Resource Type: Case Study

Cprime Creates Custom Training Pathways for a Multinational Consumer Electronics Icon

Posted on June 20, 2023 by -

The Client

This global technology leader builds popular consumer electronics devices like smartphones, computers, tablets, and wearable accessories, as well as software, productivity, and entertainment products. They have developed a reputation for innovation and a sleek design ethos that have made them an international household name.

The Challenge: Upskilling from Within — Creating New Career Opportunities in an Established Workforce

In response to a growing global shortage of technical talent and high attrition rates, this client looked inward to address some of its technical staffing needs.

“The rationale is simple—there’s a very competitive hiring landscape for specific roles in the technology workforce economy,” explains Chris Knotts, a Director in the Cprime Learning Practice. “As a result, the device manufacturer wanted to cultivate talent from within their own ranks. Selecting and promoting people already familiar with their culture not only improves employee retention over the long term, it is also more cost effective.”

It was not an idea new to the organization. The company already had a mechanism in place to recruit and upskill employees, but the program had a limited scope and capacity. The device manufacturer wanted to expand its internal retraining capabilities to include two emergent high-demand subject areas—Quality Assurance (QA) and Enterprise Program Management (EPM).

The fundamental challenge for the company, however, wasn’t a lack of expertise, it was a lack of bandwidth.

“They knew exactly what they wanted to do, they just needed help with the execution. They wanted someone to overcome the hurdles that prevented them from doing it themselves,” says Knott. “They needed external muscle to come in and perform the administration, needs assessment, and training design and then get in there and do the actual coaching.”

To achieve that within a limited timeframe, the company required an experienced training partner with established expertise and an inventory of relevant course materials. While they expected a customized training experience tailored to their needs, they did not want to begin from scratch.

Solution: Cprime—a Multi-Disciplined Team with the Right Educational Assets

Based on previous success working together to fulfill its Atlassian tooling needs, the manufacturer shortlisted Cprime as a candidate in its request for proposal (RFP) call. Cprime won the bid on the strength of its expansive subject expertise and proven track record.

“Cprime met all their personnel and asset requirements,” says Knotts. “We had the experience and instructors, and our learning catalog contained the exact course materials that they wanted us to design.”

The Cprime team began the course design phase by sitting down with the management and supervisory teams to further sharpen requirements and clarify expectations. Cprime then collaborated with the company over the course of two months to develop and deliver multiple iterations of the training.

 

“They knew exactly what they wanted to do, they just needed help with the execution, someone to overcome the hurdles preventing them from doing it themselves. They wanted skilled external muscle to come in and perform the administration, needs assessment, and training design and then get in there and do the actual coaching.” — Chris Knotts, Director, Cprime Learning Practice

 

Rapidly Iterating to Meet Client Requirements

Each of the iterations involved further defining the course design and objectives, selecting and refining course content, and creating assessment criteria to determine successful learning outcomes. A multi-disciplined Cprime team of nine people provided input to ensure the courses reflected the most up-to-date industry best practices. Leadership and subject experts from the device manufacturer’s internal talent development team provided regular input to maintain alignment between Cprime’s output and the company’s culture and ways of working.

“We worked directly with their QA and EPM stakeholders, embedding with the functional heads of the teams that we would train, so they could inject their input right from the beginning,” says Knotts. “We ended up with the Quality Assurance and Enterprise Project Management learning tracks based on Cprime library materials but entirely unique to the device manufacturer’s needs.”

The resulting course materials combined core Cprime course content with practical use cases that helped students relate them to real-world situations and expanded their understanding of how the principles fit the manufacturer’s greater project environment.

An experienced Cprime enterprise technology coach then delivered each session, beginning with core concepts and shifting into on-the-job mentorship, demonstrating key competencies on the job.

“The Cprime technology coaches got deeply involved with the teams, fostering the practical application of the software testing they were teaching,” says Knotts. “It wasn’t a matter of spoon-feeding them a lecture, It was very hands-on.”

 

“We worked directly with their Quality Assurance and Enterprise Program Management stakeholders — embedding with the functional heads of the teams that we would train — so they could include their input right from the beginning.” — Chris Knotts, Director, Cprime Learning Practice

 

Results: Off-the-shelf Training Content Combined With Custom Coach Delivery

With only two months to prepare, Cprime delivered two intensive, ten-day training sessions. The coaches began training the first cohorts of the device manufacturer’s internal promotion candidates on the new learning tracks in month three.

The Cprime trainers then oversaw concurrent online and localized training sessions at the client’s main California campus, training over 70 people across five cohorts.

Despite the very intensive preparation, planning, and tight timeframes, Cprime received positive feedback from the students and impressed the company leadership with their results.

“Our emphasis on the hands-on, real-world coaching component enhanced what could have easily been dry, theoretical training sessions has been really meaningful for the students,” says Knotts. “Both the students and the stakeholders really liked what we were doing and how we did it.”

Because of early successes with the pilot, the device manufacturer is already looking toward a continued partnership.

“They invited Cprime to plan a second set of sessions,” says Knotts. “They knew exactly what they needed and their standards were high. Because the project was under such heavy scrutiny, It’s been really satisfying to exceed their expectations.”

 

“Cprime’s emphasis on hands-on, real-world coaching component into what could have been dry, theoretical, training sessions has been really meaningful for the students. Both the students and the stakeholders really liked what we were doing and how we did it.” — Chris Knotts, Director, Cprime Learning Practice

If you’d like to see similar results for your organization, explore our flexible Learning Pathways.

Automation and Emulation Software Leader Streamlines Development Processes With Cprime’s Expert-Led GitLab Solutions and DevOps Services

Posted on June 16, 2023 by -

The Client

In an era of online shopping and next-day delivery, this US-based Cprime client facilitates business continuity for thousands of brands worldwide. Their complex automated storage, retrieval, warehousing, and logistics solutions improve the flow of goods, materials, and information, allowing companies to meet the ever-growing expectations of global consumers.

Industry expertise, robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have made the company a global leader in materials handling and logistics. Its diverse clientele come from industries that include ecommerce, retail, food and beverage, manufacturing, and third-party logistics providers.

Challenge: Streamlining Modern Warehouse Design Pipelines to Enhance Pre-Sales Efficiency

Designing a modern automated warehousing solution is astonishingly complex. In an unoptimized environment, the sheer number of factors and volume of calculations required to create a design prototype for a new logistics facility can take weeks.

“A modern warehouse is essentially a collection of robots. It’s all spectacularly complicated,” explains Kevin Ryan, Cprime Head of DevOps, EMEA. “The scope, size, and throughput of modern warehouses, and the number of unique products in any given warehouse have grown beyond our human ability to calculate. Even machines struggle to crunch the numbers efficiently.”

While lengthy design calculation times were the company’s primary pain point, system complexity also resulted in an inability to react rapidly to change. Any updates to a customer’s operating parameters or facility specification would further delay pre-sales project modeling; the company had to recalculate each time-consuming potential design from scratch. The delays ranged from hours to weeks.

“If customers can’t get answers from us quickly, the dialogue stalls and the entire process can grind to a halt. We wanted to change that,” says one of the project’s executive sponsors.

“They were seeing new projects and revenues delayed by up to a quarter as they waited for a mathematical model. There was a potential cost of millions for each delay,” says Ryan. “The company needed a development framework that would allow them to put a pre-sales mathematical model of a warehouse in front of a customer faster, which meant boosting efficiency.”

To complicate matters, any development framework the company adopted had to be a good fit with Azure Batch, the cloud platform providing the computing power to manage the calculations. The company also needed an implementation partner that could work closely with the cloud specialists on-site to modernize, scale, and streamline its infrastructure to meet the growing demand of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers.

