The company had acquired another company in the logistics space that had a large backlog of committed changes to the product. Many of these commitments were made without documentation or technical feasibility evaluation. The dev team ran with no process and little to no quality assurance testing before going live. Customers were leaving, and there was a lawsuit looming and little understanding of how to turn things around.
The leaders of the original company were no longer involved with the product. The product was considered a loss leader with the goal of migrating the customers to a new platform once parody of functionality was achieved. The development team didn’t have a standard software delivery lifecycle. The business had no view into technology capacity, so they committed to monthly delivery of everything that came in expecting technology to deliver. Technology felt they had no choice but to accept everything the business requested.
Jenni Crenshaw, SaaS Company Senior Vice President
Working for the C suite and specifically the CTO, Jenni was asked to evaluate the stateside leader of the team for his ability to turn the team around. It was determined that he didn’t have a deep understanding of software delivery processes and would require training in what agile is and how to work with business counterparts to be successful. A plan to replace him was started but he quit the next week. Jenni was asked to take over the team and right the ship, putting her initial focus on the dev team.
Jenni took over the week of a monthly release, so she began by spending a week watching and listening to the team as they prepared for their release. The release went in with defects on 50% of the functions released. This was due code that had never been tested. It was the teams process to “test as much as they could, then go live.” She immediately implemented a rule that no untested code would go to production. Jenni took some dev capacity and realigned it to build a regression suite which the platform had never had. She then developed a capacity model and had the backlog of work estimated in points by dev function. Jenni equally forced the business side to prioritize their requests and used the two pieces of information to lay out releases.
Concurrently, Jenni sat in on customer calls with the business to understand the biggest issues, finding missed commitments and expectations with code quality. Release 2 went down to 5% code defects in production. Jenni put in weekly touch points for updates, prioritization, and process improvements. The company began telling customers the improvements made and resetting expectations on delivery dates. By month three everything was up to full capacity, delivering clean code and the team could negotiate release cycles with the business without Jenni.
Thirdly, during this time Jenni instituted daily standups with the full team and identified three top players on the team who she met with one-on-one daily. The goal was not only to right the ship but to have it run independently. By investing in these resources, progress to that outcome was being made. At that point, the team was functioning well, and the quality was up, but the threat of a lawsuit still loomed due to missed commitments. Jenni asked to stay with the team for another three months to focus on righting the P&L and managing the lawsuit threat. She had a suspicion that the P&L could be realized with a few changes. By evaluating the last three months of data on where capacity had been spent, she identified 3 points in one contract that took up 25% of the capacity and had less than 10% advancement in 3 months.
With a laser focus on those 3 points, Jenni established a tiger team of members inside and outside the team bringing in the top talent from across the company. Within a month, they could confidently say that these three points would not be able to be delivered without significant technology investments in a loss leader platform.
Jenni developed a proposal and went to the CEO to recommend negotiation out of those commitments. By impacting only one customer and only on three requirements, all other commitments could be met within the promised timelines. After much discussion of the analysis, the decision was made to move forward with the recommendation. In the end, Jenni had taken the worst performing dev team to the best performing dev team in the company in just three months. In six months, she stabilized the P&L and avoided a lawsuit for the company. Her drive for analysis and problem solving were the things that pushed her to deliver on this one. She knew the dev team would turn around with a focus on good agile processes, mentoring, and coaching the team to understand their responsibilities. However, it was her focus on the bigger picture and what was happening to the company that led her to identify and turn around the P&L issue.
Watch full video interview below.
Contact Jenni Crenshaw via LinkedIn or her Career WebFolio.
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