Case Study - How portcos improve R&D ROI with data-led technology delivery

The challenge

Hg Capital is one of the largest and most successful Private Equity firms in the world with over $40bn under management. Hg focuses on software and services businesses, and its objective is to maximise organic growth over typical hold periods of five years.

Plandek works closely with Stuart Pearce, the Portfolio CTO at Hg. It is Stuart’s responsibility to help Hg’s portfolio companies improve their tech-enabled value creation – by improving the ROI of technology (R&D) investment.

Stuart is very careful to respect the ‘sovereignty’ of each portfolio company, and his role is only to help facilitate best practices. The responsibility for strategy and execution remains firmly within the companies themselves.

The scope

Plandek is sponsored by the CTO within each portco. It is very easy to set up (integrating seamlessly to the underlying DevOps toolsets) and provides a ‘balanced scorecard’ of metrics to track and drive the effectiveness of the software delivery capability and related ‘Agile DevOps maturity’.

Plandek provides visibility and key technology KPIs for technology leadership, as well as actionable insights (via customisable dashboards) for all the key players within a tech delivery capability itself – from Team Leads to Delivery Managers, Product Managers and Engineering and DevOps professionals.

Pearce, therefore, finds Plandek to be an ideal metrics tool to recommend to portco CTOs so that ‘everyone is happy’.

As Pearce comments: “Plandek is not imposed on portcos, rather it is voluntarily adopted by those CTOs and teams looking to track and drive their tech delivery effectiveness via improved metrics and analytics.”

The outcome

Plandek helps accelerate technology value delivery in key ways:

It opens up ‘the black box’ of technology delivery for C-Suite stakeholders so they receive understandable KPIs that provide a balanced scorecard of delivery effectiveness, thereby greatly improving communication and trust.
It ensures that the delivery capability is aligned around the key strategic priorities of the business and enables the technology team to clearly track and manage the allocation of resources between the development of new road-map features relative to technical debt and unplanned work.
Crucially, it is designed to be ‘loved by teams and relied on by managers’ by providing a set of metrics that is shared and understood from scrum teams upwards so that everyone within tech delivery is focused on accelerating value delivery over time.

Enabling portco technology delivery teams to become more data-led is an essential step in optimising technology value delivery.

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