The Collecting Group

With the challenges of rapid scaling, new product lines and growing their in-house development team, this meant TCG had to ensure they were scaling sustainably and using best practices across the organisation. 

The growing volume of work given to the development teams was flowing, but bottlenecked at the analysis stage. Teams weren’t set up to handle shifting priorities, which we find often happens in high performing, scale-up companies. 

These constantly shifting priorities meant that using a sprint pattern rather than a well managed backlog wasn’t working for the teams. Delivery needed to be value-driven and prioritised using a new process, enabling the teams to focus on product development using iterative delivery techniques to satisfy their ever growing customer base. 

TCG wanted external guidance to ensure their agile methodology was fit for purpose and would be setting them up for continued growth, rather than holding them back. 

Key goals to improve delivery:

• More visibility of work in flight
• Quicker releases
• Easier releases
• Value-driven delivery

Having previously worked with Nimble Approach, TCG knew that our knowledge and experience helping organisations to streamline processes and prioritise business needs would be of huge benefit to them. Our goal was to take the team on a journey through agile coaching, to become a high functioning and high performing team to enable TCG’s continued growth.

• 50% reduction in cycle time
• Improved throughput and reduction in dwell time across the team
• Enhanced team satisfaction

In 3 months the cycle time of delivery has now halved, which means the team is working twice as efficiently as they were previously.

The processes, techniques and ceremonies that are now performed are well facilitated and focused on the work, i.e. deliverables, identifying blockers, bottlenecks and understanding priorities. This means that the teams are well informed and able to take more ownership of the work that they pull in rather than having it pushed upon them.

With cycle times being half what they were before the business and their users are seeing new features drop in half the time they were at the end of 2022. Meaning the business has built a great jumping off point to keep delivering and improving without worrying about process.

Agile Coaching doesn’t have to be a 2 year project if you have a collaborative team who are eager to learn. An Agile Coach can add value in a short amount of time if you are invested in the outcome.