In 2017 I had the exciting opportunity to introduce business agility at Moonpig, one of the UK’s best known start-ups. I have recently left Moonpig, but given it provided me with such valuable learning, I thought it was worth capturing my experiences in more detail. To that end I’ve written a series of blog posts providing an in-depth case study which I hope will provide useful insights for others looking to adopt and scale lean and agile. I have benefitted enormously from the generosity of the lean and agile community, and I hope that by sharing my learnings, others can benefit as I have.
Inevitably the series ended up being longer than I expected, so while it takes about an hour to read in total, it’s divided in to much smaller bite-sized chunks! Part 1 provides a more in-depth introduction and cites some of my key influences, but if you’re keen to get straight in to the detail, it starts here:
PART 2: STARTING WITH WHY (4 minute read)
This post covers the context for change, examining the internal and external factors behind our decision to explore business agility.
PART 3: WHAT AND HOW? (5 minute read)
In this part I outline the vision – what did we actually mean by adopting “business agility”? What outcomes did we hope to achieve? In addition I introduce the “roadmap” – how we planned to go about introducing change.
PART 4: ALIGNMENT (7 minute read)
One of the first steps on our journey was reorganising ourselves in to cross-functional teams, and this post describes the rationale behind that as well as the practical steps we took to make the change.
PART 5: SQUAD PRINCIPLES AND ROLES (6 minute read)
Part 5 delves in to the definition and principles of our cross-functional teams, as well as discussing some of the specific roles that evolved to support our model. It also covers how we defined the role of functions within the cross-functional world.
PART 6: WORKING IN SQUADS (5 minute read)
In this post I explain the broader operating framework which enabled visibility, transparency and knowledge sharing between different teams.
PART 7: ITERATING ON THE SQUAD MODEL (4 minute read)
Inevitably we didn’t get our re-organisation 100% right the first time, so part 7 is dedicated to how we adapted and evolved our cross-functional model to improve it.
PART 8: GETTING FASTER (8 minute read)
Increasing the speed at which we delivered learning and value was a key objective of business agility, and in part 8 I explain how we introduced lean and agile working practices across squads, particularly “non-tech” squads, to optimise flow efficiency across all value streams.
PART 9: GETTING BETTER (4 minute read)
In part 9 I describe how we started to leverage lean thinking, introducing a data-driven, experimental approach to drive improved outcomes and increased ROI across all value streams.
PART 10: MEASURING HAPPINESS (5 minute read)
A key objective of business agility was to improve employee engagement. This post describes how we planned to measure engagement on a regular basis.
PART 11: GETTING HAPPIER (5 minute read)
With plans in place to measure engagement, this post is dedicated to discussing some of the specific initiatives around improving that outcome.
PART 12: OUTCOMES AND LESSONS LEARNED (7 minute read)
In the final post I review the some of the early results to understand what improvements our changes had delivered. I also summarise some of my key learnings and offer some advice to others that might be interested in exploring business agility.
