Clients

We have worked with some of the largest change implementations in the world, from an ERP implementation with 3,000 users, to a CMM Level 2 implementation of more than 5,000 staff, to multiple Agile enterprise transformations involving hundreds of teams, thousands of users, and scores of business units. A number of those stories are listed here. While the names of clients need to be confidential in this context, references from amongst the cases listed below will be made available prior to beginning an engagement with us.

Agile Momentum

Traditional Financial, a medium size investment company, had projects that took too long, customers that didn’t trust IT, a general lack of collaboration on projects and a lackluster feeling amongst teams and management alike. Beginning with a readiness assessment, we identified key players, the many opinions on the state of things from developers, testers, project managers, vice presidents and senior vice presidents.
What we found was an organization ready to change, anxious to adopt Agile, but having been unable in the past to accomplish this. Several sessions of an Agile orientation revealed some had heard this pitch before, but for some reason nothing had happened. We were engaged in June of that year and began by forming a Transition Team that operated using Agile, complete with business and process stories, one week iterations and a Product Owner. Seven epic stories were defined, with an organizational change perspective being the driving approach. There were a total of five people on the team, three of whom were vice presidents. After getting used to the idea of doing this kind of grassroots work, everyone seemed to enjoy the hands on approach.
The first Agile delivery team at Traditional began work in July, transitioning from initial requirements and architectural work done in waterfall style. The transition was a little rough at times, especially for one consultant who was invested in a big design up front (BDUF), but with training and handson coaching, the team was soon humming along delivering working, tested software each iteration.
Meanwhile, the Transition Team had authorized another Agile team to start up and had defined the criteria for new projects going Agile, how each project would be governened (basically using the traditional Agile artifacts and processes, rather than Traditional’s normal PMO-heavy methods). Soon two Agile teams were delivering in two week iterations, with heavy involvement from business users both day to day and at iteration reviews. The Transition Team had been convervatively throttling back the number of Agile teams, but now, after initial skepticism, the senior vice president on the customer side remarked in an iteration review “why wouldn’t we do our next big project in an Agile way?” The question was indeed rhetorical.
The Ajax team,

Enterprise Transformation

The Fortune 200 financial services company took a very deliberate approach to it’s Lean-Agile implementation.
The VRI team was a case in point.

Extreme Change

The Fortune 200 telecom company wanted to change development cycles from a year or more to 90 days or less. They did, but there were casualities: middle management, and successful change.

Rapid Achievement

The old style phone company was intent on achieving CMM Level 2 in record time. At the time,  they were the largest Level 2 assessed organization in the world.

ERP for 2000

The Fortune 300 hardware manufacturer was on deadline to implement ERP before year 2000.