WHY DO YOU NEED IT?
Although lean product delivery has been around for many years, focussing on rapid delivery of value to customers and reducing cost of delay, many companies struggle to shift from a project to a lean product mindset for a number of reasons:
- The business may not be seeing value delivered quickly enough and are struggling to have visibility on the issues/improvements.
- Traditional delivery processes cause difficulties in the rapid acceptance of product features being delivered by teams and suppliers.
- Larger initiatives lose sight of Agile practices and fall back to traditional project delivery methods that preclude short feedback loops through fast, small iterative releases.
- The businesses Value Streams are not well defined, leading to poorly understood product workstreams.
- There are common challenges when applying a lean product mindset within the context of a complex organisation with legacy technical debt (e.g. monolithic platforms requiring more traditional IT management processes).
- They may be working with a large System Integrator (S.I.), management consultancy or supplier that can be slow to change, either due to traditional contracts or outdated governance processes. These relationships hamper Agile practices.
- Working with larger consultancies can increase reliance on suppliers and hinder the growth of internal capabilities and practices.
- The product outcomes are poorly defined or the features described are bloated and not well connected to the business case. For example, re-platforming legacy systems can lead to expensive “like for like” products and often miss opportunities to improve customer experience and market positioning.
- There is a lack of trust and cooperation between delivery teams and the product management team.
- With many business units and suppliers involved, root causes for delays/waste can be difficult to understand with accountability being passed between parties.
- A company may have a lack of in-house skills and need to work collaboratively with an expert in order to transfer those skills and upskill the in-house teams.
- Agile behaviours and practices across a scaled engineering team can lack appropriate governance resulting in inconsistent delivery and quality issues.
Our experience is that governing Product Ownership practices has the largest short-term impact across these core challenges.
