The Situation

I was working with a software development team at a client. One day, their business development team approached me and
said “This Agile stuff isn’t for us right? Is it just for developers?”

The Task

After some discussion, we found that the problem they were trying to solve was their proposal re-work time. The process they were using, which was very standard to
proposal teams, was causing massive amounts of content to be rewritten due to miscommunications on direction.

The Action / Approach

We conducted an Agile 101 workshop to introduce the non-IT teams to the Agile manifesto and then looked at the 12 principles to see how they could
work for this business development team.

We changed how they approached proposals, starting with a storyboard that outlined the critical factors and themes. We then worked through the elements of the request for proposal. This was all translated into a backlog, from which anyone with the bandwidth and knowledge could pull items
and start working on them.

The storyboard and backlog not only showed the team’s priorities clearly, but also allowed them to eliminate work silos and shave several days off
the process work time.

The Result

In three months:

  • The business development department now had a mechanism to take on short turn around bids that they couldn’t before, increasing their output volume by 20%.
  • Agile became a mindset accepted across all departments in the organisation, not just in IT.
  • The time to complete a work product was reduced by several days, with over 50% less rewriting.

Relevant Business Perspectives

Practice