What changed, in three engagements.
Process Mentors does not name its clients, because the approvals that naming requires are a burden we choose not to place on the people we work with, so the three accounts below describe each organization only as far as it can be described without identifying it. Each one sets out what the organization looked like before the engagement, what was put in place, and what a person inside it could see had changed.
A private-equity-backed company
From twice-weekly status chasing to a portfolio leadership reads live.
A private-equity-backed company brought Process Mentors in through its vice president of delivery, whose teams kept missing what had been planned. Everything was treated as the top priority, the picture of the work was scattered across spreadsheets and trackers that had to be updated by hand twice a week and then walked through in an all-hands meeting, and nothing connected the strategic objectives to the work or checked whether a delivered enhancement had made any difference to the business.
Working first with pilot teams and then more widely, we stood up one system of record that links objectives down to the work, a written product development lifecycle built on value increments, and AI skills that prepare and run the delivery events. The manual updates and the meetings that existed only to pass information along were retired, definition work that had taken weeks now completes in a single working session, and delivered work is confirmed against the result it was funded for.
Senior product, engineering, and delivery managers got their time back for higher-value work, the meetings that remain are the ones where decisions get made, and today the organization runs its own planning event, its managers use the skills on their own, and its leadership reads the live system directly.
A global company
When team-level agile turned out to be the wrong place to look.
The chief technology officer of a global company brought Process Mentors in after an agile adoption had stalled, and after reaching the conclusion that the organization had been concentrating on team-level agility when the real constraint sat in how investment decisions were made. Funding ran on annual plans and stage gates, every team worked differently, work waited for long stretches between approval and release, and although a framework existed on paper, most groups kept a second set of books to satisfy its gates without following it.
We moved the organization to value and innovation increments held in a single portfolio backlog, so that real discovery went to the items that mattered most for the coming quarter, and we introduced a monthly event the organization named its Dragons’ Den, after the television show, in which every increment that had come through discovery had to be justified and defended in front of executive leadership before it could enter the intake queue. That event changed behavior more than anything else, because nobody was willing to bring a request for investment that could not stand up to that level of challenge. With requests arriving ready, the intake queue could be matched to the real capacity needed to finish the work, a quarterly planning event committed against that capacity, and teams could see what others needed from them before the work began, while improvement at the team level continued alongside.
The organization started less and finished more, the pile of completed work sitting behind a feature flag because another team had not done its part stopped growing, the second set of books disappeared because the gates it had been built to satisfy were gone, and the practices kept running after the engagement ended.
A sizable private-equity-backed company
A PMO held accountable for impact it had no way to show.
The head of the project management office at a sizable private-equity-backed company brought Process Mentors in because the office was being held accountable for a lack of impact while working in a way that gave it no means of showing any. Work was funded and run as projects, each area set its own priorities and those priorities collided at delivery time, dependencies were not managed in any real sense, leadership saw the work only through slide decks that were out of date by the time they were presented, and everything was measured by activity, so there was no way to say what any of it was worth. The organization had also been through earlier transformations and was wary of another one.
We introduced relative value scoring and relative sizing for increments, and used both as a significant input to ordering a single portfolio backlog, so that the order of work was agreed in one place and no longer argued area by area. Increments that were ready moved into a prioritized intake queue, which fed quarterly Value Delivery Planning, dependencies were identified and tracked before work began, and each increment carried a measurable outcome that was checked after delivery.
The office was re-chartered as a value management office, it could show what delivered work was worth and not only that the work had been done, the areas worked from one set of priorities, leadership read a live view of the portfolio in place of the slide decks, and the wariness left by earlier transformations was overcome as the new way of working proved itself on the organization’s own work. From PMO to VMO.