Market-Leading Innovation at a Luxury Automaker by Introducing Agile Product Lifecycle Management

Overview

The company is a world leader in high-technology engines and renowned for high quality products and is one of the most prestigious and respected. Additionally, the market is intensely competitive and rapid innovation is essential.

The Challenge

The company was three years into a seven year global business transformation program to implement a Product Lifecycle Management approach using traditional management techniques. When they began their transformation, they were seeking to improve flexibility, capacity to deliver value, and ability to respond to market demands by introducing and optimizing a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach to engine design, manufacture, and assembly.

Subsequently, after three years, the business had achieved an improvement of only 6% efficiency, which was insufficient to meet the company’s challenging market requirements. They also need the ability to compete in the market in very smart ways.

Making a Change Mid-Stream

Convinced that switching to an Agile approach would enable the PLM transformation, the company chose to partner with Cprime. Specifically, the mission was to achieve faster time to market, rapid value delivery, and increased innovation.

Additionally, the scope included all aspects of the program across all relevant business departments, including organization, process, technology, people, and cultural change.

The Solution

The Cprime team worked with the company’s team to catalyze their Agile transformation using a combination of coaching, consulting, practitioners, and training. The program involved more than 400 individuals in the UK, Germany, and the US.

The teams worked on:

• Defining the Agile program approach of structure, organization and processes. In addition, this included distributed working and the use of communities of practice.
• Coaching teams to use Agile effectively with the new PLM approach.
• Training all relevant individuals in Agile approaches, totaling over 400 project managers, team members, and business stakeholders.
• Consulting support for the senior program management and associated stakeholders.

 

“To start with I was skeptical. Agile has brought accelerated value delivery to our business. As a result, now I would fight ‘tooth and nail’ anything that threatened working this way. The Cprime team catalyzed our transformation to Agile, allowing us to see improvements straight away.” – Head of Product Lifecycle Management

 

The Results

The impact has been game changing. As a result of the transformation, the company has enjoyed a significant boost in its ability to work effectively with distributed teams. Additionally, they switched to a predictable release schedule and commitments, which are driven by business value. Their teams delivered 80% more changes than initially expected with a 90%+ acceptance rate for work managed through the new system.

Consequently, this pioneering Agile transformation, a first for this company, extended far beyond the IT team. Further, it was implemented in other business areas across multiple geographies and at scale. And even more stellar, key stakeholders repeatedly praised the wide-scale cultural mind-shift that came with this program, helping the organization to become more responsive.

The key results included:

• Achieving effective distributed teams across multiple countries and functions.
• Implementing block-point releases with:
  • A consistent and predictable calendar
  • Fixed time and cost
  • Variable scope
• Transitioning to making commitments that benefit business outcomes, rather than hitting purely technical objectives.
• And lastly, embedding ongoing business process improvement.

Interested in similar results for your organization? Explore our flexible Agile transformation and 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.