Solution: Leveraging the GitLab Toolchain with Cprime Expert DevOps Services

Evaluating its options, the automated warehouse designer selected GitLab to provide the backbone for its new continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) initiative. Recognized for being robust, reliable, and secure, GitLab was the ideal CI/CD, collaboration, issue tracking, quality automation analysis, and code review tool. The GitLab toolchain contained everything the company needed to speed up development and enhance their predictive modeling sales tools and in-production logistics engines.

To implement the solution, GitLab recommended the Expert-Led GitLab Solutions and DevOps Services of Cprime, their Certified Training Partner.

“The Cprime DevOps team has invested heavily in GitLab professional services engineer certifications covering everything from CI/CD, project management, DevOps, and inner sourcing, to security and system admin,” explains Ryan. “But the requirements for this engagement went beyond professional GitLab implementation services. The company hired Cprime to show them how to take the GitLab toolchain and achieve elite DevOps CI/CD performance.”

“The requirements for this engagement went beyond professional GitLab implementation services. The company hired Cprime to show them how to take the GitLab toolchain and achieve elite DevOps CI/CD performance.” — Kevin Ryan, Cprime Head of DevOps, EMEA

Discovering Context and Objectives Using Spikes

The two-person Cprime team began Discovery to define the company’s context and objectives clearly. They started by creating research tasks to identify and resolve questions and explore potential solutions.

“By creating technical spikes, we formed an understanding of their codebase and what they needed to achieve,” says Ryan. “Using those prototypes, we rapidly gathered feedback and verified we were on the right track.”

Tailoring Toolsets and Processes for the Azure Environment

After achieving consensus with the company’s management and DevOps teams, the Cprime team tailored the new GitLab instance to work specifically within the customer’s Microsoft Azure environment and security context.

“We created secure containers, CI/CD pipelines, and process templates,” says Ryan. “The result was a universal base implementation they could reuse across multiple projects to speed up development long term.”

Infrastructure as Code With Helm and Terraform

To ensure a consistent, easily deployed development environment, the Cprime team also worked with the company to leverage GitLab CI/CD’s native Terraform integration. Using the Terraform Helm provider allowed the company to begin centrally deploying Helm charts. This allowed it to manage high- and low-level Azure Kubernetes components, easily implement and modify Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows, and simplify the creation of common and complex infrastructure patterns.

Throughout the process, Cprime worked to bridge the gaps, coordinating and driving innovation between company stakeholders, DevOps teams, and third-party Azure infrastructure architects.

“As implementation specialists, Cprime took the work of all the teams, rationalized it, and worked as the engine that put it into production,” says Ryan. “It was all about streamlining collaboration and automating the processes to speed up development.”

“As implementation specialists, Cprime took the output of all the teams, rationalized it, and put it into production using GitLab. It was all about streamlining collaboration and automating processes to accelerate development.” — Kevin Ryan, Cprime Head of DevOps, EMEA

Results: Increased Deployment Frequency and Reduced Error Rates

Because of the combined efforts of Cprime and the project teams, the warehouse design company established high levels of process maturity based on DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) core metrics. Across the board, the company’s deployment frequency increased while it slashed its change lead times, change failure rates, and mean error recovery times.

Cumulative Change Dramatically Reduces Turnaround Times

As an indicator of the efficacy of the cumulative changes, the company reduced simulation times from over 11 hours to as few as 24 minutes. Turnarounds on proposal submissions showed similarly dramatic improvements.

“We’ve reduced the time to solution—from receiving customer data to running designs and calculations and ultimately giving out a warehouse proposal—from eight weeks down to one day,” the executive sponsor states. “The productivity increase has scaled our capacity to answer RFQs and engage with new and existing customers.”

Likewise, by using GitLab project templates, Terraform, and Helm scripts to automate their CI/CD pipeline, the company’s development team recently set a new turnaround record—they received a new specification and deployed the corrected warehouse design in only 90 minutes.

“We’ve reduced the time to solution—from having customer data to running designs and calculations and ultimately giving out a warehouse proposal—from eight weeks down to one day. The productivity increase has scaled our capacity to answer RFQs and engage with new and existing customers.” — Executive Sponsor

Getting There With Cprime

During the engagement, Cprime exceeded the client’s expectations for GitLab professional engineering services. Based on Cprime’s performance and the clear successes of phase one, the company has extended the relationship indefinitely.

“We started with a very short engagement and, based on our performance, over a year later we support all their GitLab and Azure-related activities,” says Ryan. “The company learned what I want all potential Cprime customers to understand: if you want to become a high-performing, elite development organization, Cprime will get you there.”

If you’d like to see similar results in your own organization, explore our flexible GitLab and DevOps solutions.

Exploring New Horizons with Cprime—Creating a Continuous Integration Testing Pipeline for Lunar Vehicle Development

Posted on June 13, 2023 by -

The Client

When a prestigious European technical university set out to build a moon robot, one of its goals was to highlight the potential of its new generation of engineers. Using a fresh student perspective, the institution sought to create a semi-autonomous rover that could move freely about the moon’s surface while collecting important information about radiation levels.

Unlike previous remote moon exploration vehicles, however, the university’s initiative focused on creating a smaller, more lightweight system. The new rover would have a form factor that scientists could easily convey into space and deploy as a swarm to gather data across a vast surface area. The rover’s affordability, autonomy, and improved mobility would allow exploration teams to undertake missions across terrain impractical for larger, heavier, and more expensive self-driving vehicles.

Challenge: Breaking New Ground — Creating a Modern CI/CD Testing Platform for the Aerospace Industry

Software development is often a process of trial and error, and developing hardware, software, and firmware systems for off-planet exploration exponentially increases the potential risk of something going wrong. Due to the narrow margins for error in space, the rover project team of 50 student engineers and support staff wanted a modern, proactive testing and development process to increase their chances of developing a robust, reliable lunar vehicle.

“Having your code break on the moon is obviously a massive problem. It’s not something that you can fix by hitting a button and rebooting the system,” says Kevin Ryan, Agile and DevOps Coach for Cprime EMEA. “The problem was that embedded system workflows, especially in the aerospace and space industries, are decades behind the processes used to develop modern cloud-based industrial infrastructures. Not that the students lacked skills—there was a lack of precedent in the entire industry. Cprime’s role was to help them establish that precedent and significantly reduce marginal risks.”

“Having your code break on the moon is obviously a massive problem. It’s not something that you can fix by hitting a button and rebooting the system.” — Kevin Ryan, Agile and DevOps Coach for Cprime EMEA

Aligning processes with modern cloud methodologies

To improve their quality control protocols, the university team needed to align their processes with contemporary cloud methodologies and software development best practices. That meant implementing the tooling and ways of working for a CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous deployment) pipeline. The testing pipeline would allow them to rapidly iterate upon their code and design while maintaining quality and continuity across the project.

“As a team, they focused on writing complex, embedded machine learning and AI code. Coming directly from academia, they weren’t up to speed on code development automation infrastructures,” says Ryan. “Industrialized development just wasn’t a part of their scope.”

Solution: Partnering with Cprime to Evaluate Tools and Create New Development Opportunities

Based on a recommendation from one of their commercial partners, the university team turned to Cprime, GitLab Certified Training Partners. The initial brief was simple, but left room for expansion.

“They had chosen GitLab—a complete DevOps platform—but they wanted Cprime to show them what using it should look like,” says Ryan. “They needed to understand the fundamental building blocks. We began by implementing the development environment and went from there as they learned the tool’s potential applications and use cases.”

The Cprime trainers experienced a learning curve nearly as steep as the student engineers themselves. The project was more than a simple tooling upgrade or transformation. The Cprime team needed to dive deep to define the project’s practical requirements and apply their newfound knowledge to a viable solution.

“Due to the unfamiliar environment, it has been a little like a research project—an incremental process to figure out how their DevOps journey should work,” says Ryan. “There was no Googling for a quick solution. As trainers, we needed to understand what they do before we could even hope to make reasonable and intelligent proposals to move them forward.”

