Assessing and improving a car finance company’s ways of working
As one of the UK’s top three car finance companies, this organisation had a sizeable development team. We brought an outside view to help them understand the maturity of their technical and end-to-end delivery practices. I focussed on the delivery practices with a technical director supporting me. People can get set in their ways and continue making small changes to delivery models rather than considering the big picture.
Many problems were uncovered. Here are a few highlights:
A lack of visibility into the strategy and portfolio from almost all the delivery teams
No urgent technical improvements reaching the portfolio team for prioritisation
Offshore teams with poor communication tools were struggling to understand requirements and conduct testing
Specialist teams causing bottlenecks
Why traditional approaches fail
A typical assessment approach is to put everyone in a room and get them to put up issues on a wall. These are then prioritised and actioned. This will feel like a high-value activity, but it has serious flaws:
More junior or offshore team members are rarely invited, leading to missing insights
Surface-level insights from recent issues become the focus
Not knowing what better looks like means you may not raise an issue
Systemic issues that have been there for many years are ignored as they are just accepted
Senior team members may be given the most attention and speak more than others
Brainstorming activity gives little time to think
Implementation
A 6-week assessment was conducted. This was used with many other clients and following this process:
Map the delivery stages, their activities and outputs
One hour 1-to-1s with people to explore issues with each delivery stage
Deep dives into outputs and processes where required
A fixed set of maturity questions across a number of key areas run with senior leadership
Reporting back with important findings
The client scores their own maturity level in key areas based on a provided scale
Many interventions with their own high-level plan were created to improve the current state
Prioritisation of interventions and assessment close
It is essential that the client scores their own maturity level. This self-reflection creates a strong drive for improvement. It also gives them a baseline maturity score that helps direct where to invest. In this case it showed they were much less mature than they originally thought.
The feedback from the management team was very positive. It achieved the following:
Gave a voice to people that were rarely listened to
Giving an outside perspective helped them see how their current delivery methods needed major changes and not just tweaking
Showed where people were struggling where they weren’t even aware there were issues
Gave them a much better understanding of their maturity and a foundation for improvement
Gave them new solution options that they hadn’t considered
Suggested wholesale changes where processes weren’t fit for purpose
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