stories, and documenting new ones. Taking a data approach to provide transparency, the team’s average velocity and the Product Backlog data points were used to forecast delivery dates.
Agilious transformed the product roadmap by using agile methodology to iterate each individual feature, monitoring user engagement and feedback along the way. With a human-centric product approach, Agilious brought together product thinking with lean-agile delivery.
The Result
The team updated the forecast after each sprint. This provided stakeholders with a realistic, data-based forecast of the Release 1 completion date and actual product development costs. The team improved with each Sprint, increasing velocity and delivering high-quality product increments.
The outcome of this initiative was beyond everyone’s expectations. Release 1 was completed in 10 months at a cost of USD 6 million — saving the institution USD 7 million!
Agilious' unwillingness to let us deviate from correct practice into bad habits is what set them apart from all other coaches we have had… we immediately saw improvements in our effectiveness.
Agilious' unwillingness to let us deviate from correct practice into bad habits is what set them apart from all other coaches we have had… we immediately saw improvements in our effectiveness.
