Case Studies
VP Engineering saves 6 months of delays in change management programme due to engineering engagement
"Adelina has a real empathy with people at all levels and roles of the business and has a very rare skill of being able to see different viewpoints and represent them to other parties. She uses her neutral position to foster trust and facilitate discussion to achieve greater common understanding which helps people engage with each other and get alignment."
Client: VP Engineering in 3,000 FTE hardware group in FTSE100 company.
Issue: VP Engineering had to deliver a significant change programme affecting multiple divisions and 300+ people but 12 months into the programme, they could not see any real results despite roll-out via one of the senior teams.
Solution: The Geek Whisperer delivered a programme of active engineer engagement with articles focused on specific challenges between engineers and leadership, webinars and one to one confidential conversations. The Geek Whisperer built trust with engineers 3 levels below and provided early warning of issues in one of their teams. VP was able to make an intervention to turn engagement around and stem losses.
Value to Customer: By customer's own estimation this saved 6 months of delays in change roll-out costing the company and c£15m in staff time and resources. Prevented the loss of 11 key engineers.
How Influencing Engineers to Change Working Patterns Saved $100,000+ dollars and 80 engineer days per release cycle
"Adelina does one-to-one sessions, help people understand the problem from all perspectives, help figure out “what’s in it for me?” for stakeholders. She does this all without spoon feeding which helps with learning by doing. Hence the lessons 'stick'."
Client: Project Manager in a hardware design company with 6,000+ employees.
Issue: The release team identified the release process for a cycle of 2 months, took 1 month, which then overlapped with the next release cycle. This prolonged release process was taking up 100 engineering days. This was costing the company $130,000/release process.
Solution: Project Manager from the release team attended "How to Pitch ideas to engineers" course and learned how to talk to engineers about this problem and applied the Appreciation Algorithm techniques learnt on the course and how to position the proposed changes to engineers and management.
Value to customer: The release team brought the cost of engineering during releases from 100 to 20 engineering days. The engineering cost went down from $130,000 to $26,000. The release process time was halved, from one month to 10 working days, or one sprint.
Breaking the Cycle of Inefficiency: How a Director of Engineering saved £2m by aligning business functions
"Adelina has a genuine curiosity about other people's problems so you ask really powerful questions and get the participants thinking quite deeply about the problems they have. That level of investment in your client's problem helps people open up quickly"
Client: A Director of Engineering in a global software/hardware design company, running a team of 2,000 people.
Issue: The client had identified inefficiencies around testing and the release process that were costing the company £400k each month. Despite having good supporting data, he was struggling to find a way to position the changes he knew were needed to senior peers outside his department who would also need to make adjustments.
Solution: Geek Whisperer worked with the client to dry run potential approaches, evaluating likely responses and challenges. This brought a completely new focus to developing a successful strategy, and addressed the client's anxiety about his peers' likely reactions.
Customer Value: Testing time was decreased by 6x and the release process halved to 2 weeks. The client estimates that his company avoided further wastage of £1-2m.