Digital Transformation
Equal Experts
Full Credential Description
Challenge Starting small In spring 2018, a small, hand-picked team started a period of 6 weeks discovery. Their brief was simple. How could John Lewis & Partners migrate search away from the old system and enable legacy decommissioning, using lean, agile practices. For a traditional retailer, this approach was new, empowering, and exciting. The decision was to go live to a small percentage of customers with a very basic version of search, and then iteratively add more features. They knew that as soon as they did go live, they would start to learn about the system’s characteristics and how customers used it. Building a team for success During Discovery the team grew and took shape. This was a combination of permanent staff from JL&P and consultants from we. Communicating with operational stakeholders was an essential component of ensuring success. People from Operations and Middleware were co-opted, and aligned with the team from the outset. Taking time out early to agree on ways of working was time well spent. The team wanted to have just enough process to deliver reliably without overheads. Very importantly, the whole team was responsible for quality. To do this they embraced continuous delivery, employed kanban-style working with a strict standup and ticket discipline. The team was the first to adopt You Build It You Run It at John Lewis & Partners, and first to use the Paved Road on the John Lewis & Partners Digital Platform (JLDP) . Peak 2018 at 1% When there a...