Retailer Case Study

At The Speed Of Retail

Background

A UK national retailer had the vision to increase their online services and digital product offering. They had an existing I.T Development department consisting of permanent, third party, and individual contractor staff. As part of a desire to become more resilient to change and better meet customer demand, they wanted to adopt Scrum as their default means of delivering value. After the initial exploratory surveys and interviews with selected individuals, we could see most team members had a fair understanding of Scrum – what they needed was a helping hand.

How We Worked

We provided a 4-Sprint Accelerate service. The Client had already configured their development teams into a potentially cross-functional capability. Our agile coaches saw that the Scrum Events (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and the Sprint Retrospective) although occurring regularly, were not being utilized to their full potential. These events are the backbone of the Scrum Framework, and the teams would always struggle to reach high-performance if these events were not understood and facilitated well enough.

Our Coaches observed the Scrum Events for each team. When they could see that the team were struggling to get maximum value from any event, they would intervene and ask the powerful coaching questions that would facilitate the team getting back on track. These coaching interventions were always done unobtrusively and sensitive to the personalities within the team. one-one coaching with the key roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master took place to ensure the capability was sustainable within the client organisation. Agile Monster Coaches facilitated team Sprint Retrospectives so we could demonstrate good practice and ensure everyone had a voice.

Results

This guided execution of Scrum allowed very short feedback loops between the client team and our coach. Combined with one-one coaching this resulted in team being able to course-correct their Scrum implantation very quickly. By building on existing knowledge, Agile Monster could focus on fine-tuning the skills and techniques that would allow the team to reach high-performance. They were able to use each of the Scrum Events, not just as meetings, but as decision points were they could inspect and adapt collaboratively to achieve customer value more effectively.