A single repository of distinct projects with clear relationships

After clarifying the engineering team’s requirements, Cprime began putting together the components for a successful CI/CD pipeline. The team adapted course materials and explored key principles—from classes like GitLab with Git Basics and GitLab for CI/CD Pipelines—with the engineers to help them create an elite DevOps toolchain to solve their testing issues.

“We began by advocating for a mono repo rather than a poly repo approach to mitigate complexity and aid communication. Then we developed systems for quality assurance, build, and testing automation. We also automated dependency management and documentation generation,” says Ryan. “Once they were comfortable with the basic processes, we moved into more hardcore QA tools like Google Test, the C++ testing and mocking framework. Now, they are doing some groundbreaking stuff and actually deploying machine-level firmware to their space robot.”

“Together we have put together a toolchain that ensures they check, double check, and triple check every one and zero in their code base. It has pushed the project forward and allowed them to increase their benchmarks while simplifying each subsequent success.” — Kevin Ryan, Agile and DevOps Coach for Cprime EMEA

The right tools for success

To reduce context switching and promote a more familiar, consistent development and testing environment, Cprime also introduced the GitLab Workflow extension for Visual Studio (VS).

“Using modern technologies like Docker and VS development containers has made a huge difference,” says Ryan. “Because each machine you compile code on can yield a different result, just having an identical environment for everyone with all the dependencies, tooling, and  build infrastructure in place has improved auditability and repeatability.”

Results: Increased Quality and Reduced Margins for Error

After 18 months of working with Cprime, the university teams have a unique CI/CD pipeline suitable for the aerospace industry and low-level firmware and embedded systems development. It is a development and testing framework that rivals any cutting-edge development and testing automation infrastructure for the cloud.

By guiding them toward a uniform development ecosystem with repeatable processes, Cprime helped the engineering team eliminate nearly 75% of the trial and error caused by compiling and testing code on inconsistent systems.

“That translates directly into higher quality firmware and software, and a reduced margin for error,” says Ryan. “We have put together a toolchain that ensures they check, double check, and triple check every one and zero in their code base. It has pushed the project forward and allowed them to increase their benchmarks while simplifying each subsequent success.”

If you’d like to see similar results in your organization, explore our flexible
GitLab training and GitLab implementation solutions.

Atlassian Cloud Migration Case Study – Business Value Derived by Georgia United Credit Union

Posted on June 12, 2023 by -

About Georgia United Credit Union (GUCU)

Georgia United is one of the largest and strongest credit unions in Georgia. They serve over 150,000 members with innovative digital banking solutions, full-service branches, and 100,000 surcharge-free ATMs across the globe. They provide “banking experiences that allow you to live your best life.”

The Challenge

Georgia United Credit Union (GUCU) had resource constraints and limited experience in migrating Atlassian applications from Server to the Atlassian Cloud. The complexity of their Jira Service Management instances and related integrations made it critical that the migration was executed meticulously. Additionally, being a nationally regulated financial firm, many security protocols had to be adhered to and met from end to end.

The Solution

Migrating to Atlassian Cloud would allow Georgia United Credit Union to deprecate their existing infrastructure and mitigate the related security risks and concerns. Additional cost savings would be realized, as there would be no infrastructure or support costs in Atlassian Cloud.

The Benefits

Financial Impact

GUCU realized significant TCO reduction by going to Atlassian Cloud. As a result of the migration, on-prem infrastructure was decommissioned, and the engineers supporting it were freed up to do other high-value activities.

Security Risks

Security concerns have been alleviated by migrating to Atlassian Cloud; there are no longer any outages to patch operating systems and remediated CVE vulnerabilities, keeping the company and its data more secure.

Latest & Greatest

Once in Atlassian Cloud, all upgrades happen behind the scenes with no need for GUCU to involve technical resources to plan and perform the upgrades, or coordinate the downtime with the rest of the company.

About Cprime and AWS

Cprime is a strategic consulting company specializing in Agile and DevOps transformations. Cprime holds the following partnerships—SAFe® Gold Partner (Agile), Atlassian Platinum Partner (DevOps), and AWS Advanced Tier Consulting Partner (Cloud)—a claim no other firm in the world can make.

Cprime participates in the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program, AWS Solution Provider Program, and AWS Well-Architected Partner Program. In addition, Cprime has achieved its AWS DevOps Competency and is pursuing a Migration Competency, while actively delivering services to customers.

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A Leading Pharmaceutical Company Works With Cprime to Nearly Double Speed and Efficiency, Saving Billions

Posted on April 27, 2023 by -

The Challenge: Attempting a Transformation Within a Transformation 

A digital or Agile transformation is always going to be a long and challenging effort, especially at the enterprise level. This company has been pursuing a large-scale digital transformation for years now, which causes change at all levels. Amidst this change, they tasked the development team with undertaking a huge tooling project and, to accomplish that, an Agile transformation of their own. 

Migrating to a new SaaS platform

The coordination and management of clinical drug trials involves a lot of moving parts, and the cost of mismanagement can be very high. The team had relied on custom applications for many years to support this process. But, considering the advancements made in the tools available, and the cost of keeping up an aging infrastructure, the organization decided in 2018 to invest in a new cloud-based SaaS solution for the PMD functions. 

The development team’s Director and Product Owner explains, “While it sounds logical to think moving to a SaaS solution would mean everything is simplified and made easier, the reality is quite different. There’s a tremendous amount of data involved and several key integrations that need to be duplicated, migrated, or reconfigured.”

And, of course, work can’t be put on hold for the duration of this process, so all of that work needs to be done while both tools and all integrations are live and the data is constantly changing. 

“I equate it to jumping onto a moving bus,” he says.

Pursuing scaled Agility

After joining the team as Product Owner in 2019, the Director became responsible for delivery, engineering, and product management, in addition to the tooling migration. With the resources available, the only practical way to get a handle on the workload was to double down on the scaled Agile transformation the team had already begun.

“We were technically ‘doing Agile’,” he says, “but there was a lot of room for improvement. Specifically, we needed to get better organized and consistent around processes, roles, and expectations.” 

He took an important step by working to get Agile Facilitators (Scrum Masters) installed in the four existing Agile teams to add that layer of oversight and coordination. He continues, “I think bringing in the Agile Facilitators gave us better insight into where we were struggling. For example, we were moving people to the work rather than work to the people. We were heading into sprint planning without having fully refined our backlog, and then refining as the sprint progressed.”

By surfacing these gaps in their Agile practice, the team could start formulating a plan to fill them. 

Overcoming inertia

Of course, change rarely comes easily. Especially in very large organizations, inertia can be a formidable obstacle. 

Moving to new ways of working comes with a cost—financially and psychologically. “The way we’ve always done it” is not just an excuse. It’s a security blanket that protects the organization from new ideas that can sometimes be scary.

And the larger organization was already experiencing a lot of change as part of their ongoing multi-year digital transformation. So, additional change was an even harder sell. After all, the changes weren’t just tool- or process-related. They involved changes in mindset and culture. 

The Director says, “I realized quickly that we would need to create a solid plan of attack that would garner support from others in the organization if we had any hope of making changes that would stick.”

The COVID-19 pandemic  

On top of everything else, in early 2020, the global pandemic hit with its accompanying upheaval and uncertainty. The teams had to quickly learn how to work and collaborate remotely, which is not the standard for Agile teams. Over the next two years, significant staff turnover also took its toll on the team’s efforts.

Despite all this, they made progress. In June 2021, they launched the planning module on the new platform. 

“Over the eighteen months it took to achieve that goal, we learned a lot about where we were and where we needed to be,” he says. “The key takeaway to me was that if we wanted to continue to progress, we needed help.”

That’s when Scott Seivwright, Executive Agile Coach with Cprime, began consulting with the team.

The Solution: A More Formalized Approach to Scaled Agility and Expert Guidance

Scott recalls, “When the Director and I first spoke, I could see that a lot of the pieces were there, but that they were missing structure and consistency.”

