Scaling new ways of working at Enterprise Level: Implementing a Single View of Work for greater transparency and efficiency

The situation

A large telecommunication company had embarked on an enterprise-wide initiative to enhance delivery capabilities and create a Single View of Work across teams. They aimed to launch an Agile Release Train (ART) with 11 teams while embedding new ways of working. To enable this transformation, the Atlassian Jira platform and Marketplace App ecosystem were selected as the tooling needed for collaboration and reporting. To ensure successful implementation, the Telco sought experienced practitioner coaches to drive consistency and alignment across the organisation.

The challenge

The organisation was facing several challenges, including:

• A compressed timeline to initiate the Agile Release Train and new ways of working
• The need for persistent teams while transitioning to remote work
• Ineffective tooling, with teams relying on a single spreadsheet to manage requirements, tasks, dependencies, and risks, lacking clear reporting capabilities
• An urgent need to hire Scrum Masters and Business Analysts to support newly formed teams.

The process

Cprime Elabor8 led the Agile Release Train setup, ensuring the foundational elements of a program of work were established. This included:

Design, training and facilitation

To ensure alignment from day one, we:

• Delivered formal training for key roles and an awareness program for all 11 teams ahead of the first Program Increment (PI) Planning event
• Designed and facilitated a structured cadence of delivery events, including PI Planning, to establish alignment and transition readiness
• Conducted bespoke workshops for the Senior Leadership Team to ensure full buy-in and understanding of the new processes
• Developed and delivered Jira & Jira Align training, equipping Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Product Managers, and Release Train Engineers with the skills needed to maximise tooling effectiveness

Capability uplift and coaching

Building strong teams was a key priority. We:

• Equipped Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Product Managers, and Release Train Engineers with the skills needed to maximise tooling effectiveness
• Provided ongoing coaching to enhance collaboration and accountability, fostering a culture of continuous improvement
• Conducted structured team launches and product inceptions, ensuring teams were well-structured and aligned with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) principles

Tooling and Single View of Work

To support visibility and efficiency, we:

• Implemented the Atlassian suite, including Jira, Advanced Roadmaps, and Jira Align, creating a robust, scalable tooling foundation
• Configured the tools to support the SAFe operating model, ensuring seamless integration and reporting capabilities across teams
• Established a Single View of Work, enabling transparency and real-time tracking of progress, dependencies, and risks
• Introduced Miro as the preferred digital whiteboard, seamlessly integrated with Jira to support remote SAFe, PI Planning events and collaboration

Planning and prioritisation

To drive efficiency and focus, we:

• Led the implementation of a new planning and prioritisation process, introducing regular quarterly planning cycles to enhance transparency and manage work in progress (WIP)
• Developed a structured work hierarchy within Jira, enabling standardised reporting and dashboard visibility.
• Facilitated the logistics and execution of PI planning events, engaging nearly 200 participants to align on strategic priorities.

The solution

To address these challenges and ensure long-term success, we:

• Established a Single View of Work, achieved through an extensive Jira, Jira Align, Marketplace App and Miro configuration
• Aligned the unit to operate in the same cadence and established a standardised work hierarchy within the tooling structure. This consisted of 4 layers within Jira from the team to the top of Portfolio and created a clear standard yet flexible way to break down work into small chunks to execute on
• Standardised reporting and dashboards, allowing team members and leadership to drill up and down through the work hierarchy, enabling transparency and data-driven decision-making. This enabled transparency and visibility through roadmaps, dashboards, visual boards, reports, dependency maps, and risk registers to create effective events
• Aligned the organisation to the same cadence via the alignment of start and end dates for sprints and increments. This alone created greater alignment of plans via common dates and timeframes to work with and easier dependency management due to working towards the same planning dates/timeframes (both sprint and PI/Big room Planning)
• Slicing work into similar-sized units (User Stories, Features, Epics), fostering alignment, enabling realistic estimations, and simplifying roadmap communication
• Integration of Jira Advanced Roadmaps and Confluence, ensuring seamless data flow and easy roadmap visualisation

The Results

The implementation led to significant improvements in transparency and alignment with portfolio goals. The organisation experienced:

• Increased predictability and consistency in delivery for teams, enabling more realistic plans to be built and achieved than ever before
• Enhanced visibility of work progress, risks, and dependencies within a single tool, creating efficiencies and eliminating the need for manual data gathering and reporting
• A standardised way of working within a Teams of Teams structure, fostering alignment and autonomy without the burden of manually synchronising plans and progress reporting per project
• Improved prioritisation and decision-making, enabled by consistently sized and structured work items

 

Just eight weeks into the implementation, a team member remarked, “I’ve been here 10 years and never seen this level of transparency and visibility in this area.” Senior leaders noted that the transparency of work was something they never thought was possible, reinforcing the impact of the transformation.

Final thoughts

Cprime Elabor8’s expertise in both leveraging the Atlassian suite of tools and pragmatic ways of working design and facilitation created a successful Single View of Work and ways of working implementation. The engagement not only improved delivery capabilities but also created efficiencies by fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration across the organisation. Moreover, it established a foundation for scaling Agile practices further, enabling the rollout of additional Agile Release Trains (ARTs) in the future.

Discover how we can help your organisation achieve similar results. Learn more about our Single View of Work Solution.

Single View of Work Toolchain Transformation Ways of Working