I’m Sarah Boyd, Senior Product Manager for Emerald’s Platform. I've been at Emerald for a number of years in various roles and parts of the business, most recently on the delivery of emerald’s newly launched insight platform.
Creating Real ImpactFor over 50 years, Emerald Publishing has been championing new ideas with the potential to make a positive change to the real world.
Today, we continue to nurture fresh thinking in applied fields with a mission to demonstrate the impact of ambitious, interdisciplinary research that tackles society’s challenges. We are dedicated to supporting our authors and their work by offering a personal and supportive approach.
Through global growth and acquisitions, we have built a group of businesses represented in over 20 countries that helps connect and inform the worlds of research, education and learning.
Emerald now publishes over 320 journals, more than 3,000 books and over 1,500 case studies, via our dedicated research platform emeraldinsight.com.
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Emerald is a mid sized publisher with big ambitions in Bingley, just north of Bradford. It is a proud family business with roots in Yorkshire and strong links to the local community, not least the Emerald Headingley stadium. Emerald has been a leader in business and management scholarly publishing since 1967, consistently focused on applied research that has a real impact in the community – such as improving educational outcomes for summer-born children or promoting wellbeing in the workplace.
Phase 1:Our Agile Journey
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Last year, emerald’s technology director, Alice Fleet, presented a session on Emerald’s agile journey and early progress in the steps towards a model of SAFe for portfolio management. Today, I’ll provide an update on progress form the last 12 months, plus a summary overview of the development journey and delivery of the new emerald platform.
Drivers• Geographic distribution• Need for product
innovation • Requirement to accelerate
and scale• Transparency on progress
and improvement
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A quick recap on the some of the key points from Alice’s presentation last year Transformation from May 2016 Drivers: Increasingly geographically distributed teams Need for innovation – new product propositions / Open Recognition of the importance of cross-functional teamwork and of transparency around progress
Runway of architectural enablers
Boosting discovery and delivery through Product Management and Product Ownership
Automated orchestration and configuration management
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At the point of update from Alice around 12 months ago, we were responding to the continued frustrations of: Lack of prioritisation = absence of focus in large jack of all trades team Absence of focus = task switching + inadequate skills development + obscurity over progress + slow delivery Slow delivery = management frustration + developer demoralisation Through the introduction of foundations for scaling within programmes, we looked to: Separation of product management and ownership so there’s always a defined flow of prioritised features for story creation Setting up the Why, what, how triad of product, architecture and planning so we’ve got clear architectural enablers on a runway alongside product features Working on our devops toolchain so we have the necessary environments and build processes for development and run mode
Necessity of scaling at the business level to deliver the different types of work through the squad model
Challenges• Maintaining buy-in for
managing the flow of work• Effective flex models for legacy
tech / integrations• Culture: Empowerment = good
/ Governance = bad• Securing slack time to learn
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Finally, Alice noted some of the key challenges we were continuing to face into The need to retain balance in the social contract between Emerald and its staff. Why put up with change in an organisational context that ultimately sets you up to fail? How can we ensure that we balance control with empowerment, or we won’t carry the organisation and its staff with us Project freezes cannot last; how can we open the doors without sliding back into the core chronic conflict? What scaling mechanisms can we use for complex and intertwined legacy systems Can we build our architecture and infrastructure capabilities fast enough to keep pace with needs? How can we achieve this with small teams and tight deadlines?
Away we go…
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But, beyond those future challenges outlined in the last slide, the same problems still seemed to be facing us. Delivery was still slow and inefficient. The scrum was too big and despite having split into smaller teams or “squads” within the scrum There was still no real structure to delivery (kind of scrum). Little accountability. The team had never completed a single sprint (not predictable). Not unlocking potential of the team. So, we still had the same issues: Lack of prioritisation = absence of focus in large jack of all trades team Absence of focus = task switching + inadequate skills development + obscurity over progress + slow delivery Slow delivery = management frustration + developer demoralisation
Ultimately, we’d lost sight, as a team, of what we were trying to deliver and why. And so, whilst scaling agile still feels to be the step forward in our delivery ambitions, it is still somewhat aspirational
Phase 2: Refocus & Delivery
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It was time to go back to basics and refocus on what the “jobs to be done” were
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So, the “Why” – in late 2017, we started work on the relaunch of our Emerald Insight platform, our premier product for content, data delivery.
