Client’s Problem: “Our analysis department is overrun with work, and our business partners don’t have the people or resources to self-service. Our people end-up being managed through their email inbox with no coordination, meaning frustrated business partners, duplicated work, cut corners (tech debt), no time for innovation, and low morale. How do we fix this?”

This client had a process problem. During the scoping and discovery phase, we interviewed the analysts – all of whom had plenty of enthusiasm, talent, and skill. Likewise, their business partners possessed the needed subject matter expertise and strategic vision to facilitate high-quality analytics work.

The disconnect occurred in work coordination and precisely how the analysts worked together. There was no “strength in numbers” credo or prevailing spirit of “we succeed as a team, fail as individuals.” To rectify this issue, we designed a workload management process that blended agile methodologies and traditional governance.

As the first step, the analysts self-selected groups of cross-functional “squads” with business partners that had overlapping strategic needs. We also created an informal “capability owner” role to help each squad take strategic ownership of its work. These squads were taught a blend of agile techniques (backlogs, sprints, stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives) and encouraged to modify them to suit their needs.

Additionally, the department and executive teams designed and implemented a process for managing and governing work requests to separate the distinct forms of work we found: PMO-governed strategic projects, support, and ad hoc analytics. The outcome was high-performing analytical teams embedded within the business. These teams leveraged agile methods to manage their workloads while remaining unrestrained to pursue development without the rigid or formalized overhead that would slow them down.