To address this issue, Scott recommended the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) as a template from which the team could build a structured combination of roles, ceremonies, artifacts, and processes to formalize and systematize their Agile practice.

(SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.)

To test the validity of this plan, they pursued a pilot program in the UK. The Cprime team resourced Agile professionals who could take on vital roles in the SAFe transformation. They also liaised with external suppliers and internal teams to coordinate the software delivery, data systems, and integrations that would link the existing stack with new APIs and platform solutions.

Then, in March 2021, the teams headed into the core SAFe ceremony, the quarterly PI planning session.

Big-room PI planning

Optimally, PI planning is an opportunity for all stakeholders connected to the Agile Release Train (ART)—the SAFe designation for a “team of Agile teams”—to meet together, in person, to discuss the next six sprints’ worth of work. Of course, with the pandemic still affecting many areas, getting everyone together wasn’t possible.

The Director recalls, “Although we had to make do with a mostly virtual PI planning event, I think it was a huge step forward for us. It was the first time we could get the right people together all at once from both the business and tech sides to discuss what we needed to do, what stood in our way, and how to address those issues. It fostered communication and collaboration that we vitally needed.”

The event spotlighted more areas for improvement as well, which informed future planning events and the Cprime team’s strategies.

“At the time,” Scott says, “the clinical trial program was running at an overall efficiency rate of about 48 percent. In other words, a little less than half of the drugs being sent out in support of various clinical trials were actually reaching the right person at the right time to produce valid, timely results. So, in order to avoid invalidating the tests, the company was spending about twice what they should have been to cover for inefficiencies and waste in the process. This was our starting point.”

Bringing in an Agile Coach to serve as RTE

The next step in the process was for Scott to bring in Brandon Hill-Jowett, Cprime Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer (RTE). The Release Train is the SAFe designation for the coordinated effort required for a team of Agile teams to accomplish the work planned for each planning increment. It’s the RTE’s job to lead that train, remove any impediments standing in its way, and keep it speeding down the track.

“Bringing Brandon on made an immediate impact,” the Director says. “He’s given us a huge amount of energy and drive, and a clear vision of what we need to achieve. He’s a fantastic coach, and I’ve seen the increase in Agile and SAFe knowledge—both my own and in the team—and how much that’s leveled up our work.”

Brandon says, “After that initial PI event, we came away with a clearer understanding of the blockers holding the team back from taking the next step. For example, we found that estimates for the work required to accomplish a given goal were as much as 265 percent low for a variety of reasons: internal dependencies, unreliable systems, scope variance, delays from outside vendors, and erroneous testing cycle times. Now that we’d set up a dialogue with the business side, those explanations went a long way toward justifying the need for change.”

Brandon worked with the Director and other stakeholders to identify systemic problems that could be rectified through incremental change and a focus on continuous improvement. They set up SAFe ceremonies on a regular cadence to support collaboration and fuel regular progress. They also created an Executive Action Committee (EAC) that meets regularly to discuss and rectify dependencies and blockers on the business side, make decisions to guide the team’s strategy, and keep the rest of the organization informed.

“We created cross-functional teams during the final PI of 2022,” Brandon says, “and we’re now working on optimizing the ART so we can keep this momentum going.”

The Results: The Team Sees Both Measurable and Unmeasurable Affects in Short Order

The results of these efforts have been nothing short of fantastic.

Massive improvements in productivity

Brandon reports, “We’ve seen predictability rise from 45 percent to 80 percent, which means our planning is becoming far more accurate and work is getting done consistently. Since establishing cross-functional teams, we’ve seen velocity double, meaning twice as much is getting accomplished each sprint.”

The Director agrees, “Our technical capabilities and engineering function have gotten much stronger. By improving our ability to quickly and efficiently update and develop our systems, we’re able to get working software in the hands of the user faster. Then, we get feedback faster and can turn that into further improvements. So, we’re delivering more value to our customers, faster than ever.”

Brandon continues, “Mapping out the previous processes, we calculated an average release time of 548 days (about 18 months). We forecast that the efficiencies we’ve proposed will reduce that release cycle by 73 percent to just 149 days (about five months). Overall, we forecast we will increase that 48 percent efficiency up to 80 percent, saving the company billions of pounds annually.”

A better culture to support a better way of working

Some of the benefits are less tangible, but no less important.

“I’m seeing marked changes in the culture and attitudes of those in and around this team,” the Director says. “There’s greater psychological safety and trust. We’re working together more effectively, both within the tech department and with the business side. In this kind of environment, it’s becoming easier to ask the right questions, entertain innovative ideas, and collaborate freely because we’re working toward common goals.”

He concludes, “In the end, our goal is to help more people with the life-saving and life-changing drugs the company develops. Every step we take to improve our piece of that puzzle means we’re achieving that goal.”

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

SAFe® Organizational Change — Achieving 70% Predictability at an International Lifestyle and Beauty Pioneer

Posted on March 31, 2023 by -

The Client

This Cprime client is an internationally recognized global cosmetics and beauty manufacturer. Founded over 70 years ago, the company is notable for its transformation of the industry, especially in how they market accessible cosmetics with luxury appeal.

Today, the beauty product manufacturer is globally ubiquitous—it is currently the home of over 30 instantly recognizable brands synonymous with quality and affordable extravagance.

The company’s success has translated into a public valuation of over 90 billion USD with annual sales revenues of nearly $18 billion from business operations in over 150 countries.

Challenge: Aligning International E-commerce Websites Across Multiple Brands, Regions, and Cultures

Known for its traditional brick-and-mortar sales success, the company has also seen significant results because of its increased focus on online retail and e-commerce channels. But, despite doubling online revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic, the beauty brand was leaving money on the table, especially during the critical holiday season that represents most of the cosmetics and lifestyle industry’s annual sales.

Complexity of Scale

The manufacturer’s key issue was maintaining consistency and functionality across a vast number of corporate and international websites. Each of the company’s over 30 brands operated multiple semi-autonomous regional websites, each with localized content and requirements. Everything from brand messaging to site performance, content delivery, payment collection, and product fulfillment across the sites was difficult to maintain, inconsistent, and underperforming.

“It is the most complicated company I’ve come across,” explains Jennifer Vasi, Cprime Agile Coach and Certified Scaled Agile Framework® Program Consultant (SPC), and Release Train Engineer. “Its online, brand, and global and regional aspects all have to come together. From a scaling perspective, that is incredibly advanced. The company has over 300 different websites—think 30+ brands, each with 10+ regions. Each website has a different brand experience and each checkout section follows specific regional requirements.”

The Costs of Inconsistency

Poor user experience was causing shopping cart abandonments and driving customers to competitors with more stable, streamlined, user-friendly ecommerce portals.

“They were behind the curve,” says Denise Joseph, Agile Coach and Certified Scaled Agile Framework® Program Consultant (SPCT). “When site performance dipped, consumers would simply head over to another online vendor for a better shopping experience.”

Another pain point was that the levels of technical maturity in the organization varied widely—while some sites were updated with modern development technologies, others ran slow and deeply complex legacy code.

“The sites for newer brands were usually very advanced and on the most current development platforms. Other, more established brands were running code up to a decade old,” says Bridget O’Brien, Cprime Agile Coach and SPC.

A Global Disconnect

The next issue was the disconnect between the regional and corporate teams with product placement, promotional efforts, and site feature development. They often failed to leverage valuable regional knowledge. In terms of feature development, the different localities and international teams were working at cross purposes, duplicating costly development efforts instead of coordinating to develop new components the company could reuse across all locations. Despite local advice, management was also investing in initiatives unsuitable to specific regions.

“The company needed to eliminate its autonomous websites, build a modern, universal ecommerce platform, and establish processes for effective inter-regional communications,” says Liza Ridgway, Cprime’s Head of North America Sales. “They needed to eliminate redundancy, errors, and duplicated effort.”

“The client’s primary goal was prioritization—they wanted to create a very focused roadmap that included modernizing the platform,” adds O’Brien. “They wanted to get the entire organization moving in the same direction.”

