The Problem
# A Global Prioritization Plan to Tackle Technical Debt
Over the course of several years, a multinational technology company amassed a significant amount of technical debt in its technology stacks. To complete needed enterprise-wide software updates, and the security initiatives and hardware upgrades that would address the debt, the company needed to prioritize which initiatives were the most important but was having difficulty. This prohibited them from being able to share with impacted engineering teams what was coming and when. This lack of planning created drawn-out projects that never got fully completed. It was left up to teams to manage, prioritize, and sequence the work. A global set of priorities and an execution plan were much needed.
The Approach
# Solving the Root Problems to Build a Roadmap for Project Execution
We began by identifying the root of the problem statement—sharing the observation that the bigger issue across their three planned enterprise initiatives was an attempt to execute more than necessary, all at the same time. Our input included interviewing engineering leaders about current enterprise-wide initiatives, inventorying more than 60 in-flight projects, and understanding the full who, why, when, why, and how environment. We created a roadmap for the projected plans and categorized them into buckets and phases. We then worked with enterprise architects to prioritize initiatives based on business value and impact. The Senior VPs affirmed the "must have" initiatives and the allocated resources to get the work done on time. We created a rollout approach with enterprise-wide communications for broad visibility and reach and defined the roles of full-time program management employees to track and report initiative execution and the periodic refreshing of the roadmap. This included training the program managers in the processes for their independent management in the future.
# Services Provided:
- Business & Operating Model Strategy
- Change Management
- Workshop Facilitation
- Strategic Planning & Execution
- New Process Development
- Portfolio Planning and Management
Value Delivered
# An Enterprise-Wide Plan to Deliver Tech Initiatives On-Time
The Propeller team reduced planning time by bringing multiple initiatives to the table at the same time, therefore reducing the time spent executing by re-sequencing and/or parallelizing activities where it made sense. This approach included a new, repeatable framework to perform cross-enterprise planning for tackling future enterprise-wide tech initiatives. The client’s organizational leadership and development teams now had a long-term planning model.
Highlights include:
- 68 initiatives sourced from 14 teams that clarified the 10 must-haves to track for the year.
- A first-ever enterprise-wide roadmap of initiatives from central technology
- The value of thousands of engineers focused on the on-time delivery of the 10 most essential technical initiatives for the company
- First-ever tracking visibility into the completion status of multiple top-priority initiatives
