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Client

Forture 500 Car Retailer

Industry

Consumer & Retail

Topic

Agile

Challenge

A Fortune 500 car retailer wanted a more comprehensive view of their customer data. Their existing data was stored by each individual retail store and wasn’t easily shared companywide. To solve this problem, the company purchased a big data solution and needed to form an agile team to rapidly get the data platform off the ground and ensure that it scaled seamlessly as the project grew.

The Results:
  • New platform supports the analysis of customer behavior, enhances customer service, and improves marketing.
  • Implemented and expanded the platform faster than anticipated, accelerating return on investment and quickly bringing data from additional sources into the platform.
  • Set standards and cadence for new associates to learn their roles and pick up their workloads.
  • Created a wide range of helpful collateral and other documentation available to the team and to the broader technology group via a wiki site.
  • On schedule, the first major production release of the new data platform was carefully coordinated with other teams in the company’s agile organization, alleviating organizational dependencies and ensuring that the project advanced as planned.

Scaling SAFe-ly

Although executives strongly supported the project, the newness of the technology had the potential to delay the initial implementation. To alleviate potential problems, the retailer’s development team participated in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), designed to help multiple teams across an organization work using agile methodologies.

A scrum master joined the new team and began providing agile coaching and training while working closely with the two product owners responsible for the project. As new contractors joined, the scrum master established team norms and roles and crafted a healthy development rhythm. As internal associates joined the team, we trained them in agile development and oriented them to the development effort. Helpful information was captured in an easy-to-use wiki site, which made it easier to train the new members of the team and to explain procedures to people outside the team.