Delivery Acceleration for a Tourism Organisation

The Challenge

Faced with a demanding business strategy, conflicting priorities and a new workforce after significant departures during COVID, a leading tourism body was challenged to deliver across multiple fronts. Historic delivery cycles were measured in months, ill-equipped for multiple streams of work and seen as expensive and only moderately successful. Something had to be done urgently.

Our Solution

EPiC was collaborating with the customer to develop a strategy and roadmap for digital transformation. While the client had been practicing business agility and agile methods for some time, their commercial agreements with vendors were still fixed-price engagements following traditional project patterns.

Although the vendor used agile methods internally, their client interactions adhered to fixed-price engagement and waterfall phases.

EPiC, as Agile Coaching and Delivery Specialists, proposed an experiment for both the client and vendor to fully embrace agile delivery. The goal was to move past historical grievances and establish high-level agile behaviors for a few months.

• T&M commercial agreements
• Cross-functional teams including vendor developers and client
• A single backlog of remediation, improvement and strategic features
• Vendor given access to client Jira project and Microsoft Teams
• Jira workflows configured to support vendor SDLC, develops & release management
• Executives agreed to empower the Product Owner and utilize sprint review for feedback

We proposed project inception followed immediately by our first two-week sprint.

Outcomes

• Continuous delivery to production from sprint 1, with high-value upgrades from sprint 2
• Progressively faster and easier delivery with each sprint
• Demonstrably massive uplift in value delivered, speed-to-market and quality