Solution: Partnering with Cprime for Incremental Change

Aware of the changes required and the complexity of all its moving parts around the globe, the manufacturer’s ecommerce arm reached out to Cprime. The request for help was based on the two companies’ successes working together on a previous transformation.

“Rather than trying to boil the ocean, they recognized they needed somebody to guide them incrementally through this complex transformation,” says Vasi. “Cprime had helped them before and we were familiar with the organization’s people and culture.”

Improving Portfolios, Empowering Teams, and Aligning Objectives

Operating at the portfolio and team levels, the Cprime consultants approached the manufacturers’ requirements using the same methodologies they were engaged to promote.

“At the portfolio level we began with a basic transformation to empower management to recognize value streams and select and group project teams,” says Joseph. “We led the transformation using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), eventually adopting a more supportive role and offering coaching to support the company’s new ways of working and help management align around its objectives and the key results it sought.”

As a part of this process, the Cprime coaches helped the company visualize the data they had in Jira, establish their development programs, and effectively plan using the Atlassian toolset to achieve their goal of becoming more predictable. Throughout the engagement, the Cprime team adapted its approach to meet the manufacturer’s requirements.

“Our team size fluctuated. Our coaching team numbered around five people, but we often took on player-coaches in specific roles to fill in the gaps,” says O’Brien. “When they needed release train engineers, for example, someone from Cprime would take on those responsibilities and advise and help until their teams had the knowledge for independent success.”

 

“The company needed to eliminate its autonomous websites, build a modern, universal ecommerce platform, and establish processes for effective inter-regional communications.” – Liza Ridgway, Cprime’s Head of North America Sales

 

Prioritizing Communication to Achieve Desired Business Results

At the team level, Cprime followed a similar path, prioritizing removing the communication silos between the brand and its regional partners to develop a standardized ecommerce platform based on mutually established goals. Just as significantly, Cprime set out to open up a dialogue between the head office and the regional teams to ensure their local expertise would start being considered.

“We spent a lot of time in goals coaching and story writing with the brand and regional teams, working with them to stop their goal posts from shifting,” recalls Vasi. “It wasn’t about affecting what they were delivering. It was about streamlining how they worked and collaborated so they could become effective product teams with a view of the big picture. We focused on teaching them how to deliver value rather than simply checking off unrelated and potentially conflicting boxes in their internal ticket system.”

Results: 70% Predictability with Structured PI Planning and Improved Information Flow for All

Over the course of the engagement, the manufacturer’s ecommerce section went from almost no structured quarterly planning to running regular release trains and regional program increment (PI) planning sessions.

“With release trains and PI planning sessions in full swing, the teams aligned. Each knew what the others were working on and how their own deliverables affected the work product of their colleagues,” says Nicole Bruno, Cprime Agile Coach, Release Train Engineer, and SPC. “They had a better, more collaborative working relationship—they were no longer just throwing requests over the fence.”

Change at the Organizational Level

In a year and a half, Cprime trained hundreds of people throughout the organization, in the US, Europe, Hong Kong, APAC, and the rest of Asia. Overall, the Cprime team facilitated 13 independently held release trains, each with a minimum of 50 team members.

“As a result of the training, for three days every quarter, across the company and the world, 650 people would sit down and establish a roadmap,” says Joseph. “The entire company—management, and everyone down the line—knew exactly what to deliver for the next three months.”

Enhanced Planning and Efficiency

Besides providing the regional teams with a voice and averting expensive culturally unsuccessful initiatives, the roadmap eliminated costly duplicate work by providing the teams with the information they needed to create shared services the company could reuse in every locale. As a result of the planning, predictability rose to 70% despite turbulent pre- and post-COVID-19 market conditions.

While no transformation is ever complete, Cprime has helped place the beauty and cosmetics manufacturer on the path to future success by empowering its management and teams with the information required to plan more effectively.

“We got them to a place where they understood their deliverables, and could measure how their teams were doing. Management had clear metrics to base decisions on,” concludes Joseph. “Leadership gained confidence in what the teams were planning. The teams themselves justified that confidence by learning how to establish realistic workloads they could take on without over-committing and under-delivering.”

 

Want to see the same results for your organization? Explore our flexible Scaled Agility solutions.

 

SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.

A Leading Pharmaceutical Company Pursues Scaled Agile Excellence with the Help of Cprime

Posted on March 14, 2023 by -

The Challenge: Lack of Alignment and Planning Struggles Slowed the Agile Scaling Journey

As they progressed in their efforts to scale their Agile practice, they identified opportunities for improvement across the board, both in processes and in the underlying cultural and strategic approach they were taking to scaled agility.

Interdependent teams working in silos

“We had four delivery teams working with two products,” says the R&D department’s Product Director, “and the products are highly interdependent. The data coming out of each feed the other in a cycle. So the delivery teams worked hard on their own product backlog items (PBIs) but there really wasn’t a mechanism for keeping all four teams aligned at all times.”

Additionally, the effectiveness of planning was limited because different teams were planning independently in parallel, which often left risks and dependencies undetected until they became blockers.

Project instead of product mindset

This leading pharmaceutical manufacturer had already engaged Cprime a year earlier to provide extensive training courses around various Agile disciplines and Lean Portfolio Management (LPM). As a result of her own experience in these training classes, the Product Director recognized that the delivery teams were approaching their workflow from a project perspective rather than focusing on value streams, which is a core foundation of SAFe and LPM. To progress with their scaling journey, this would need to change. This core adjustment in what was guiding the work would require tremendous change involving many people. It was no small task.

 

“We had four delivery teams working with two products and the products are highly interdependent. The data coming out of each feed the other in a cycle. So the delivery teams worked hard on their own product backlog items (PBIs) but there really wasn’t a mechanism for keeping all four teams aligned at all times.” – R&D department’s Product Director

 

Limited understanding of the big picture

Finally, a general lack of alignment between the business and technical teams resulted in priorities and tasks being set down without the teams really understanding the bigger picture of what they were building and why. This is a situation that we see affecting nearly every organization in one form or another. While it can be a formidable challenge, the delivery teams were eager to overcome it.

The Solution: Bringing in a Release Train Engineer (RTE) to Solidify SAFe

Heading into 2022, they reached out to Cprime to source a coach and SAFe expert who could help guide the teams through the coming changes. Ryan Evans, RTE and Agile Coach, took on this challenging and exciting engagement.

An initial assessment and gap analysis

“Although I am an RTE,” Ryan says, “running the Agile Release Train (ART) wasn’t my first task. I needed to thoroughly understand where the teams were in terms of Agile maturity and workflow so I could give the ART the best chance at success.”

Ryan worked closely with the Product Director to perform a large-scale assessment of the delivery teams and processes. In the end, the assessment functioned as a gap analysis.

“I’ll never forget opening Ryan’s report,” she says, “to see forty-six items listed as opportunities for improvement. But it was great to see everything out on the table. Then, Ryan and I discussed each item and decided which were most important and would have the most impact. Then we could focus our efforts accordingly.”

Ryan adds, “While the gap analysis turned up many necessary improvements, we could boil nearly all down to a few main themes: getting all the teams unified into one ART and working on one cadence so they could plan and execute the work as a cohesive unit, and applying foundational SAFe concepts pragmatically to better organize and prioritize the work being done. So, that’s what we did.”

Changes to enhance PI Planning

Ryan began working with the teams in February 2022, five weeks before the end of the first quarter. With an eye on optimizing the Q2 PI Planning session, he focused on making changes that would get meaningful results without causing undue disruption.

“We had about five weeks to prepare for the new PI Planning,” Ryan recalls, “so it was a blur of activity. We needed to coordinate a much larger and longer session than they’d done before, and we wanted to do some preliminary training so the teams and leadership could get the most out of the event. But we completed it and ran an enhanced planning session involving all four teams, as well as subject matter experts and other stakeholders from several other business units—about one hundred attendees on three continents.”

