Engagement

Tech Holding Engineering and Agile Project Management team conducted a three-week engagement with the Insperience team to provide an outside perspective on its technology and development processes. Our specific objectives were:

• Using the Tech Maturity Model (TMM) methodology, provide an objective scoring of the current technology platform for scale and reuse in a future v-commerce platform.

• Document the current platform architecture and highlight areas that require attention or enhancement in order to scale.

• Evaluate the product development processes and identify factors that may block the team’s ability to scale the development and operation of the platform.

Under normal circumstances, the Tech Holding team would spend as much discovery time as possible on-site. Because of the current circumstances, we were limited to virtual conferences, chat/email communication and documented information to provide the basis for our understanding and recommendations.

Our Approach

Scrum

Insperience leadership was extremely impressed with all of the recommendations and brought on the Tech Holding team for phase 2 of the engagement in order to implement the recommended improvements across the board, from business to technology groups. While the scrum process was already in motion for the Insperience team, but to a large extent, there were key steps as part of intake, planning, and overall project governance/delivery processes that were not being adapted in full capacity. The current size and structure of the scrum team were not in an ideal state both operationally and strategically. In order to further cultivate the transparency and cross-functional communication between all of the stakeholders - Business Owner, UX/UD, Engineering, Product, QA, Project Management, Data Analytics, and others, we provided recommendations and area of improvements for the respective phases of the software development lifecycle with the emphasis on Scrum framework. Additionally, we at Tech Holding firmly believe that for any framework or process to produce maximum results, there needs to be proactive ownership and a ‘quarterback mindset’ around the delivery of the projects. That should be the responsibility of Project Managers/Scrum Masters dedicated to each project to keep the delivery pipeline in check with clear and precise communication at all times. The biggest gap was the absence of Project Management/Scrum Master as a role or a functional group within the organization. Tech Holding successfully embedded a highly experienced Project management team to start the training, implementation, and overall Scrum process with the Insperience team. The diagram below outlines the framework for the Scrum process that we strive to follow. Below, we provide specific suggestions for process improvement for the various phases represented in the diagram.

Scrum

Key highlights of the Scrum:

• Embedding feature intake and planning steps that further developed and maintained perspective on how to strategically manage the product backlog in the context of the product roadmap. It also helped to outline the dependencies and relationships between the features being planned.I

• nstitute a Technical Debt Forum that helped surface technical debt requests for consideration in prioritization and backlog refinement sessions.

• Establishment of Backlog Refinement Sessions which increased transparency and clarified the value, and broke the work down into consumable & deliverable pieces.

• Initiated the scrum ceremonies, such as sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint reviews and retrospectives.

• Established project metrics and reporting at both project level as well as sprint cycles and releases.

• Streamlined the change management process.

• Optimized the release management process.

Outcomes

Tech Holding successfully integrated a PMO group and Agile project methodology for the Insperience organization, where none previously existed. They now have shared tooling, delivery processes, and autonomy between the three scrum teams responsible for delivering Walmart’s VR experiences. The PMO group significantly contributed to the creation of the Agile POD teams for the Insperience organization. This increased self-confidence in each team member when it came to making key business decisions. The ownership and freedom of operating autonomously boosted job satisfaction. The POD structure also allowed the team members to share knowledge and ideas which help retain and cultivate the motivation. Executive management has praised Tech Holding’s PMO office for the visibility and alignment we’ve provided for sprint objectives for each scrum team and the organization’s product roadmap. Likewise, the teams are thankful for improved communication and clarity of their roles, requirements, and workflows. This effort has ensured the Insperience team has the framework they need to achieve success and gain the trust of their studio partners as they move forward on frontier of VR shopping.