Floodlight. Discovery done right

The toughest challenge faced by tech leaders is to ensure their digital delivery efforts are aligned with business objectives. This is at the heart of what we call ‘The Pursuit of Relevance’.

What makes the challenge especially complex is the rapid change in tech and the volatility of market dynamics. We have great empathy with everyone at the delivery frontline because they know they can’t stand still on shifting sands. Their business otherwise risks sinking to irrelevancy.

Knowledge is power

To meet the alignment challenge, leaders need to understand how well their digital delivery system works for the business, where it needs to be and how to get there. The critical starting point is finding the truth about now, because that’s the foundation for everything else.

To find it, tech leaders will typically use some form of situational analysis or ‘discovery’. This should be a methodical, in-depth process that shines a light on the current state and identifies areas where the complex dynamics of digital delivery can be optimised for the benefit of the business and its customers.

As always, the insights gained from processes like this are only as good as the discovery itself. Did it go deep enough? Did it go wide enough? Was it data-driven and customer-oriented? Was it really strategically-focused? And whatever the insights gained, can they be compared to previous analyses? After all, you do have measures… don’t you?

Unintended consequences

In our experience, the discovery processes we’ve seen out in the wild are often too narrow in scope. As such, their conclusions fall short of giving system-level truth, which then makes it almost impossible to be confident about alignment (or not) with business objectives.

Crucially, if discoveries are only focused on a few areas of delivery, the conclusions might promote actions that are sub-optimal to the system as whole, creating unintended consequences that cause further misalignment down the road. So what does a good discovery process look like?

Designing a discovery framework

Several years ago, and with the system very much in mind, HYPR developed a unique discovery framework to help both business and tech leaders find the truth about their current situation. It’s called ‘Floodlight’.

Floodlight delivers reliable, context-sensitive and comprehensive measures across every component that influences digital delivery – all considered through a strategic lens that connects delivery to business objectives and vision.

Proving it on the road, gathering data

At the heart of Floodlight is an Improvement Model (IM) that’s now been put to work in over 200 clients of all sizes and across many sectors. We’ve continually evolved Floodlight to meet new thinking in digital delivery.

By shining Floodlight across so many businesses, we’ve created a large, real-life dataset that allows us to compare an organisation’s situation and delivery performance against established benchmarks. Floodlight is now so highly regarded that we’re often engaged to do due diligence work for company boards.

Eight areas wide. 286 criteria deep

Floodlight is based on how value flows through techno-human ecosystems, which are broad and highly complex. To make sure discovery finds the system-level truth, Floodlight shines on eight areas critical to digital delivery and deep dives across almost 300 criteria. Those areas include:

1. Team (48 criteria)

2. Development process (21 criteria)

3. Product definition and design (30 criteria)

4. Technical practices (24 criteria)

5. Quality (36 criteria)

6. Architecture (64 criteria)

7. DevOps and Continuous Delivery (37 criteria)

8. Learning and culture (18 criteria)

When you really know, you can really change

Floodlight is highly revealing for our clients. Armed with insights, they have the truth about what’s working now, the inefficiencies and blockages that are holding them back, the opportunities for growth and the priorities for improvement and more.

It also provides a benchmark for seeing year-on-year improvement, because the alignment challenge never stops. This is why we designed Floodlight – and priced it – to be the kind of discovery businesses can do every year. $25k to discover the truth? Measured against these outcomes, it’s a tiny investment for significant reward…

The impact can be transformational

Our current engagement with a leading Australian payments provider started with Floodlight. It identified challenges that included issues in workflow, high defect rates, outdated practices and poor team dynamics. Their system couldn’t deliver the speed-to-market required by the business.

We used the results of Floodlight to design a reference delivery ecosystem to prove what good digital delivery could look like. Once proven, we embedded and scaled it across other value streams. The client has achieved the following improvements to date:

• 30% Improvement in Flow Efficiency: By optimising workflows and removing bottlenecks, we enabled a smoother, more efficient flow of work, drastically reducing idle times and improving productivity
• 80% Reduction in Defects: Implementing better quality control measures and adopting a more rigorous approach to testing and validation led to a significant decrease in defects, enhancing product quality
• 50% Reduction in Time to Market: Streamlining processes and enhancing team alignment allowed for faster development cycles, enabling the organisation to bring products to market in half the time
• Boost in Customer Satisfaction and Operational Costs: These improvements had a cascading effect, not only elevating customer satisfaction scores but also leading to substantial reductions in operational costs, thus driving overall business growth

You can read more about how we helped our client in this client story. We believe it shows the transformative potential of great discovery to provide informed decision-making and catalyse significant improvements in digital delivery and organisational performance.

We’ve created a Floodlight Quick Look guide and a longer eGuide that helps you explore how the service can help shape the right digital delivery strategy and change for you.