How do you make sure your work provides value for your organization and clients/customers? You can come up with a great product or service, but if the value isn’t clear, internal and external stakeholders will struggle to understand and support it.

Will Carey-Hill and Trisha Boyce of Suncorp presented a case study on how they have been refining their approach to ensure their products and services have clear and visible value.

They stepped through some of the areas where they made changes to improve value visibility.

Firstly they looked at the value was they were trying to execute by:

  • Defining the value (eg they had come up with the concept of a broker portal to reduce client and staff time with brokers chasing up the status of loan applications. However, when they went to brokers with the idea, the value they were actually looking for was reducing the time it took for loans to be processed. So this became the value focus, rather than a portal.)
  • Looking at both single-year and multi-year value imperatives to ensure keep an eye on current needs as well as future trends
  • Using data-driven delivery practices to measure value

They also improved enterprise agility by shifting from:

  • a hierarchical structure to a structure based around outcomes and impact with a customer focus.
  • a product management to a value realization approach, including shifting from a Project/Program Management Office (PMO) to a Value Realization Office (VRO)
  • larger releases to smaller releases and deployment (a pace over perfection approach)
  • siloed governance to simplified and integrated guardrails and governance (transparency and trust approach). Staff training and education was provided to understand and comply with the requirements (eg regulation) and regular auditing of whether guardrails are being adhered to.
  • pockets of agility within the organization to ensuring all teams were good at the basics of agile working – teams were then empowered with the basics of the relevant skills

They also invested heavily in their leadership/talent approach to drive the new approach.

Overall, this change has resulted in improved sales, delivery metrics and workforce retention.

They did note this change process commenced in 2022 and is ongoing, so takes a while!

Author: Citizen Journalist Agile Change Manager Ruth Davidson