Food and Beverage Producer Brings Product Agility to Consumer Products With Stellar Results

Competitive pressure

Despite such a strong and storied position as a consumer goods leader, this organization is not immune to the strong competitive pressure that pervades the global industry. While they are currently the largest food and beverage company in Canada, there are over a dozen larger international players that are always striving to make inroads into North America. Likewise, hundreds of smaller companies and startups are constantly disrupting the status quo.

As a result, and backed by a strong corporate culture, this organization recognized the need to continually improve. They place a high value on innovation and quality but also determine the need to speed up their time to market for new and updated products and brands.

They reached out to Cprime and started down that path.

The need for agility

Enterprise agility—the sum product of Cprime’s wide array of consulting, coaching, and support services—fills the need for speed and agility in any large organization. Of course, Agile methodologies have traditionally been applied to software development and tangentially connected disciplines. But, Agile principles are not limited strictly to IT applications, and our work with this organization exemplifies that.

The organization’s leadership wanted to solidify Agile principles and practices into their product development workflow so they could bring new and improved products to market faster. They knew that the existing framework, which had been so successful in the past, needed to pivot as competition sped up. Time that could previously be dedicated to management updates and approvals needed to be tightened up. Visibility into every stage of the workflow needed to be expanded. And, cross-team collaboration and problem solving needed to be elevated even further than it was.

If those challenges could be met and overcome, nothing would stand in the way of this organization achieving agility in product development.

A strong foundation for agility

To accomplish these lofty goals, Cprime laid out an aggressive training and coaching strategy designed to upskill the organization’s product development and support teams and get them thinking and working together in a more Agile way.

A series of workshops were held to introduce key Agile concepts as well as how Agile can be scaled to the enterprise level. Role-based workshops were also held to ensure the Scrum Masters and management teams were fully trained and ready to take on the task of leading this Agile transformation. Later in the engagement, Cprime coaches helped the teams develop strategic roadmaps for upcoming product launches, truly incorporating Product Agility into their robust existing product development workflow.

In addition to the formal workshops, Cprime coaches provided ad hoc assistance and support throughout the six months that have passed since the engagement began.

Strong results and a bright outlook

While this initial engagement is still too new to see quantifiable results, the anecdotal evidence is clear.

The organization’s teams are reporting strong execution with low variance using the new Agile processes. Stakeholders at all levels have much greater visibility into the work than they previously did, and that transparency supports continuous improvement. The team members recognize the benefits of a more collaborative atmosphere that empowers them to solve problems quickly and effectively. And, perhaps most importantly, the newly improved workflow has brought to light roadblocks in the existing processes that can now be addressed to achieve the faster speed to market that originated the organization’s need for this solution.

So, all stakeholders fully expect their new and improved products will make it to market faster as a direct result of their engagement with Cprime.

That’s why there’s no sign of the collaboration ending. Cprime’s Rita Emmons, the Business Agility Leader, working closely with the organization in recent months, has a significant roadmap of future enhancements in the works. And the organization’s leadership team are excited to see what the future holds as they pursue Enterprise Agility.

Interested in similar results for your organization? Explore our flexible Agile training solutions.

About Cprime

Cprime is an industry-leading, full-service global consulting firm with a focus on providing integrated and innovative solutions around digital transformation, product, cloud, and technology. With over 20 years’ experience, we provide strategic and technical expertise to businesses across more than 50 industries. Our team of advisors and technical experts have the know-how to meet organizations where they are to develop actionable solutions and solve business challenges. We also collaborate with our expansive network of partners to design, deploy, and harmonize technology stacks across organizations. Our mission is to empower visionary business leaders and teams to reimagine the future of work to achieve better outcomes.