Agile Education Case Study

Case Study   

Summary: Transforming Logistics: From Silos to Speed

Unbox Robotics Private Limited, a company specializing in order sorting and product consolidation for logistics, e-commerce, and warehouse companies, undertook an Agile transformation to improve efficiency and market responsiveness. At the time, the organization was over three years old with a workforce of 150-200 employees. At first, teams were not coordinated which was impacting speed to delivery, overall processes were inefficient due to heavy bureaucracy, and the organization was up against a key trade show deadline. Altogether, Pasha and his team were given six months and a limited budget to turn things around.

Approach and Methodology

To start, Pasha’s team began with an on-site exploratory exercise. In sum, this revealed four key focus areas: vision, alignment & prioritization; cross-team coordination; impediment removal; and operations & maintenance. With these goals in mind, the team created a transformation backlog using the Tuckman Model. This backlog guided the organization’s Agile transformation through stages of maturity.

Next, the team adopted a complex adaptive systems perspective, viewing teams as self-organizing agents within a broader system. This approach emphasized:

• Breaking down functional silos into cross-functional teams focused on value production.
• Realigning people and processes around purpose.
• Empowering teams with Scrum practices at the team level.

Implementation Steps

1. Initially, functional silos were dismantled, and cross-functional teams were created where applicable. Listening closely to what this organization needed, Pasha and his team also kept specialized teams in place where appropriate.
2. Next, teams were structured to adopt consistent Scrum practices. This led to the formation of a Scrum of Scrums as a reference model, enabling scaling across other units.
3. Further, they instituted a Scaled Daily Scrum with its own backlog to enhance cross-team coordination. This made impediments and dependencies visible to all Scrum Masters for rapid resolution on a daily basis.
4. Recognizing the need for both specialized and cross-functional teams in a compliance-heavy industry, Pasha and his team struck a balance between maintaining compliance and fostering team autonomy.
5. Next, the team created a User Story Map at scale as a radical alignment exercise, producing a product that served as the shared enterprise backlog.
6. Last, Pasha and his team created opportunities for leaders at different levels to work on shared goals by creating Leadership Action Teams (LAT) and Executive Action Teams (EAT).

Overcoming Challenges

While they achieved tremendous results overall, as with any trasnformation, this one had its challenges:

• Paralysis by Analysis: To combat this, the team fostered a culture of experimentation.
• Tooling Strategy: Above all, allowing workers to choose what tools they utilized put that decision into the hands of those who knew the work best.
• Individual Learning & Development: In order to foster growth throughout the organization, individual learning and development roadmaps were developed early in the transformation.

Results

• Altogether, Pasha and his team achieved a 25% reduction in engineering investment.
• As a result of 60% time savings for management, leaders were empowered to focus on future state initiatives.
• Though it started later in the game than its competitors, the company quickly established itself as a market leader, achieving significantly increased speed-to-market.
• Overall, the company experienced massive revenue growth, achieving 5x revenue within 12 months of the transformation.

Key Takeaways

• Allowing the company to find its own emergent order created a self-organizing, Agile organization.
• Scrum at Scale addresses the system at a structural level, leading to cultural changes that unlock business agility and fast value delivery.

About Mudassar Pasha Maniyar

Mudassar Pasha Maniyar, Registered Scrum@Scale Trainer™ and Registered Scrum@Scale Practitioner™, has over 16 years of industry experience and is Director & CEO of Serpro Consulting. As an Agile Coach and Consultant, he specializes in transforming businesses into self-organizing, agile, adaptive systems. Mudassar has deep expertise in Agile Coaching, Agile Modeling, and Agile Methodologies, serving clients across various industries including FinTech, Industrial Robotics, Media, Life Sciences, Government Services, Embedded Systems, Telematics, Logistics, Agriculture, and Pharma.