Development of a large enterprise demand management process in a scaled agile environment
Development of a large enterprise demand management process in a scaled agile environment
Industry: Energy/IT
Objectives, executive summary
The aim of the project was to develop a comprehensive Demand Management framework that ensures systematic capture and prioritisation of business needs and focused work of agile teams. During the implementation, trainings, workshops and iterative planning mechanisms supported the implementation and integration of the process. The new system allows for transparency, measurability and continuous improvement of workflows, while also serving as an educational tool for participants. Experience has shown that the key to success has been the iterative approach and continuous learning, which have facilitated the adoption of change and the development of sustainable operations.
Client background and environment
The client is a large Hungarian company with its headquarters in Central Europe, one of the most important energy and industrial players in the region. The company has a presence in ten countries, employs thousands of people and operates across the entire spectrum of the energy supply chain, from exploration and production to processing and end-user services. The Hungarian headquarters is responsible for the coordination of the company's domestic and international operations, as well as for the development and optimisation of strategic and operational processes.
Over the past decades, the company has grown significantly in terms of both revenues and market presence, reinforced by continuous investments and acquisitions. At the same time, these acquisitions have resulted in the merging of different organisational cultures, operating models and management systems, which has made it a major challenge to maintain efficiency. As the growth phase moderated, the company's focus on streamlining internal processes, improving transparency and operational efficiency became increasingly important, making a comprehensive rethink of the business and operations essential.
Objectives, tasks
The agile operational development concerned the processes of implementing a complex set of services that
- required the high-quality interaction of several complex IT systems, whose specialists have been involved in their development for a long time and have a deep knowledge of them,
- as user needs continue to evolve, it provides the opportunity to capture customer needs in a more systematic way and to prioritise needs collaboratively along a comprehensive product strategy
- enables three agile teams to work continuously from the backlog and manage progress in Azure DevOps
- speeds up the delivery of different functions and increases the effectiveness of the communication that supports them
- present the new process to different stakeholders (including business, industry stakeholders) and support their involvement.
In short, the goal was to create a framework that enables the continuous capture and prioritization of business needs, and at the same time helps agile implementation teams to focus implementation by describing business needs in sufficient detail and by regularly reprioritizing the needs that are constantly coming in and those that already exist in the system.
This framework has served as a pillar of agile operational development, with training, the introduction of team-level and executive-level events, and follow-up on strategy implementation to support teams in iterative, value-driven work.
The development of a Demand Management framework is both a creative and an educational process: it reveals the gaps that make it difficult to capture and implement business needs, builds on the well-established process elements and interactions that exist in the organisation and introduces new concepts and mechanisms whose adoption needs to be supported by regular follow-up at multiple levels.
Challenges, difficulties
- a large-scale, complex, rapid operational development need in an organisation with low agile maturity
- the complexity and involvement of the teams and the stakeholder ecosystem was hampered by several factors, such as cultural differences, organisational boundaries, external developers
- taking into account organisational specificities, traditions and customary decision-making mechanisms when developing an agile culture
Implementation of the task
In the first phase of the project, training sessions on agile implementation and advanced agile design were conducted, followed by a series of workshops to develop the base framework, and then the configuration of Azure DevOps. In addition, the iteration plan, the event sequence system that supported the operation of the framework, was developed to enable multi-level design. Subsequently, we supported the integration and further development of the system through coaching via Agile events and an Improvement Backlog of additional development tasks.
In the first phase, we taught the selected professionals the principles of agile operation and planning and scaled agile planning through theory and practical exercises.
In the second phase, we used a series of workshops to assess which existing and missing phase elements exist between the receipt of business requests and delivery, and which could be formalized and made more visible in order to develop a process system of acceptable quality for the organization. Although the entire framework also defined quality criteria for delivery, we focused initially on the system for processing and prioritizing requests.
The Demand Management process has therefore shown that:
- What are the minimum necessary factors that determine the elements of the framework and its process efficiency, e.g., product vision, product strategy, elements supporting competitive advantage, market changes, competitors' activities, system requirements, organizational compliance, legal compliance, bottleneck requirements, and the iterative performance of the teams involved in planning and development.
- What are the main stages of planning, from receiving the request to the PI Ready Backlog, which is ready for PI Planning, from which teams can select work for their own backlogs during PI planning? E.g. Funnel, Product Management Analysis, Product Management Backlog, Business Analysis, PI Ready Backlog E.g.: Funnel, Product Management Analysis, Product Management Backlog, Business Analysis, PI Ready Backlog
- What are the accepted rules for each stage, and who is responsible for the content of each backlog? The main questions regarding these rules are: what needs to happen in a given stage and what results are acceptable for the work in that stage, i.e., what are the main activities, decision points, the order in which items are processed, the format of the items used in a given stage, e.g., Epic, Feature, Story, etc., who is responsible, and on which platform the work takes place, e.g., the interface created for submitting requests, the project management platform, a specific Excel spreadsheet in the cloud, etc.
In the third phase, as a result of a series of workshops, we presented the Demand Management process in a Kanban board, which broadly followed the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) ART Kanban framework. This Kanban board serves to connect the work between different levels of backlogs and provides an opportunity to identify operational deficiencies in the process, correct them as quickly as possible, and speed up the process, or "flow." This set of criteria also provided the basis for the pilot operation of the Project Management platform chosen by the team. At this stage, additional internal experts were also involved, such as members of teams already working agilely within the organization, the team's business analysts, and key players from the agile teams, who helped refine the system criteria with their questions and previous project experience.
In the fourth phase, we prepared a pilot PI planning for the teams already established, followed by the first pilot sprints. This timeframe gave us the opportunity to test the process of claim acceptance and processing in practice. Experience here showed that:
- the organisation is not yet fully prepared to fully implement its projects according to the principles of the agile framework, the single shared prioritisation, there are many parallel expectations
- teams, as well as different customers, will have to get used to the fact that business needs can now only come to the team through a common channel,
- focus on the iterative design work of Product Management, the team responsible for the design, with decision-making authority to drive the Demand Management process
In the fifth stage, the team used the lessons learned to create an interface that explained the process of submitting a request to their customers in a clear way and a questionnaire that allowed them to submit their requests in a well-prepared and thoughtful way. There was also management communication to customers and the team, which demonstrated the change to a single channel submission process and reassured team members that they were not obliged to accept requests from "the side". At this stage, the Improvement Backlog, a prioritised set of work to improve the process, was developed and started to be implemented with the team. This phase was completed with the support of events.
Results
As a result of the project, a comprehensive Demand Management framework was developed, covering all the key criteria for a scaled agile product team, and through our support activities we introduced iterative planning mechanisms and events for the start-up agile team. We designed the framework to make the process easy to follow, measure and improve, and to serve as an educational tool for newcomers and those who have not worked with an agile approach before. Based on the current plans, the Demand Management process developed will also serve as a starting model for other start-up product teams.
Lessons learned
- The iterative consultative approach was key to successful implementation, as it allowed for continuous refinement and incorporation of feedback.
- The implementation of the processes has met with considerable resistance from senior and client levels, who are used to the team's service-oriented approach.
- The key role of education opportunities needs to be strengthened to ensure that all stakeholders are prepared and ready to participate in the pilot processes.
