A leading food technology and delivery start-up grew considerably during the Covid-19 pandemic. They were looking to sustain that growth while competing with the many other eating options available as the UK returned to normality after lockdowns.

The company created a logistic technology team to improve the range and reach of delivery options, including enabling a trial of express delivery to encourage new customers.

Not long into the team’s lifespan, progress seemed sluggish or blocked, and the resulting low morale further impacted performance and staff churn.

Technology leaders in the organisation tasked me to:

• Unblock delivery in the team and create an understanding of how things are working.
• Enable the trial of express delivery to go ahead through scoping, discovering and delivering the software. 
• Support the product management and engineering management in devising other relevant, meaningful work that would contribute towards the quality of the logistics offer for customers and the technology estate.
• Create a stable and resilient team around the work, building relevant skills to inspect and make changes in the future. 

Using data to unblock delivery 

Working with the team and management, we implemented measures to see what was currently happening. 

We mapped the flow of work: where it comes from, what happens on its journey to Done, and, crucially, what stakeholder expectations are attached to different types of work. 

Using this information, we found that:

• Approximately 65% of the team’s work was handling expedited issues (“stop what you’re doing and fix this”) from the factory. 
• The frequency of this work meant that on most working days, at least one engineer was disrupted at short notice, for up to half a day. 
• The context-switching this behaviour created made strategic work take longer. This was not initially detected, as the high number of support issues (taking only a few hours at a time) gave the false impression that all types of work were generally resolved quickly. 

Essentially, gaps in the organisational design meant the team’s capacity was frequently diverted away from their strategic aims to the detriment of the business. 

Analysing the expedited work, we made a business case for prioritising efforts to automate the most common items, and create self-serve tooling so the factory staff could resolve many issues themselves. 

Creating lean flow in discovery

Working closely with the Product Manager, I created a set of lean methods for discovery. These enabled the team to quickly ideate potential opportunities and evaluate their suitability against their goals, before deciding whether to invest more time.  

With engineers, I created an approach for leading the architectural discovery and delivery of strategic work. This broke down the single-person bottleneck they had been experiencing. Sharing the architectural burden resulted in faster discovery. 

Created the capability to deliver sustainably

I partnered with the team to create resilience, clarity and trust (inside and outside), ensuring things would keep going long after I had gone. Some of this work included:

• Managing stakeholder expectations using probabilistic forecasting.
• Spotting patterns in delivery information that might flag essential issues. 
• Setting, holding ourselves to and evolving team working agreements. 
• Developing skills to become aware of and facilitate through any problems as they arise. 
• Creating a structured way for new team members to learn by doing real, targeted work on the team’s technical domain.

This ensured that, as the team got better at delivering, they got better at being better, through improved awareness of their world and connectedness with each other.

My intervention created a lean, high-quality team optimised for focus. Realised benefits include:

• The automation and self-serve of expedited work significantly reduced the number of daily distractions the team received. Unplanned expedited work fell from 65% to 30% of throughput.
• This unleashed extra capacity that ensured the trial of 48-hour express delivery was completed ahead of peak. The team was freed up to make further logistics improvements (E.g. widening the reach of Sunday delivery across the country).
• Reducing the number of distractions meant that strategic work got done faster. Cycle time fell from 15 to 6 days. 
• Forecasting approaches ensured that delivery met expectations more frequently and that any issues or deviations were flagged early. Trust between the team and stakeholders was strengthened as a result. 

• agile delivery
• Agile coaching
• Delivery management
• product management
• innovation
• enterprise agility

• Digital Enablement
• Accelerated Solution Delivery

• Technology
• Retail and Consumer