The challenge

Hg Capital is one of the largest and most successful PE 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.

“We are here to help our portfolio companies accelerate their value delivery.  The effectiveness of their technology delivery is a key piece of that jigsaw. Plandek enables our portcos to track and drive their R&D ROI, as part of their broader value creation approach.” – Stuart Pearce, Portfolio CTO Hg Capital

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 outcome

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

Plandek helps accelerate technology value delivery in key ways:

1. 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
2. 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 resource between the development of new roadmap features, relative to technical debt and unplanned work.
3. And 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.

Plandek delivers demonstrable improvement in the metrics that drive value delivery such as:

1. Deployment Frequency of new features – up to 400% increase
2. Time to Value (the time taken to deliver an increment of software) – up to 55% reduction
3. Sprint Accuracy – the key determinant of delivering new features in a predictable way – up to 80% improvement
4. Escaped Defects to ensure that software quality actually improves whilst velocity is increased – up to 54% reduction in escaped defects.