Developing a digital product is a good thing but it comes with a drawback. Multiple teams working independently can be difficult to coordinate. At the same time, you can discover your organization has technical gaps, perhaps skills that weren’t needed before. Our new service - the advisory board - was designed to answer those issues. Read on to find out how.
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What is an advisory board and how is it different from regular consulting?
An advisory board is a consulting service in which Boldare’s specialists and client representatives form a single team. Its goal? To design and implement a change in the organization. The advisory board helps to create new processes and standards, and maintains consistency between multiple teams.
While regular consulting services assess the situation and propose solutions, an advisory board adds a third step: hands-on implementation. We understand that even the best ideas can fall short when confronted with reality. That is why the advisory board team is designed to react to any changes that can happen during the implementation process and adjust the plan, or even scrap it altogether if needed.
Where did the idea come from?
Our client’s digital product design and development process grew into multiple teams and managing them became a challenge. The problem was that these teams were so focused on what was going on internally that they began to lose their understanding of the product as a whole. The client wanted to change that. We created an advisory board to better coordinate these teams and help them see the big picture of the product that they were building.
What roles are included in an advisory board
An advisory board team is a mix of our specialists and the representatives of our client’s business who help us navigate their organization. On our end, we provide technical expertise, proven standards, processes, and years of experience in managing Scrum teams. Here’s how different specialists contribute to the team:
Solution architect
The solution architect is responsible for technical and technological changes. They work together with development teams and create new technical standards, as well as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Architectural Decision Records (ADR). As a result, the process of adding new development teams becomes smoother.
Agile coach
An Agile coach helps product owners better understand their role. They do that in weekly sessions where they cover:
- introduction to the product
- PO’s daily tasks
- PO’s current challenges
- evaluation on PO’s level of agility
- setting up a plan to improve the performance of each PO
- monitoring the improvement of each PO
They also work with the chief of the advisory board on building standards and a knowledge base for product owners.
Process Guide
A process guide works with Scrum masters, Agile coaches, and the chief of the advisory board. They set standards and provide a knowledge base for the Scrum flow, but also:
- map and connect current tracking tools,
- co-create a release strategy,
- conduct daily standup meetings,
- act as a chief Scrum master.
Benefits of the advisory board
Mentoring product owners improves the quality of work on the product backlog - the process known as backlog refinement. Product owners become better prepared for their meetings, implement healthy habits and consistently improve in their role. They develop skills in:
- prioritizing the product backlog,
- using tools like Jira,
- creating user stories,
- cooperating with solution architects.
How the advisory board affects the product team
The advisory board is made up of specialists in product development, Agile working and leading technologies. Implemented changes will make your product team more transparent, better at communicating, and will improve their product management skills. You will notice the difference in how your teams discuss Agile, technology and business. Over time, they will learn how to sustain these changes themselves - and pass on the knowledge to future teams.
An example of how an advisory board helped our client
Our client was running a successful digital product with multiple independent teams. We started by quietly observing how these teams worked on a daily basis and listed potential problems. Then, we took that list and discussed it with the client during workshops where we came up with a plan for implementing changes. Apart from mentoring product owners and introducing several good practices to the client’s product team, our plan was to:
- improve the quality of product backlogs,
- introduce the team to our good practices of working in Scrum and Agile,
- make the processes and architecture more consistent between the teams,
- make the teams look at the different features as parts of a single product.
Our plan was to introduce these changes over three months. That would require breaking up each of these points into smaller, actionable tasks and implementing them over time. For example, introducing the same processes for every development team required us to:
- map the process of collecting requirements,
- identify the biggest pain points,
- suggest improvements,
- implement agreed improvements together with product owners.
We also worked with product managers on their product roadmaps and helped them better communicate with their stakeholders. That improved the process of collecting stakeholder requirements, which then went to the product backlog as tasks to be completed.
How do we measure our work?
The advisory board uses two primary metrics: lead time and cycle time. Lead time measures how long it takes us from coming up with an idea for a feature to implementing it. Cycle time measures how much time has passed from the beginning of implementation to completion.
We use these two metrics to monitor the optimization of our processes. For example, thanks to the advisory board the cycle time of one of the processes went from four weeks to two!
Who needs an advisory board?
There are two types of businesses that could benefit from an advisory board. The first is just like the client from our example: a company with a successful digital product run by multiple independent teams. The second is a business that has identified skills gaps that need to be closed. In both cases, the advisory board is there to share its expertise in a manner that is in line with the client’s organization.
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