Transforming outcomes by strengthening engineering foundations at MetaCompliance

Practical Leaders was pivotal in establishing robust delivery in our teams and enabling us to scale with confidence. Their expertise and experience in building high-performing teams were key, as was their ability to rapidly earn our teams’ trust by supporting and working alongside them rather than imposing changes. Within two months, we saw dramatic improvements which enabled us to scale up and double our delivery capacity. — Andy Fielder, CTO.

Summary

Practical Leaders helped Private Equity-backed cybersecurity scale-up MetaCompliance achieve rapid, reliable delivery by transforming their engineering practices and strengthening leadership skills.

Through trust-building, incremental change, and hands-on coaching, we achieved a significant increase in tangible value delivered each sprint, underpinned by a halving of each of three key measures: cycle time, work in progress, and rework. This enabled the company to double its number of delivery teams while improving quality and velocity.

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 commissioned Practical Leaders to perform an agile engineering maturity assessment and propose a transformation roadmap (see Maturity assessment and proposals enable scale-up transformation at MetaCompliance). Following this, Practical Leaders were engaged for a further six months to lead the implementation of this transformation.

Approach

Building foundations

We began by building trust with teams and buy-in for changes. This was especially important as previous agile transformation work had not been well received due to the way it had been approached.

We started with “why,” explaining the issues we had observed and the benefits we anticipated from implementing changes. We positioned these changes as experiments that the teams were invited to undertake with support rather than things being done to them.

We acknowledged that change always causes some disruption and teams take time to get used to new ways of working. We emphasised that approaches would be adapted based on the teams’ experiences and feedback, rather than being one-size-fits-all templates being imposed on the teams. An open dialogue was encouraged through Question and Answer and retrospective sessions.

Developing leaders

We spent extra time with leaders to ensure they understood the proposed changes and were happy to support them.

We also used coaching and mentoring to develop their leadership skills to enable them to act more effectively as force multipliers for their teams, reducing over-reliance on them for routine decisions and empowering their teams to step up with support.

Starting small and scaling

We began with simple changes that teams found easy to adopt and which delivered clear benefits quickly. These were successful, and this further built trust and enabled progressively larger changes to be tackled.

It was essential to give the teams time to adopt changes at a manageable pace and not to burden them with multiple waves of change simultaneously. Alongside these team-based improvements, we also worked across teams to improve interface points between technology and customer support and contributed to refreshing the career framework to support managers in giving more effective developmental feedback.

Diving deep

We worked closely with teams every step of the way to help them become comfortable with new techniques and work through challenges. One notable example was the adoption of vertical slicing as a technique to break down work into small pieces of visible user and business value. Once we introduced the concept and illustrated it, teams understood the theory. But they became confident in applying it only after several workshops where we worked together to apply the technique to real backlog items.

Celebrating wins

At every stage, we were clear in crediting teams with having done the hard work of making changes and celebrated their achievements, however small. We built internal advocates and shared positive experiences between teams to create a sense of positive forward momentum.

The voice of leadership was also key, and all-hands events were used to further reinforce the rationale for change and the positive results we were seeing. Metrics were an important part of telling the story, with positive trends in the numbers reinforcing positive sentiment in the teams.

Scaling

During the engagement, four new delivery partner teams were formed. We helped assess candidates for these teams and engaged closely with each new team to ensure they started working in the new ways from day one.

To support parallel scaling of the internal team, we helped develop and establish improved recruitment processes and trained internal staff on effective interview techniques.

Outcome

By the end of month one, early adopters were enthusiastic about the positive effects of the first changes, saying they could understand priorities more clearly and had a better understanding of where to focus efforts to deliver results.

During month two, everyone got on board. As teams gained confidence in the new ways of working, the pace of change could be increased. Teams began raising more substantive issues in retrospectives and becoming active participants in the change process.

Roles that had previously been siloed started to collaborate without prompting, leading to significantly less rework and higher quality results, and team members in all roles celebrated this in retrospectives.

We saw an enormous change in the visible value delivered each sprint, driven by the adoption of vertical slicing along with a halving of cycle time, work in progress, and rework.

The engagement helped MetaCompliance accelerate delivery and double the number of teams with confidence that each of these new teams would deliver value.