The challenge

TalkTalk is one of the UK’s largest providers of consumer and business broadband with over 4.2 million customers.

It relies on a large software delivery team of several hundred distributed software engineers to deliver a wide range of projects which are strategically critical for the business.

Plandek was adopted with the joint sponsorship of the CTO, and CEO to track and drive the effectiveness of the delivery team – and to help the CEO and C-Suite stakeholders better understand the effectiveness of the technology team on which they rely so heavily.

Tristia Harrison, CEO TalkTalk Group – “The TalkTalk Board is highly data-driven. We require KPI’s from all areas of the business to manage effectively. Technology delivery was an area that lacked a ‘balanced scorecard’ of metrics to share with the C-suite.

Plandek provides those metrics whilst also enabling the delivery team (from squad level upwards) to optimise around the metrics that I care about. As such it is tremendously powerful.”

The outcome

“Plandek enables me to track and drive delivery effectiveness – putting intelligent insight in the hands of my teams and enabling me to communicate success better with my stakeholders.” Phil Haslam, CTO TalkTalk Group

Plandek is helping TalkTalk accelerate value creation and build trust between delivery team and internal stakeholders.

1. It opens up ‘the black box’ of technology delivery for C-Suite stakeholders so, they receive understandable KPI’s 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 (value creating) priorities of the business.
3. It enables the technology team to clearly track and manage the allocation of resource between ‘the things that really matter’ like R&D (development of new road-map features), relative to less productive effort such as technical debt and unplanned work.
4. 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 driving improvement 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.