Global Software Consulting and IT Services Firm Turns Agile with Orangescrum

ONE Business Consulting Group (One BCG) is a Global Software Consulting and IT services firm offering integrated business solutions, enabling clients to optimize their business with greater efficiency, and increased responsiveness.

ONE BCG was founded in Sydney back in 2000, and now has spread its wings across the globe with presence in Australia, Botswana, India, UK and US servicing clients across the globe, from enterprise level businesses to helping start-ups take their ideas to launch. ONE BCG offers full range of IT/Software consulting services including design & architecture of Cloud based solutions, software build & deployment, along with infrastructure maintenance and support.

As evident from their portfolio, clientele, wide technical outreach and distributed teams project agility was a top priority for them.

Having a wide range of clientele, multiple in-flight projects, ever-looming project delivery timelines and a robust project pipeline are challenges all organizations love to face.

“And as always, these challenges bring with them – scope creeps, changing business demands, budget & resource constraints, change in project schedule and at times the project end goals due to the ever-shifting business landscape.”

One BCG too had a mixed bag of the above problems and needed a platform that

• Supports quick sprints and task iterations
• Provides with absolute clarity the progress of – Backlogs, To Do, In-Progress & Completed tasks
• Offers resource availability & utilization for project execution
• Presents accurate billable information for on-time billing and revenue generation
• Gives granular data on actual vs. estimated project hours for within budget delivery
• Allows capturing of true time spent on project tasks.

“Our project were running out of budgeted hours, dependency on other tools to get real time data on project progress and inability to perform timely project health check-ups were significant challenges we had to overcome says Sachin Kumar, Project Manager, One BCG”

Sachin Kumar further adds on – a lot was at stake. It was not just about delivering projects, but about being agile in our approach for faster and accurate execution. One BCG prides in working with a sense of urgency and the ability to deliver high value services on time and within budget!

For us Agility meant – try fast, fail fast and succeed fast! Success here meant getting the minimum viable product approved within the stipulated time. We are committed to delivering products that enable our client’s processes and integrate seamlessly with their existing tool set.

Hence it becomes very important as a product development and software consulting agency to be highly agile and have nimble execution process to support our clients’ changing demands.

End of the day everything boils down to achieving desired business outcomes and making businesses efficient with the right technology fit and our technical prowess.

How did Orangescrum help in your “Agile” journey?

The first and foremost thing that one notices in Orangescrum is its simple collaborative platform; nothing beats it. Period.

And when it comes to deploying agile development – Collaboration, Staying Organized and Bringing our Diverse and Distributed Teams together is a critical success factor.

Let us take a quick look into the contributing parts of the agile methodology that are crucial to its implementation and how Orangescrum proves to be seamlessly supportive.

Product Backlog and Product Owner

To begin with, the first and foremost activity is to get the Product Owner on-board. A Product Owner (e.g. Client, Project Manager) is the final authority on what goes into the final product and is responsible for the Product Backlog.

Product Backlog is the list of all activities, tasks that are need to execute and complete the project. It is a good starting point and grows as the project progresses and the product takes shape.

In Orangescrum, a Product Owner can start by

• Creating a project and entering a quick description of the project goal/product to be delivered.
• Organize your product backlog items as tasks under Task Groups/Milestones (Sprints – more on it later below)
• Outlining in order of importance the sequence of tasks that need to be completed within the stipulated Sprint (Ideally 1 day to 3 weeks)

Task Organization and planning is critical for project execution and Orangescrum simplified it enough to make it fun and give our team a huge confidence boost.

I was not getting real time data before. I was dependent on other resources to provide me data. With OrangeScrum, Now I am able to perform Project Health Check-up activity more efficiently.

Scrum Master and Development Team

Once we were done with the task organization defining the team for the project was the logical next step.

Scrum Master is a very crucial role and is played by an expert who understands the scrum framework and ensures the team is supported and guided enough to practice it. The primary role of the Scrum Master is to keep the team on course towards timely Sprint completion.

Development Team is responsible for task execution. They are solely responsible for moving items from the ‘Product Backlog’ to releasing a ‘Done Product’ at the end of a sprint.

Orangescrum effectively helped our Scrum Master (Team Leads), Development Team (cross-functional teams) in executing their responsibilities –

• Quick assignment of tasks with the relevant priority to the developers
• All developers can see each other’s tasks and their progress that enables timely execution and delivery
• Clarity on deliverables as developers know what is to be delivered through their Sprint
• Developers from different teams collaborate seamlessly in a sprint
• Makes it easier for the Scrum Master to track progress of task execution
• Scrum Master can make timely interventions and coach the developers as needed to ensure a valuable and valid product increment is delivered.

“Orangescrum gave me better visibility on organisation billability factor. Some projects were running out of estimated hours (budget). Visibility on project status and budget was instant and easy. Better task management using its fabulous Kanban view”

Sprint and Sprint Planning

Sprints are the soul of the Agile Methodology. This is where all the action happens and also whose results are most critical to project success.

The typical idea around Sprints is to break the project into multiple Sprints that are time bound and goal driven with definite deliverables upon completion.

A lot can go haywire here! In our madness for timely delivery critical aspects, requirements are at risk of being flouted.

And Orangescrum indeed proved to be the magic wand. See how –

• Interactive and Smart “Kanban Board” provides real time progress of each Sprint
• Clearly defined estimated hours and due date for each task
• Easy to follow time tracking feature enables capturing proper billable and non-billable hours
• Custom defined task types enable categorizing various tasks to the relevant Sprint requirements
• Custom task statuses prove handy in defining true Sprint Statuses
• Entire team can refer to the ever handy Kanban Board to see who is doing what, when and for how long.
• Moreover, its Resource Availability and Resource Utilization made Sprint Planning a walk in the park

All in all our Orangescrum investment was bang-on on ROI. Adoption was further made easier with quick responses and support by their Support teams.

As the name suggests Orangescrum stays true to the Scrum framework while being intuitive, simple and enabling real-time team collaboration. We noticed significant improvements in our feedback and approval times along with our team’s growing awareness around execution time.

Orangescrum also enables transparency, thereby teams being committed towards the billable factor and eliminating any wasteful efforts. We saw a 28% increase in time savings in the projects we delivered post Orangescrum adoption and we are bound to see it grow!

Bring it all together

This interaction with Sachin asserts our thought process and the fact that Orangescrum helps battle the very challenges we set to defeat.

Rise in productivity, on time & within budget deliveries with motivated teams to back our clients is definitely the desired position for any Organization to be in.

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How agile and nimble is your company? Where are you on YOUR agile journey? Please comment below.