The primary goals of these changes were:

  • Getting on the same page — Bringing all four teams together for a single, all-encompassing planning session
  • Getting on the same schedule — Establishing a unified cadence so everyone could effectively plan, deliver, and continually improve in concert
  • Understanding our dependencies — With the use of Mural, the teams could visualize all their dependencies and when they needed to be delivered
  • Determining the priority of work — Using the concept of Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), the teams could determine the order in which they should tackle work
  • Formalizing the I&P — Establishing a consistent Innovation & Planning (I&P) sprint at the end of each PI to support continuous improvement
  • Laying a solid foundation — This first enhanced PI planning event would set a baseline on which to measure improvement, and a blueprint for future engagements

During the event, Ryan served as RTE, the facilitator who kept the process on track and moving forward. With his coaching, the Product Owners and Agile Facilitators (Scrum Masters) helped facilitate and took the lead in their areas of responsibility.

The Product Director recalls, “Going into that Q2 planning event, I think we were all far better prepared than we’d been in the past to have meaningful conversations and make appropriate decisions. Understanding what we needed to accomplish, how to best do so, and especially why, was vital to the event’s success.”

Working the SAFe framework

Another objective Ryan and the team focused on, both before and after the enhanced Q2 PI planning event, was formalizing the teams’ use of the SAFe framework to better support their scaled Agile practice as an ART. This was another byproduct of ongoing training and slow-but-steady adjustments to existing roles and processes to better align with best practices that have proved successful in thousands of previous engagements.

“To me,” the Product Director says, “one of the greatest benefits of working with Ryan on this was his supporting our use of SAFe as a framework, not a rigid checklist of requirements. There were several concepts we agreed were necessary and beneficial changes we needed to implement, but others that we discussed and decided just weren’t right for the company at this time. And that’s ok. We could pick what would work best for our unique situation.”

The primary goals of these adjustments were:

  • Formalizing roles and responsibilities — Team members and leaders were trained to take on or better carry out their respective roles in a SAFe environment.
  • Formalizing Agile concepts — This included the definition of ready, definition of done, acceptance criteria, capacity planning, feature refinement, and prioritization via WSJF. These concepts were already in play, but teams weren’t applying them consistently, so they needed a common understanding and commitment.
  • Formalizing Agile ceremonies — Establishing a consistent schedule of daily, weekly, and per-sprint meetings provided stability and unity while eliminating a lot of unnecessary ad hoc meetings.
  • Supporting ongoing improvement — Providing necessary SAFe training to get buy-in and help everyone understand the how AND the why behind the changes, as well as ongoing assessments to first establish a baseline and then track increased maturity.

Ryan says, “There was a notable rise in the teams’ confidence level as these principles sunk in and they started seeing the real world value of adhering to a more unified and consistent way of working. Even those who were hesitant at first have really embraced the process.”

The Results: An unprecedented 96% predictability rate on top of greater transparency and trust

Two PIs further along since that first enhanced session in Q2, the team has experienced an unprecedented improvement in predictability based on committed PI Objectives completed.

“In all my years running ARTs, I’ve never seen a percentage this high,” Ryan says, referring to the 95.7 percent predictability rate of committed PI Objectives the teams achieved in the last quarter. “It’s a testament to the strides they’ve made in understanding capacity and velocity, as well as what they can legitimately commit to versus what work is less predictable because of dependencies or blockers outside their control.”

The Product Director concurs, “While that number is phenomenal, we know there’s still work we can do to increase the number of stories we’re able to commit to as we work to smooth out dependencies internally and with outside teams. But, the progress so far has been excellent.”

 

“While the gap analysis turned up many necessary improvements, we could boil nearly all down to a few main themes: getting all the teams unified into one ART and working on one cadence so they could plan and execute the work as a cohesive unit, and applying foundational SAFe concepts pragmatically to better organize and prioritize the work being done. So, that’s what we did.” -Ryan Evans, STE, Cprime RTE and Agile Coach

 

Qualitative improvements

Besides quantitative results showing dramatic improvement from baselines set in March, the teams have reported several qualitative improvements as well, including:

  • Greater confidence planning, committing to, and delivering work, but more importantly, greater confidence in stating when the teams cannot commit to deliver work
  • More transparency and visibility into the work within and outside the teams
  • Stronger engagement with and understanding of the big picture strategy
  • New-found stability to withstand inevitable change within and outside the teams
  • Enhanced collaboration within the development teams and with stakeholders in other departments
  • Greater trust that the teams will finish the work that is ready and in the queue

Additionally, in November, a fifth delivery team joined to do a Large Solution PI planning session. This showed a new level of coordination and collaboration between the teams as both continue to mature in their scaled Agile practice. As a result, the company has renewed the engagement so the progress can continue.

The Product Director concludes, “Working with Ryan has been great. We got on well from the get go, and I know that every new decision or experiment is going to be a give and take where we will do what’s best for my teams and the company as a whole.”

Want to see similar results for your organization? Explore our flexible Scaled Agility and Learning solutions.

SAFe and Scaled Agile Framework are registered trademarks of Scaled Agile, Inc.

Cprime Cloud Migration Improves Action Camera Pioneer’s Internal Communications and Organizational Data Flow

Posted on March 3, 2023 by -

The Client

Established in 2002 by sports enthusiasts wanting a rugged, compact, and easy-to-use method of capturing high-quality video in extreme environments, this Cprime client sets the gold standard in the industry.

Today, the market has grown to $3 billion, and this company has captured one-third of global sales — over $1 billion in both 2021 and 2022.

The Challenge: Improving Poor Application Performance and Overcoming Sluggish Vendor Support on a Tight Timeline

Action cameras occupy an extremely competitive market expected to reach over $7 billion before 2030. This rapid revenue growth is due to the professional and consumer appetite for versatile, feature-rich cameras and lenses with ever-increasing resolution and video quality.

To remain at the top of the market, the camera manufacturer sought to update its infrastructure. All in all, the goal was to enhance team collaboration, eliminate organizational silos, facilitate employee access to proprietary resources, address efficiency issues, and speed product development.

To achieve this, however, the company faced multiple challenges. These included the poor historical performance of its legacy Jira and Confluence applications.

Sluggish Vendor Support

“The biggest pain point was the hoops they had to jump through to troubleshoot or even locate specific data,” explains Crystal Zapata, Cprime Technical Project Manager.

 

“We went from waiting a day or more to receive support responses to receiving them within hours — much better than before. The support requests we see now are about the applications’ enhanced functionality rather than their poor performance.” — Company Project Sponsor

 

The provider’s declining service frequently resulted in multi-day delays in response to simple support requests. With teams from multiple disciplines working from locations around the globe, time differences only compounded the issue. The delays affected everyone, from the company’s developers to its sales partners and customer service agents.

Poor Application Performance

Additionally, the solutions themselves — poorly configured instances of the normally reliable Atlassian Jira and Confluence — were not performing well, causing productivity issues and frustration.

“They wanted ownership of a streamlined, systematic, and cloud-based process that worked without submitting a support ticket and waiting days for a response, and a reliable Jira dashboard and Confluence reports that everyone—from their manufacturing team members and development project managers up to their CEO and CIOs—could look at and say, ‘This is where we’re at, this is what we’re tracking.’ ”

A Tight Schedule — Shifting Data at Scale without Interrupting Critical Workflows

Challenges also grew from the sheer volume of data to migrate and the technical and logistical demands of delivering functioning Jira and Confluence cloud applications.

“We usually try to fit each migration into a single weekend to avoid disruption, but there was so much data that a Saturday and Sunday weren’t enough,” says Yevgen Lasman, Cprime Data Migration engineer. “From a technical perspective, they required extensive customizations with interlocking dependencies, including a complex repository of proprietary mathematical formulas and important technical documentation. We also had to work with their third-party vendors and application suppliers to identify and address issues as they arose.”

