“Our customers have told us they’re getting the products and services they have always wanted. We’re connecting with them to understand and solve their pain points at a pace previously unheard of in Fletcher Building”
—Wayne Armstrong, GM Digital & Marketing at PlaceMakers
Industry:
Construction, Manufacturing, Recycling
Quick Facts:
- Approximately 150 people trained and practicing SAFe
- 2 ARTS, 5 Value Streams
- Fletcher Building followed the full implementation roadmap to ensure all their people (including multiple partners across multiple geographies) were trained and aligned before launching each of the trains.
- They also focussed on gaining buy-in from executives of the business units as well as IT leadership through a Leading SAFe course. This helped them understand the theory and enabled buy-in to the radical change in approach.
- Including the Business Change team in the ART created the organization’s first cross-functional business team with marketing, operations, digital team, and digital support.
Outcomes & Lessons Learned:
- Improved reliability (~ 94% predictability) and frequency of releases as well as accelerated development into market enabled better comms and created a competitive advantage
- Creating a cross-functional alignment helped to drive digital adoption.
- Following human-centred design and focusing on solving customer pain points was integral to achieving the organization’s goals.
- They shifted conversations from time/cost/budget to customer experience and prioritisation (fixed capacity) and benefit realisation.
- They did discovery in parallel to development, which enabled a relentless improvement of products.
- The transformation resulted in a more than 90% customer satisfaction in products. Customers are more highly engaged than ever before.
- Ecommerce revenues jumped from $0 in 2019 to $300+ million in 2022
- Over time, the teams created strong bonds, took ownership of the objectives, and created their own innovation features, which accelerated development and ensured that Fletcher Building achieved its initial $100m sales target a year ahead of schedule.
Overview
SAFe helped Fletcher Building transform their large, complex portfolio organisation by completely changing how they implement technology solutions. They moved from siloed teams and waterfall technology practices to customer-led cross functional teams aligned around delivering prioritised business outcomes.
The company faced initial challenges, such as getting buy-in from a decentralized IT department and overcoming the organizational mindset that “going fast” was a problem for IT to solve. Additionally, there was a six to seven hour time difference between Fletcher Building and their software development vendors, which made it more challenging for people to align and communicate.
“There is always resistance to change,” explains Wayne Armstrong, GM Digital & Marketing at PlaceMakers, the retail trading arm of Fletcher Building. “Initially there was a belief within parts of the organization that this is a nice theory but would never work in our highly complex, fragmented organization with a huge number of disparate systems and vendors.”
To overcome this, Fletcher Building worked with a dedicated partner, Pretty Agile, and focused on ensuring the culture of the teams was strong with a very engaged leadership who actively addressed some of the risks quickly. Pretty Agile was able to challenge the organization’s thinking and help set them up for success leading up to launch.
In the end, SAFe helped Fletcher Building to halve the time and cost to implement technology, exponentially increase digital revenue, and make a step change in staff engagement and customer satisfaction.
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