Context of our client
Our client is a media broadcaster, subsidiary of a larger group. They take care of processing media for their internal (and external) client and are recognized for their expertise in:
- Managing VoD catalogues
- Producing Live and non-live programmes
- Managing live TV plannings
- Managing Premium TV channels
Challenges of the mission
Our role was to support and orchestrate the delivery a company-critical project from end-to-end. On top of the classic project management constraints, we helped them tackle their company-specific challenges.
The problem is due to their holding’s influence, their organisation inherits of heavily siloed administration and slow processes.
On top of that heavy load, they suffer from the following tensions:
- Project management happens mostly in waterfall, while innovation system is hyper-centralized
- Hyper-specialized resources, who are critical to several project successes
- No link between company objectives and the project.
When we asked “why do you want our help? What’s your vision?”, we got answered: “there’s no vision for the company”.
That wasn’t true, obviously. But it signalled a lack of communication and transparency we had to tackle at some point if we wanted to keep the morale of our project team high.
On top of that, and due to engineers’ hyper-specialization, our client had complex resource planning issues. For instance, a few specialized resources are sometimes double, or triple booked. Or worse, there are no backup in case a resource is unavailable, and projects must be put in pending until they come back.
Our mission
While managing Business as Usual, we linked all their project management challenges to one main issue.
Indeed, no resource was trained or even in charge of doing proper business analysis prior to any of their project.
On top of that, our client expects project results quickly and loves to have a fast go for their project. Indeed, pretty projects on presentation slides makes top management happy. To “achieve” that in less than a week, like they’re used to, middle management must rush through their own requirements, by themselves, for each project.
That is of course, when requirements documentation are taken care of.
Combine that with heavy processes and a low organizational maturity in information management and problems are bound to happen.
We successfully managed the go live of the main, company-critical, project, squeezed in a very short timeframe and despite a shifting scope. Our biggest impact was however to educate our client on the need for building a business analysis capability.
We:
- guided them in choosing the right profiles to complement their department.
- tapped into real frustration of engineers and middle management as a motivation engine to rally people around the change
- we managed to build our very first use case!
- follow up on the scalability of their newfound business analysis capabilities
Results
Today, on top of celebrating the project success, our client is getting its first ROI on business analysis! They’re now able to:
- Collecting and translate business requirements
- Making sure the solution proposed matched customers’ expectations
- Improve project-related processes
- Get assistance in managing change
Next steps
That sounds quite an ideal world. But this organizations still suffers from acute meeting-itis.
In fact, we witnessed people scheduling an 8-hour long, agenda-less meeting during which:
- Nobody shared or even took notes
- Nobody knows what has been said
- Nobody recalls what were the conclusions and which decision has been taken
We already could experience a buy in on us implementing industry standards as simple as meeting minutes, workshops, and process councils, and our next goal will be to work on a step-by-step shift in mentality to improve operation management.