We didn’t have…•Control•Speed•Flexibility
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Moving away from licensed third party SaaS systems, Emerald had taken the decision to bring the architecture, product and release roadmap, along with data modelling, in house to drive our speed, control and flexibility in new product and proposition development.
We needed…•Control•Speed•Flexibility
Product Vision
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The “What” An Open Community Platform that connects impactful research with the people who use it, for the benefit of all It needs to an amazing customer digital experience, based on intuitive technology and simple UI because ultimately, the user doesn’t care about the technology used or the process to get there, they just want it to work, and work well.
Drivers
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Our business, industry & world is changing It is data driven, it is experience based, personalised & driven by the consumer Throughout our business, diversification and a deep understanding of the value chain is critical
Agile Development
• Build something according to user needs
• Ship it to the customer• Feedback• Improve
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We went back to basics on our agile and scrum methodology No organization undergoes an agile transformation simply to be “agile”. They do this in order to ship code based products to customers in order to realize value as quickly as possible. It’s all about delivering and achieving outcomes
MVP Scope
Single repositorySearch & BrowseAuthenticationAccessBusiness Intelligence ComplianceDiscovery
Innovation Starts Here!!
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We returned to the core components that we needed in place to deploy as a production ready product – returning to our initial user research and feedback, what were the outcomes for our customers we wanted to deliver through the platform launch: An improved search experience A streamlined authentication process Intuitive navigation Ability for our customers to access the services they are entitled to We balanced the scope with the timeframe for launch and we let things go on the basis that we would, iterate, improve and deploy new features through new code We had a tight timeframe for release and launch, and so tight control on scope was required with a tight focus from the teams on the end goal
Our Charter• We formed cross functional, empowered squads with clear objectives• We returned to agile values and the SCRUM framework.• We deeply aligned our Product Managers with our Product Owners• We focused on delivering value, nothing else.• We leaned down our processes (bug reports etc).• We viewed each sprint as a live deployment• We introduced outcome milestones and prioritized by value• We established a shared vision and goal.
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Body slide
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And we introduced fun in doing this…
Requirements, requirements…
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Much of this build has been about building core skills in house, focussing on product management with the control of our roadmap, data and architecture
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And working with partners and existing solutions to best complement our core skills and vision. In particular, we worked practically hand in hand with our development partners 67 Bricks throughout the initial build and launch, and continue to do so.
LAUNCH DAY!!!
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On 4th July 2019, after 18 months of scoping, refining, development, testing, planning, blood, sweat and tears… I pressed the big red button, and….
emerald.com/insight
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We launched the new version of Emerald Insight, the first step to Emerald’s open community platform.
The Future?
“Platform problems do not go away…they just shift…”
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With control of our platform, comes responsibility of supporting and evolving it – we now have no-ne else to leverage for that So whilst we need to ensure we continue develop the platform, we also need to ensure we’re building the right things to differentiate Emerald in its niche
Prioritisation Framework based on Value
Product Architecture Delivery
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PLUS we still have all the ambition and drive to deliver lots of things that provoked this transition in the first place. Work is in the progress to fully develop and implement emerald’s prioritisation framework going forward, as underpinned by the aligned triad of product, delivery and architecture This effective alignment will be the keystone to our future approach and future success, and perhaps, we can update on that next year…
Key LearningAgile is a good thing
Scaling agile is probably a good thing
Spotify model works at Spotify
Focus on outcomes
Prioritize & Deliver Value
And
If at first you don’t succeed…
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So what have Emerald learnt to this point so far? Agile is a good thing – but remember what the objective of using agile development is The size of organization and its ambitions may require scaling agile, and that can work, but make sure that it is a version that suits the organization, because Spotify model works at Spotify – we are not Spotify and so we need to find our own model Keep in sight that overarching goal – to deliver value, and make sure that is the core factor in prioritization processes and decisions.
Agile Principles
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Ultimately, it’s keeping those core agile principles at the heart of whatever approach you take
