In light of the Global Digital Business Transformation, is your company expanding its digital services? Are you managing multiple delivery teams across multiple geographic locations?

With more demand for your software delivery services and increasing geographical distribution of teams, it becomes increasingly necessary to deliver more scalable delivery models.

The objectives

Your objectives are to:

• Deliver productivity and flexibility through development of more consistent operation across platforms and sites, making better use of established best practices and reducing onboarding costs
• Enable optimal resource allocation through visibility and an enhanced decision making process
• Enhance management decision making and productivity through self-service information tools and reliable workflows
• Enhance customer satisfaction through development of agile and responsive ways of working

The actions

In order to achieve the above, you must engage key individuals across the organisation to implement the following:

• Establish a Senior Management Team, with representations from each discipline and each site, responsible for identifying, prioritising and tracking organisation initiatives.
• Develop a dashboard of initiatives for capturing, prioritising and tracking the organisation initiatives (detailed below as “Mini Internal Projects”).
• Centralise all knowledge making your Intranet the single point of truth for all knowledge in the organisation (linking off to other tools where necessary)
• Reduce the number of tools used by teams to the bare minimum (eg. only one issue/task tracking tool = Jira)
• Develop a service catalog, describing the targeted capabilities of the organisation and their current level of maturity
• Develop a career path framework, including job descriptions, recruitment materials and training regimes for each level of expertise in each discipline
• Develop comprehensive onboarding procedures for both internal and external resources
• Build and document Business Process Management (BPM) Jira ticket types, workflows and dashboards including the following:
  • Presales
  • Active Projects
  • Mini Internal Projects
  • Incidents (including escalations and resource requests)
• Develop a shared resource management spreadsheet using Google Sheets for the allocation tracking of all resources (internal and external)
• Structured Project Review Board to undertake Daily Project Review calls to address each of the outstanding BPM actions as documented by the requestor in Jira tickets (detailed below in “Matrix organisation management”)
• Build a Matrix organisation structure

The implementation process

I have achieved the above, in the past, by first identifying some other like/minded individuals (“champions”) and together we worked to create working examples of the above which we used to “normalise” the adoption thereof.

In order to achieve the greatest effectiveness and benefits, the model is heavily dependent on the whole organisation owning the process. It requires ongoing training and some policing. Also, the process is always a work-in-progress, requiring adaption to constant change and adoption of new and better ideas.

The most effective sales tactic can be to demonstrate to users that the information that they are requesting is already available on a Self Service basis, particularly if they contributed to the information model themselves.

Challenges

The major challenges of implementing a new Business Process Management regime include:

• Convincing everybody across the organisation to invest time in understanding the new processes and learning the tools
• Training staff (particularly Commercial staff) to use tools such as Jira and Confluence (they much preferred PowerPoint, Word and Excel)
• Building ownership and avoiding disempowerment of those who were happy to continue with how things were

The results / outcomes

The results you can achieve include:

• Greater flexibility through a common understanding of One Way of Working across all departments and all sites, leveraging the Best Practices established wherever they were most mature
• Reduced cost through faster onboarding of internal recruitments and 3rd party resources
• Increased revenue and improved customer satisfaction through greater responsiveness to requests / escalations and better decision making