CASE STUDIES
Subsea wireless provider roll out agile methods (SAFe, Scrum) and Atlassian's Jira with Lottusa
About Customer
CSignum is Scotland’s subsea wireless provider. The company created the only wireless communications solution that enables the transmission of data through the water-air boundary, water column, seabed, and subsea structures using HydroFi technology. CSignum provides an underwater communications platform that carries data with low-frequency electromagnetic waves.
Relying on electromagnetic fields means EM-1 signals easily pass through the surface of water instead of scattering like sound and light waves.
Overview and Context
When Lottusa joined CSignum they were in a rapid growth phase, onboarding many engineers and in the urgent need to organize product development planning processes. The company leadership team was eager to move fast and be an agile ops organization whilst at the same time keeping transparency over the progress, risks, dependencies, and plans.
Challenge
Multiple challenges were identified in the following areas:
Product Planning & Process
The biggest case was for what ways of planning product development across multiple teams and nearly twenty people to apply. Since the Teams had various expertise and they were responsible for a given product component the challenge was around creating a process that would align various teams working toward the same direction with the single product they were developing.
Syncing engineering plans and working with support/customer trials
The company was operating in two parallel worlds. One was the engineering with the lab where the product was assembled. In the engineering part, the product tests were run to verify the performance thresholds of the assembled product. The second world was where the trials were occurring with potential customers - companies that wanted to run product tests in their real environment to verify the results they would get using CSignum’s product. The challenge was how to connect ongoing development, with ongoing customer trials and future maintenance.
Tools & practices
The challenge for the organization was the tools stack that is spread and the usage of various tools and methods of work. The biggest one was between project management for the product development initiatives and providing asset management along with customer support and customer communication whilst in the trial phase. The overall company was using Microsoft 365 with SharePoint. Additionally, it had the urge to create project plans that would show up on the timeline. On top of it the work was managed within Atlassian’s tool - mostly Jira. From this point of view, it had to be worked out what the alignment and synergy between these tools were, and whether there’s the possibility to utilize the features of a single solution in favor of seamless data collection, and accessing insights easily.
Solution
We’ve undertaken ongoing workshops with the product management team and customer enabling team. Through these workshops we’ve worked out following processes:
hybrid model for product planning and prioritization - here we’ve created Program Increments Planning, Scaled Pre-Planning meetings, scaled retrospective meetings. On the product development and delivery we’ve supported the customer in introducing Scrum framework that over the time evolved into Scrumban.
We’ve provided many hands on practical workshops where we engaged with customer to support breaking down grand product vision into granular, outcome driven definitions of the deliverables
The workshops were organized to ask the questions “What Customer Support” we want to offer and deliver for the customers to create seamless, robust and reliable customer experience
We’ve introduced the Agile Risk Management concept - since the product profile imposed a very high level of complexity and its development was uncertain in its nature requiring several phases of water testing - it was crucial for the customer to define the risk and have a way to actively mitigate those risks. Since the teams were working in a Hybrid Agile set up it was crucial to implement a risk management approach that would be inclusive of agile ways of working. We had a process that was incorporated into the Scrumban framework, we created risk items as part of the product backlog and treated them in a similar way as any other product backlog items.
We’ve introduced Atlassian’s Jira marketplace app called BigPicture that was helping to create project scopes, estimate them and generate plans so much needed for the management team to steer the product development.
Benefits
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Seamless communication and whole org alignment - through the hybrid project management and product delivery models
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Streamlined decision making - through the regular, ongoing Program Increments planning and models of working at scale, where there’s multiple teams working toward single product solution delivery
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Clear tool stack - customer gained speed and management transparency with the tools that were integrated and workflows within them were designed to better processes efficiency
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Flexibility and agility - on the execution level teams worked with agile frameworks, on the planning they worked using more predictable and stage/gate processes.
