BEIS commissions Triad to support decommissioning of the Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme

We identified a highly experienced delivery manager, Paul Douglas, to support the project. His role was a blend of delivery manager, agile coach and scrum master – technical, educational and organisational leadership, in other words.

Some team members required training on agile ways of working; other subject matter experts were familiar with a variety of different working styles. The priority for Paul was to improve the agile working structure and develop clear dependencies between the multiple decommissioning workstreams. At a cross-team level, he introduced a scrum of scrums, interlinking team structures for closer individual collaboration, with clear escalation paths. Within the team, the introduction of a “three amigos” approach drove rapid consensus between different delivery disciplines, increasing quality and reducing time to deliver. He also reinforced the application of Jira to realise its full potential for tracking and monitoring tasks, and for unifying communications between team members.

An agile environment was essential for fluent task management and processes, but this was new to some team members. Others were new to the role; this included a junior product manager and an intern, both of whom needed extra assistance adopting an agile methodology. Paul therefore gave team presentations and set up individual Agile coaching sessions, together with specific training, upskilling and mentoring as required.

He also made sure that for task-based meetings only those who needed to be involved were present. However, to build team cohesion he set up informal weekly sessions for all.

Paul designed a roadmap covering the entire decommissioning process, to ensure project completion on time. He introduced process management across the multiple workstreams, and generally supervised day-to-day activities, creating risk logs to identify, evaluate and reduce risk at all stages.

The process included regularly engaging with multiple stakeholders, which involved weekly or even daily checkpoint calls. In addition, Paul led the assurance and approvals for each phase of the project. All deliverables were approved first time with no conditions applied.

Paul’s other main task was supervising the actual work and the associated technology involved, which ranged from Power BI to Java. At times, the technology stack became more complex than expected, but through research and analysis, as well as training, the team was able to proceed smoothly.

Before older systems were decommissioned and legacy systems introduced, Paul worked with the team to develop a service transition plan to ensure smooth handover to the business-as-usual teams. He organised workshops and developed training videos as future reference documentation for new and current teams.