Kent Business Solutions

Want to Kick Your Product/Service Delivery Timelines Into High Gear?

3/19/2021

By: Kathy Kent Toney, President of Kent Business Solutions

Photo by Paul Chambers on Unsplash

I was talking with my amazing sales coach today, Breandan Filbert, and she brought up a topic we’ve hashed over many times. She pretty much said this…

“Kathy, you do a great job of promoting other people. Now you need to really start promoting yourself more!”

Okay, I get the point. I do love to help other people out…it’s just my nature. I’m all about providing value to everyone I meet.

I must admit...I'm enough of an introvert that it hasn’t always been that easy to promote myself. So, I’m taking her challenge head-on by discussing the success I had on a project with one of my amazing clients.

Prior to my engagement with this particular manufacturer, they had a very cumbersome, rigid product development process. There was no wiggle room for jumping ahead in the process, when necessary, to accomplish tasks. It was like they were stuck in the mud.

One of the biggest issues was the approval packet that would get buried on people’s desk, waiting for sign-offs. This is just one of the reasons why it took them two-to-three years to develop their last new product! Considering there’s no smart technology in their product line, this took them waaay too long!

The CEO knew there was a better way. That’s why he hired me.

As a certified Professional Scrum Master, this was right up my alley.

Not sure what Scrum is? A short definition is this: it's a project management framework for developing products, primarily software. But since this proposed project involved a physical product, there was that added challenge to address. So I dove right in!

The first step I took was to delve into their previous development issues. I carried those lessons learned over into the new process to prevent them from happening again. Next, I trained them on Scrum and we developed the new process together.

In just two months, I got them up-to-speed with their Scrum process and left the project in their very capable hands.

And the results were great! Eight months later, they launched not only their originally planned product, but five other component systems as well that fit across their whole product line. If you take the additional products they developed into account, they experienced a product speed-to-market increase of over 100%!

They are so thrilled with Scrum, they're well on their way to using Scrum across their whole business, including service functions like Marketing. They’ve experienced great results in these areas as well.

So, if you want to prevent your project from getting stuck in in the mud and want to kick it into high gear, Scrum could be your answer!

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Now that I’ve shamelessly plugged myself 😂, I’d like to switch back to promoting someone else!

My strategic partner, Michael Cantu’, has developed this amazing app called Ratify AI, which is meeting an important need in the market…how to holistically manage COVID vaccine protocols in the workplace.

It’s been created in consultation with medical experts and lawyers who are are in-the-know on this topic. It does away with manual daily health checks and tracking with spreadsheets, to name just a few benefits.

If you’d like to learn more about that, click the button below to download our FREE COVID Management Checklist. It will help you gauge the fitness of your current protocols and point out areas where you can improve.

I’d love for you to check it out!