LeadingMile Consulting has recently completed a long-term project with one of its key clients. The main goals of the long-term effort consisted of implementing an Agile structure whereby the client was able to turn around change in a continuous fashion. As such we managed to deliver tangible and measurable results consisting of bi-weekly releases.
The permanent change to the business means that not only large-scale projects (including an upgrade) were delivered, but progress can also be seen in the smaller releases, tweaking data flows and existing systems.
In this article we highlight some of the key landmarks of the project, as well as the value we provided by bringing in our proprietary frameworks and our experienced consultants. In a competitive business environment, we feel it’s important to bring in assets that can hit the ground running and our Asset Based Consulting framework is a major factor in the ability to achieve goals. This article will take you through our journey at one of our clients. Through their partnership with LeadingMile, and show how they have been able to save precious time and money.
Challenges
As with many projects, the main challenges included aligning to strategic goals, overcoming legacy barriers and navigating between stakeholders. Furthermore, for this client it became of vital importance to also unlock the value of their data. As an active client in the alternative investment industry they were still unable to report and analyse on every data area they wanted to strategically report on. For example, Look Through data was missing as well as historical data on a part of their portfolio. Not only did we manage to add data for each of these areas, we also made sure this was usable in their portfolio reporting. This way we enabled the organization to extract value from their data. In addition, we made crucial changes to existing data to reflect the actual situation and improving their decision making.
The final challenge we faced was the ability to keep up with change. Historically, the organization found it hard to deliver change to their systems as most clients do. It is easy to forget that simply implementing a system is never sufficient to becoming best in class. As an organization you will have to keep investing in your system landscape and evolve over time. This not only requires agility in your change process, it also means that release and test processes need to be in place to scale up the deliveries. Together with the client we managed to turn a ‘semi-annual’ release cycle into bi-weekly release cycles.
Project Management
Upon starting up at the client, LeadingMile introduced and implemented their out-of-the-box Agile/JIRA framework, which enables the client to directly make use of our project tooling and experience with similar projects. While JIRA was new for the client, through the success of the projects we delivered we saw a growing adoption of the tool in the organization, making it the most actively used tool in the organization. We are not solely focused on the tooling itself but bring along a set of templates (frameworks) and skills that are necessary in these types of challenging projects.
Looking back at this project
We look back at this project with pleasure as we managed to deliver an un precedented amount of change in a challenging environment and time. We managed to do so within a timeline which previously would have been unthinkable for this client. We not only put various fully tested solutions in place, we also made sure the end users were able to achieve their goals, be it the investment into new areas or the reporting across portfolios. This not only provided the client with all necessary tools to continue their business as usual but it also means the client can move their change capability forward in a more responsive and mature manner.
