Diageo: 2022

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Diageo is a global producer and distributor of over 200 brands of alcoholic beverages in nearly 180 countries. 

Challenges

Analytics reporting across finance, accounting, marketing, HR and logistics was very adhoc in tooling and rife with data inconsistencies. The vision for Project Heartbeat was to create a new integrated, fit for purpose decision making analytics capability in Power BI that delivered sustainable profitable growth, enabled by data from one source of the truth. However, the project was over a year late and nothing had been delivered as yet.

Task

Initially engaged as the Product Manager pod/team leader of Diageo employees and external Accenture consultants to fast track the delivery of new components which rolled up into various Power BI analytics reports. Because our approach was a success, was then engaged to cover for the absent Senior Product Manager to coach and oversee the product vision and delivery across all five pods.

Actions

• Agile coached product hierarchy, backlog grooming, test frameworks and change management across five teams
• Decomposed SAFe PI Planning goals by totally revising the delivery approach to focus on the specific analytics reports which provided the most value to internal stakeholders as a whole (e.g. P&L) rather than the volume of components used in the reports. 
• This then drove the roadmap for component delivery whilst managing dependencies across multiple sprints and multiple teams
• Introduced shared design and functional code assets to standardise user experience and speed up build delivery
• Introduced stakeholder led design sessions as the interface between external Accenture delivery teams and internal stakeholder management
• Mentored Diageo employee from a BA into a PO role

Results

• Early on, it was clear that internal stakeholders did not understand or appreciate the delivery of a shopping list of multiple intangible smaller components across multiple reports. It slowed down the transition from using adhoc tools like Excel pivot tables over to Power BI as reports couldn’t be created without the core components. This ultimately also increased disillusion with the project. The new approach of focussing on the product hierarchy of tangible value of reports first (e.g. P&L) and then prioritising the relevant components within them secondly which were also contained within other reports meant that we could deliver value faster and more efficiently. 
• Stakeholder led design sessions focussed on value increased confidence in what was being built would meet the needs of the teams who needed to use the reports. This was further enhanced by using key stakeholders as partners and champions of the approach and to their wider peer community. 
• Totally switching over to Power BI was impossible within the original six month deadline given that a year was already essentially wasted. However, after eventually becoming able to deliver consistently, it meant that report end-user training commenced 
• Then handed over the project to a permanent member of staff who was mentored during the process.