Situation
After recently consolidating 3 different data teams under a single organization, the client came to Sketch for help adopting productive practices for these teams. They wanted Sketch to help build the operational model, as well as help determine individual skills and delivery practices necessary to become a product-driven organization. At the start, we identified Speed to Market, Predictability, and Alignment as the most important outcomes to focus on improving.
Before we got started, the client had shared many challenges they were facing:
- Stakeholders didn’t know where their requests were in the queue, or when to expect them to be completed.
- Coordinating priorities for large efforts (and even small ones) was difficult and prone to misalignment across individuals and teams.
- Teams were focused on fulfilling requests and had difficulty creating time and space to improve the client’s product offerings.
- Teams couldn’t deliver work independently, so members spent too much time in standups for coordination and visibility needs.
- Leaders weren't sure how to apply agile practices to a data organization.
As a result, the data science team was isolated from the rest of the organization, which made it impossible to keep everyone pulling in the same direction.
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- Team structure
- Core team practices
- Cross-team planning
- Continued growth practices
Iterative improvements
Working in phases helped the organization incrementally develop the skills needed to enable more advanced practices. The process felt less intimidating, even as the team completed all of the following steps toward their identified objectives:
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- Agile bootcamps (training sessions)
- Team coaching for ceremonies
- 1-on-1 coaching sessions
- Facilitated workshops and working sessions
- Contract Scrum Masters from Sketch who filled the role on the teams
- Coaching for the leadership team
- Tool configuration (ADO) to establish consistent patterns for tracking and managing work
- Squad health checks using proprietary software to take a baseline and measure progress
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