Maturity assessment and proposals enable scale-up transformation at MetaCompliance

In two weeks, Practical Leaders gave us insights into what was holding teams back and what to do about it. They quickly earned the teams’ trust and identified issues others had missed. The roadmap was immediately actionable, and we knew exactly what to do next and why. — Andy Fielder, CTO.

Summary

Over two weeks, Practical Leaders conducted a comprehensive agile and engineering maturity assessment across MetaCompliance’s product teams, delivery partnerships, and stakeholder relationships.

Based on the findings, we delivered a prioritised transformation roadmap with concrete, actionable recommendations that addressed the pain points identified in team dynamics, delivery predictability, and business alignment. Leadership gained clarity on where teams stood and exactly what steps would drive results, enabling them to accelerate their PE-backed scale-up transformation.

Client overview

MetaCompliance Limited is a global leader in cybersecurity awareness education and human risk management. With around 250 staff and over £40m annual recurring revenue, this Private Equity-backed scale-up was among the Deloitte Technology Fast50 in 2023.

Context

MetaCompliance had recently embarked on a new round of Private Equity-backed scale-up growth. The new CTO had completed an initial technology health assessment but needed external expertise to rapidly deepen that understanding and translate insights into an actionable roadmap. Our challenge was to identify what was impeding teams, determine the highest-impact changes, and map a transformation roadmap that would deliver results quickly and sustainably.

Scope

The engagement comprised a review and assessment of:

• Team agile ways of working across four cross-functional product teams.
• Technical, product, and delivery leadership maturity within each team.
• Capability and performance of team members in each team.
• Engineering culture.
• Relationships with business stakeholders and interactions with other departments.
• Effectiveness of near-shore delivery partnerships.

Approach

Building trust and observing teams

We started by building trust with teams by positioning the engagement as seeking to identify their frustrations and ways to address them.

Over a full sprint cycle, we observed all agile events for all teams, including stand-ups, refinement sessions, sprint planning, sprint reviews and retrospectives. This covered internally staffed teams and one pure delivery partner team.

We assessed:

• Team dynamics, level of mutual trust, openness of communication, and frequency and effectiveness of collaboration.
• The degree to which work in progress was tracked and actively managed.
• Volume and causes of rework.
• The teams’ clarity of purpose, maturity of product roadmaps, and focus on delivering user and business value.
• The amount of collaboration between developers and test specialists, and whether/how the Three Amigos technique was used.
• Quality and consistency of participation in ceremonies.
• Transparency and alignment between the client and their delivery partner (where applicable).

Stakeholder and leadership interviews

In one to one interviews with Technical Leads and Product Managers, the QA manager, Design Lead, and selected engineers, testers, and designers, we:

• Established the path to where they were now, and what had been tried previously.
• Identified pain points and uncovered concerns.
• Assessed leaders’ depth of understanding of modern agile product delivery.
• Assessed individual contributors’ engagement and contribution.

Through one to one interviews with technology and executive leadership, we gained strategic context and understood their goals and concerns.

In one to one interviews with business stakeholders from customer support, customer success, sales, and marketing, we:

• Captured their experiences and challenges.
• Assessed the effectiveness and consistency of incident prioritisation.
• Audited adherence to SLAs for incident resolution.
• Assessed the degree of visibility and the perceived predictability that stakeholders had of resolution timescales.
• Assessed how customer requests are triaged and fed into the product prioritisation process, and stakeholders’ satisfaction with the visibility they had of these decisions and the resulting roadmaps.

Data audit

We also audited the work tracking system for:

• Backlog quality: completeness of user stories and other backlog items. Quality and clarity needed improvement to ensure that desired outcomes were clearly captured and that acceptance criteria were well defined.
• Delivery metrics: cycle time, work in progress, predictability and consistency of delivery. Cycle times of 30 days or more were common. Teams often had 50 or more items in progress simultaneously. Sprint completion rates were as low as 50%, with significant quantities of work carried forward.
• Bug rates. Escaped bugs (those making their way into production) were on a steady downward trend, suggesting recent quality improvements were having an impact. However, the volume of bugs found in new work was causing significant rework during sprints.
• Individual contribution levels (item completion rates and code volume/complexity). In some cases, contribution levels varied by a factor of 3 or more between team members doing similar tasks.

Outcomes

We presented the findings to technology leadership along with a comprehensive set of actionable recommendations. Each recommendation addressed a specific problem, and the rationale and implementation steps were clearly described. These recommendations were prioritised and sequenced in a proposed transformation roadmap.

The six-month roadmap gave leadership confidence to commit to specific interventions, with clear expectations of impact and timelines. Following this assessment, Practical Leaders was engaged to drive implementation of the transformation roadmap. To find out how, see Transforming outcomes by strengthening engineering foundations at MetaCompliance.