The timing was critical. Due to the seasonal nature of their business, the migration had to occur without disrupting revenue or production during the peak product development and sales cycles.

“Finding the right time to make it all happen was key,” says Zapata. “Everything had to fit into a window immediately after their development freeze time and just before the busiest time of the year.”

Solution: A Cprime-Atlassian Platinum Partnership for Cloud Migration Success

The camera manufacturer decided to take control of its data by migrating their legacy Jira and Confluence applications to Atlassian Cloud hosting. To solve its migration challenges and ensure the process went smoothly, the company engaged an experienced, full service global Atlassian Enterprise Platinum Solution Partner. Specifically, Cprime was the ideal candidate to extend the client’s Atlassian toolset with expertise in accredited services, application integrations, training, and custom solutions.

To start the transformation, the Cprime migration team formed a comprehensive action plan beginning with a deep-dive audit. Consequently, over three weeks, they worked with the manufacturer’s steering committee, network specialists, technical project managers, and product stakeholders to assess its peer data, add-ons, and potential risks.

“Together, we identified their Atlassian application layouts and mappings and determined the most effective way to migrate their customizations, applications, and journal components,” says Zapata. “This included forming a plan for migrating the data the company had in use and important archival data from early camera iterations that they needed to keep for reference.”

A Flexible Migration Plan for Real-World Conditions

Once the manufacturer’s teams approved the migration roadmap, Cprime began iteration testing to identify potential pain points and establish realistic timelines for each phase of the move to the cloud.

“Finding the right time to make it all happen was key. Everything had to fit into a window immediately after their development freeze time and just before the busiest time of the year.” — Crystal Zapata, Cprime Technical Project Manager

“Migrating production systems, there is always an element of risk, but we mitigate that as much as possible,” says Zapata. “Here, we stepped the client through our test iterations, ensured the stakeholders understood and approved the process, and provided their business units with a clear schedule.”

Throughout the migration, the Cprime team remained flexible, adjusting the strategy and timelines to align with the manufacturer’s shifting production schedules.

“We were ready to go live in September, but, for business reasons including the peak sales season over Black Friday and Christmas, the manufacturer froze systematic changes to its production environments,” says Lasman. “We altered the roadmap to fit their timeframe. In the meantime, we laid everything out and tested it to ensure the company had the confidence to move forward when they were ready.”

With such large volumes of data involved, the scheduled migration intervals often exceeded low-activity periods between Friday evening and Monday morning. When work bled into the busier periods, Cprime ensured that the system remained unaffected by shifting only low-impact archived data that did not affect business activities or application performance.

Continued Support

Cprime support continued after the camera manufacturer signed off on the migration.

“We stayed on site for an additional two weeks, providing bespoke training documentation explaining changes to the process flow to avoid confusion,” Zapata says.

Results: Improved Issue Resolution, Application Performance, and Data Security

Despite the challenges, the company saw immediate results from its Jira and Confluence cloud migration.

Greater Visibility and Control

Taking control of their hosting and system administration provided the first set of benefits.

“They now have access to advanced features of Atlassian Cloud,” says Zapata. “They can also leverage customizations the cloud offers that their legacy provider couldn’t.”

More Responsive Customer Support

By switching to direct Enterprise tier Atlassian support rather than going through a third party, the company has seen response times to support tickets improve radically. Application speeds have also increased with internal and external Jira Service Management users describing the performance as “snappy.”

“We went from waiting a day or more to receiving support responses within hours — much better than before. We are very happy with the changes,” says a project sponsor. “The support requests we see now are about the applications’ enhanced functionality rather than its poor performance.”

Data Security and Application Performance Gains

Moving its Jira and Confluence data to the cloud also improved data access and security. By migrating its data, the camera manufacturer added a layer of protection through the redundancy and fail-over protection characteristic of managed cloud solutions.

Based on the results of the camera manufacturer’s cloud transformation, the company continues to turn to Cprime regularly for insights into its next steps.

“Even with the move to the cloud complete, we frequently meet with the company to discuss new use cases and advancements in the software,” says Zapata. “Cprime is happy to be on board to help them navigate future upgrades.”

Want to see the same results for your organization? Explore our flexible Atlassian Cloud Migration solutions.

A Global Banking Leader Accelerates Digital Transformation Through a Custom Blended Learning Program

Posted on February 24, 2023 by -

The Client

Few financial institutions offer greater depth and breadth of services than this U.S. based global banking and investment leader. Besides retail and commercial banking services, they are also a custodian bank for many of the financial industry’s largest hedge and investment funds.

We began working with the organization in 2014 and the relationship has grown and strengthened over the years. In 2019, it took a huge leap forward when we took on a new initiative to deliver the company’s proprietary software engineering onboarding and training courses globally across six time zones. (To learn more about that epic undertaking, read the case study here.)

The Challenge: Onboarding and Upskilling a Global Development Organization

The need for qualified software engineers and DevOps professionals has been speeding up globally for years and shows no signs of slowing down. The financial services industry is no exception, and a large digital transformation necessitates new roles and qualified professionals to fill them. So, our client found themselves in a familiar position: needing to prepare a large number of existing team members to thrive under a new way of working even while zealously working to transform their development organization to support enterprise agility.

With a software engineering workforce numbering in the thousands—and constantly growing—this was no small task.

Fortunately, Cprime had already cultivated a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with the company that already spanned nearly six years.

Alex Gray, Cprime’s Lean Agile Practice Lead on the engagement, explains, “It was really the relationship and reputation we’d cultivated with the software engineers onboarding training that encouraged them to approach us about this new program. We were glad to get the opportunity.”

So, when this initiative began in 2022, they trusted us to get it off the ground.

The Solution: Custom “Blended Workshop” Learning Academies Delivered with Speed and Finesse

Unlike our previous learning engagements with this client, they asked us to generate custom coursework rather than facilitating courses they had already developed internally. The initial request was for an e-learning course for Scrum Masters (referred to as Agile Leads within the company), so that’s where we began.

An initial plan for the learning Academies

“Our first step,” Alex says, “was to develop a storyboard outlining the general learning objectives for the e-learning course, and how the modules would progress. We put that together and reviewed it with the client leadership team.”

After iterating on the storyboard, they fleshed out the content within that framework. The goal for the e-learning course was to cover the core fundamentals any new or existing Agile Lead would need to know to succeed in their role. Rob Hill, a Cprime Learning Consultant, explains, “This was a combination of standard Agile concepts and best practices combined with terminology and processes unique to the organization, designed to get Agile Leads at various levels of experience up-to-speed quickly.”

Once we developed the initial content and the client approved, we collaborated with a partner vendor that created the actual course using Adobe Captivate. These experienced practitioners made suggestions around visuals, format and frequency of quizzes, and the general flow of the learning path. Where it added value, we implemented the changes before coming back to the client with a completed SCORM file. They uploaded that to their Learning Management System (LMS) so they could securely host the course internally and students could access it through their Learning and Development portal.

“It was really the relationship and reputation we’d cultivated with the software engineers onboarding training that encouraged them to approach us about this new program. We were glad to get the opportunity.” -Alex Gray, Cprime Lean Agile Practice Lead

Developing the blended workshop approach

“Although the e-learning course was very good,” Alex says, “we felt there would be tremendous value in giving the students the opportunity to interact with each other and expert instructors. So, we developed a complementary instructor-led workshop as well.”

Students completed the e-learning course remotely and at their own pace. Then, in small, structured cohorts, they would come together in the workshops (virtually or in-person) to discuss what they’d learned, ask questions, and run through several interactive exercises.

Rob continues, “This blended learning approach offers students the best of both worlds: the ease and convenience of e-learning and the enrichment of a more traditional face-to-face workshop so they can apply their knowledge to real-world scenarios and get some experience working with the new concepts. More practical, less theoretical.”

