With any new role, you’re never sure what to expect. And in joining Revance, and meeting the OPUL team, they were not in terrible shape.

But it was easy to find a few gaps and a few process changes that would have a good impact at all levels.

The first, was create a clear way to communicate and prioritize work and we did that by creating a 2-week schedule of meetings that everyone would know and have access to.

This included, regular stand-ups, retrospectives, scrum of scrums and a Global Prioritization meeting to help everyone stay focused on the projects that mattered to the company; aligning with KPIs and company goals.

person holding cup with body of water background
a scrabbled wooden block spelling the word prize

Stakeholders were clearly identified and teams were provided with a process to provide input and feedback.

That input and feedback would be recorded and reporting using Aha!

The system would then formulate a score that would clearly rank the projects and requests to allow for clear alignment with the goals and prioritize the projects accordingly.

During our Global Prioritization meeting, stakeholders and teams could discuss the priorities, ensuring that all views were taken into account before resources or decisions were taken to work on projects.

During our Scrum of Scrums, we would then continue to evaluate the priorities and make sure that were focused on the key projects.

Agile; Scrum or Waterfall?

The team had been successful in delivering their projects using waterfall, but needed to improve by providing predictability.

The first step was to find a structure for the teams that would work.

We started by introducing Squads that could work independently of each other.

Those Squads were not all work in scrum format, but picked the best fit for each pod so that they could be as fluid as needed.

The teams used Jira, with a process defined to ensure easy tracking and status check ins, linking our Jira, Confluence, Jira Product Discovery and Goals so that they could be monitored at any time and provided clear updates.

yellow sticky notes on brown wooden table
four handheld tools on board

Tools

Tools are essential to help manage process and reporting.  But choosing the correct tools is key.

For Revance, we leaned into the Atlassian product suite.  Using Jira, Confluence, Trello, Atlas and the latest, Jira Product Discovery, we were able to keep the suite integrated with all the regular updates.

Our reports used Jira to pull together the status, the timelines and the goals and easily could be used in Executive Reporting.  The live updates made it simple and accurate when showing the status of projects, any delays or impacts to cross-dependencies and kept people informed.