Our client is an established PayTV vendor with over a decade of deploying middleware product solutions. Facing a more competitive market (customer in-house development, introduction of Android TV, erosion of product royalties) with the introduction and customer environments requiring much shorter product development cycle times, our client was struggling to grow its business and felt that it needed to review it’s R&D and Delivery operations. It turned out that this was not the root cause of their struggling growth.

We were engaged to assess the clients R&D and delivery processes and capability, look at structure and ways to make it more effective and efficient.

Our tried and tested approach in evaluating a development and delivery capability with an organisation is to start with a ‘Discovery Phase’ where we get to understand the organisational architecture of the company, what the business drivers are that steer the technical and deployment strategy and execution.

During this ‘Discovery Phase’ we observed that whilst R&D and Delivery could be more impactful, having a clear company vision and strategy that would drive a market engagement model was needed. The company had evolved a product over time and was expending vast amounts of resource supporting legacy product to a few resource intensive customers. By analysing the proportion of revenue verses effort to support existing clients and the high cost of solution introduction to new customers it was shown that the client did not have a ‘drop-in’ product as advertised. Each deployment was bespoke and could not be supported at scale. In addition the perpetual strain on the development resources to support the multiple bespoke solutions was impairing any future product development making the client’s solution less competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

Our observations were presented to the CxO team at the earliest opportunity as we felt that the task that were requested to perform would not result in the expected by the client. Upon review of our initial findings the client requested that we change the scope of the engagement to support a product strategy and organisational transformation roadmap.

For the remainder of the engagement we advised and mentored the client Exec Team in terms of:

* Creating a vision & strategy that supported legacy products/customer needs and articulated it’s future transformation to a solutions and services led organisation
* Investment in people, solutions & services
* Driving the cross-company organisational changes required to execute the new vision and strategy
* Executing the required changes in 8 weeks

The client was very receptive of the new direction and launched their new branding and customer messaging.
Legacy product overhead was reduced and additional support contracted under new services agreements.
A new professional services organisation was set up and marketed to their customers, maximising their bespoke capability as a separate self-sustaining revenue stream and allowing investment in new product development to compete in the market.

Value was delivered by;
-Provide strategic and operational business decision support
-Design and maintain the future roadmap of the business
-Communicate business capabilities, maturity and the value of architecture
-Optimise service efficiency and effectiveness
-Improve cross-business collaboration, service delivery and asset utilisation

Pains relieved included;
-Lack of ownership
-Lack of access to budget and investment in people
-Lack of knowledge transfer
-Lack of strategic focus on architecture from the business

• Productisation
• Product Lifecycle Management
• Business Change Management & Communication
• Professional Services
• change management

• Purpose to Portfolio