Expanding to meet growing demand

Templates_Medium_black_coralThe Agile Leads course thrilled the client, so they requested more courses in the same format for additional roles. Thus far, we have developed blended learning courses for:

  • Agile Lead
  • Product Owner
  • Agile Lead Coaching
  • UX Designer
  • Engineering Lead
  • Product Adoption
  • System Architect

Additionally, we have developed these instructor-led courses:

  • Agile Architect
  • Agile Designer
  • Agile Engineering Lead
  • Agile Product Owner
  • Agile Scrum Master
  • Agile Stakeholder
  • Agile Story Writing
  • Agile Customer Centricity
  • Defining your Product Roadmap
  • Implementing Kanban
  • Agile Team Transformation
  • Agile Product Adoption
  • Agile Stakeholder Management
  • Agile Coaching
  • Shift Left

Alex adds, “As the organization continues scaling their Agile practice and the teams mature, they have requested courses covering more mature subjects and advanced roles.”

The Results: Top Scores from Students and Enhanced Trust from Leadership

The results of this training program have been remarkable. Over 4,700 students have gone through the programs Cprime has developed since 2020. And feedback has remained very positive nearly across the board.

Feedback scores of 4+

“We request feedback from every student, and it has thrilled us to find nearly all of them have rated the course material and the instructors at four or better out of five,” Alex says. “We’ve heard comments like, ‘this wasn’t like any other classes I’ve taken—I feel like I can go out immediately and use what I’ve learned.’ That’s really gratifying.”

Of course, perfection is unrealistic. In one case, a trainer we brought in simply didn’t mesh well with the teams and we saw some negative feedback as a result. So, we immediately rectified the matter and feedback scores rose again.

“In some ways, negative feedback is even more valuable because it supports our and the client’s mutual commitment to continuous improvement.”

From trainers to trusted advisors

Alex concludes, “I think the most telling result of this engagement is how our relationship with the client has expanded. They already considered us excellent trainers. But now, they view us as trusted advisors, which is exactly what we want to be. Whether it be refining the courses in play or considering where new courses may be of value, we’re working together to deliver the greatest value to the organization.”

Could Your Company Benefit from Results Like These?

Explore our training solutions today and speak to a learning expert so we can help your organization achieve something similar.

A Global Transportation Leader Stabilizes Large-scale Transformation Through Strategic Training

Posted on February 21, 2023 by -

The Client

Since its formation in 2011, this company has grown into one of the world’s largest transportation groups. Operating leading airlines in Ireland, Spain, and the United Kingdom, its premium and budget brands connect over 350 destinations worldwide. Moreover, they serve nearly 120 million passengers and move countless tonnes of cargo annually.

The Challenge: An Unexpected Market Upheaval Provides an Opportunity to Upgrade Internal Processes

Every airline struggled through the long and unpredictable travel restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and this group was no exception. However, looking ahead, leadership focused the time on improving the company’s internal tools and processes to ensure they came out of the situation stronger and in a better position to weather change in the future. Meanwhile, they also created a new business unit dedicated to their global tech operations. 

To learn more about the digital and scaled Agile transformation they took on, read the case study here.

A vital part of every successful enterprise-wide transformation is a robust training program to enable and empower employees at all levels of the organisation to succeed in the new reality the transformation is creating. However, the global tech business unit did not have a formal learning and development program set up. 

So, they turned to Cprime—their trusted transformation partner—to quickly spin up a training program that could start making a difference immediately.

The Solution: An Innovative Approach to Rapid Training Success Across 19 Tracks

Unlike many learning and development engagements Cprime has headed up, a quick turnaround was of high priority because the client was pursuing a tight timeline for their digital transformation. By the time the organisation was ready to pursue this new training program, the goal was to have employees fully trained on new roles, concepts, and processes (which were still being established) progressively over a period of 18 to 24 months, starting as soon as possible.

Rather than creating bespoke training courses with original custom content—an excellent but time-consuming option—the training team decided to focus on sourcing, curating, and coordinating delivery of existing courses that would fill the client’s needs as quickly as possible.

Progressive, role-based training in three phases

“We started by outlining a series of learning pathways in three phases,” recalls Alex Gray, Cprime’s Lean Agile Practice Lead on the engagement. “They had to be role-specific, developed in priority order. They also needed to be tailored to ensure students would be able to absorb the elementary level coursework immediately, and would then be knowledgeable enough to successfully progress through intermediate and advanced coursework as the transformation progressed around them.” 

As a result, pathways were developed to guide students to take on 19 different roles within the transformed tech business unit:

“Each level of each pathway included a group of core modules that contained the basic concepts, required skills, and practical guidelines around fulfilling each role in the transformed organisation. Then, a range of additional modules provided supplemental knowledge and deeper dives into each role, which the students could take on at their own pace.”

But how were the learning pathways developed so quickly? 

A new training role created to fill the need

Alex continues, “Since we were not creating any of the content, we needed to approach building these learning pathways in a different way. I worked closely with Aradhana Sabherwal—one of Cprime’s experienced Agile Coaches—to fill a new role we haven’t needed in the past. We called it the Learning Curator.”

The responsibility of the Learning Curator was to:

  • Identify any learning challenges across the business unit
  • Suggest the skills that could help the organisation meet those challenges
  • Liaise with internal SMEs to understand the client’s learning context
  • Seek out Agile learnings that could instil those skills in the teams
  • Describe the modes and formats in which the learning would be delivered to the teams
  • Design the learning pathways
  • Build the system and access points to support the teams’ learning and application

“Once we had an outline of the pathways completed, it became a matter of leveraging Cprime’s own catalogue of existing instructor-led courses where possible, and seeking out third-party classes and interactive video courses to fill in the gaps where necessary.”

Coordination and management to keep the program on track

This unique combination of formats and providers required the efforts of an exceptional Learning Manager—a role well-suited to Cprime’s Vicky Brownsell.

“Vicky serves as the coordinator that ensures the ongoing training program runs smoothly, because there are a lot of moving parts.”

“Once we had an outline of the pathways completed, it became a matter of leveraging Cprime’s own catalogue of existing instructor-led courses where possible, and seeking out third-party classes and interactive video courses to fill in the gaps where necessary.” -Alex Gray, Cprime Lean Agile Practice Lead

The Learning Manager’s responsibilities include:

  • Hosting in our learning management system (LMS) and training management system (TMS)
  • Coordination of the training schedules to support each student’s progressive learning path 
  • Booking participants onto Cprime and external courses
  • Following up with participants to make sure they have booked, attended, and completed classes
  • Engaging with Cprime instructors and third party vendors to solidify schedules 
  • Agreeing the best possible rates with third party vendors to ensure the client is getting the best deal without compromising on quality
  • Coordinating billing and invoicing between the client and training providers

“Vicky’s work has been invaluable over the last three quarters as the training program has only grown in size and complexity,” Alex says.

The Results: Smooth, Progressive Training with Clear Practical Impact

clipboard icon“The most powerful evidence of the success of this program is the fact that the students who have gone through the program are successfully applying what they’ve learned to their evolving roles within the changing organisation.” 

So far (as of January 2023) 265 students have benefited from a total of 932 hours of education in the ten months since the program launched. Cprime has also worked simultaneously with the client to develop internal capabilities so they will be able to take over the management responsibilities to keep the program running continuously going forward.

Alex adds, “Something else that underlines the value Cprime brought to this engagement was the fact that our executive sponsor started out requesting continuous input as every detail was arranged. But, she very quickly grew comfortable with the level of quality, efficiency, and professionalism we brought to the table. Now, she only wants a weekly update to keep her in the loop, and she’s thrilled with the outcomes so far.”

Consequently, as the client’s transformation progresses, these qualified and experienced students are forming a strong foundation of expertise to solidify the new way of working.

Could Your Company Benefit from Results Like These?

Whether you’re undergoing a large-scale transformation or just looking to upskill your teams to increase productivity, efficiency, and quality, Cprime’s pre-developed and custom learning solutions can get you there. Contact us today to explore your options.