AIM Consulting | 02/05/2015 | Delivery Leadership | In The Media
Baseline Magazine has published an AIM Consulting article by John Saunders about how agile methodologies were leveraged to revolutionize business operations for a nonprofit. An excerpt of the article is below with a link to the publication and the full article.
Introduction
Most nonprofits are interested in process improvements that will better enable them to accomplish their respective missions. However, major change can be intimidating and complicated to implement, especially if the organization isn’t quite sure what it needs to do differently or lacks the expertise to make it happen across the organization.
As a Senior Program Manager with AIM Consulting, I had the opportunity to assist a nonprofit with a major business transformation using Agile methodologies.
The Situation
The nonprofit is an endowed charitable organization whose mission is to reduce or eliminate the need for foster care through direct services to children at risk of abuse or neglect. To achieve their strategic goals, they wanted to do two things: 1) overhaul their entire practice and 2) implement new technology that would allow social workers to better manage their cases.
The Problem
Before AIM Consulting came into the picture, the nonprofit attempted to achieve these goals by treating each goal as its own project and running them simultaneously under separate project managers. They started the practice redesign by hiring a consulting company to create a new practice model–a narrative document that describes the goals and values of the organization and how they go about achieving their mission.
These early efforts proved frustrating. The people who best knew the organization were involved only sporadically in the process and there were prolonged delays. The practice model was created through a waterfall-like process of conducting interviews, drafting, redrafting, and editing. When the document was finally completed, it didn’t reflect the organization’s view of itself. After weeks and months with no results, leadership knew they needed help.
Realizing that they needed specialized expertise in program and project management, the nonprofit turned to AIM Consulting. I was brought into the organization as an expert with 30 years of experience building and managing programs for companies of all types. The nonprofit hadn’t considered using Agile before I came onboard, but a lot of techniques under the umbrella of Agile were perfectly suited to the problems the organization was struggling to solve.
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