Enabling agile teams to improve service predictability and expansion

The Full Story 

The Challenge 

Ventech’s goal was to improve transparency, collaboration, and flexibility across their IT services ecosystem. By implementing Agile in their service-driven company, Ventech would become a frontrunner in its industry with a truly next generation IT service desk.

But there were hurdles to achieve this vision. Team organization and prioritization difficulties meant that Ventech was constantly putting out fires instead of proactively tackling high-value issues. These challenges were a direct result of a culture focused on delivering quickly rather than delivering value effectively. More importantly, the team needed an overarching roadmap to create alignment among the teams, drive operational agility, and better service experience for their customers. 

An Undeniably Different Approach 

West Monroe brought together technology, product development, and operations expertise in a multidisciplinary team to help instill an agile culture and mindset in Ventech’s IT service center organization. This diverse expertise enabled Ventech to adopt the SAFe methodology— which enables an organization to implement agile practices at an enterprise level—and best practices for organizational design, change management, and portfolio management. 

The SAFe methodology isn’t typical in IT service operations focused teams. Ventech’s unique environment required us to tailor the SAFe methodology to support service products like training, knowledge base management, and operational support. We helped Ventech build product teams to support the services they provide to their end customers, including:

• Operational support (workforce/desktop support) product team 
• Learning and development (training, e-learning) product team 
• Communication and innovation product team 
• Survey response team 
• Service operations support team  

West Monroe went beyond providing a strategy and a roadmap, partnering with Ventech to stand up agile delivery capabilities and build skillsets to internally manage it. Our continuous improvement approach allowed us to analyze and improve their unique agile implementation throughout the engagement. 

Real Results  

Ventech evolved from a help desk to a service center. From 2017 to 2020, Ventech made great strides to evolve from a tactical help desk and mature its capabilities. We helped Ventech not only evolve its capabilities into the next generation but also developed a system to continually improve their capabilities—creating a truly customer- and solutions-focused IT service center.  

Ventech now has a SAFe-enabled service delivery model. Its portfolio roadmap allows its IT service center team to plan and structure projects in eight-week program increments—removing the chaotic working environment and replacing it with a proactive and predictable approach. 

Teams can better estimate effort and correctly prioritize work, allowing them to deliver high-value solutions in a focused and sustainable cadence. Since Ventech and its clients are spending less time putting out fires, they have more time to work on future enhancements for their products and services.