Contributors:
Myself: Director of Experience Design
Ben Bays: Director of Technology
Fez Saige: Sr. Program Manager
Kelly Belknap: Client Partner
Rob Pierry: Chief Technology Officer
And over 150 contributors and stakeholders.
FedEx Office, resulting from FedEx's acquisition of Kinkos in 2004, operated on separate systems inherited from both companies. This led to different systems across different channels and modalities, resulting in a fragmented experience for customers and employees. The project's primary objective was to streamline these systems across various channels, such as retail stores, shipping locations, online platforms for consumers and businesses, and regional print centers.
Furthermore, the FedEx team aimed to transition from traditional annual development cycles driven by business requirements documents to agile incremental release cycles. This shift required adopting the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and incorporating agile design principles to ensure design was seamlessly integrated into these incremental releases rather than treated as an external component.
The initial vision, complemented by conceptual designs from another Projek202 team, had already been established. My involvement began as the FedEx team prepared to enter the implementation phase.
In the past, I had managed agile scrum engagements of up to 4 sprint teams, but this project would be more than twice that scale, and three times the amount of executive eyes on it. It was an exciting but turbulent time in my career, where I would be challenged to scale my past learnings and stretch my leadership skills.
Establish the Program Team
The program team consisted of myself as a Sr. Experience Director, a Sr. Technical Architect, a Sr. Product Owner, a Sr. Project Manager, and a Release Train Engineer.
Design the Release Train
Create areas of subject matter ownership that would be manageable for a typical scrum team. The teams were the Program Leadership, Research & Strategy Team, Design Systems Team, Hardware Team, Digital Print Team 1, Digital Print Team 2, Digital Ship Team, Account Management Team, and Print Center Team. (to the best of my memory from a project that started in 2018)
Identify the Scrum Teams
Identify the best people to drive and deliver for each subject matter area, identify gaps, and fill with full-time or contract hires. The total team would consist of 9 scrum teams, with 150-200 people contributing between delivery, leadership, and subject matter experts.
Train the Project Management Methodologies
Many people on the delivery teams needed to be trained in Agile Scrum, and nearly everyone needed SAFe training. Additionally, I was bringing some proprietary methods to the table for bringing design into the scrum team in ways that typical agile scrum did not include in their typical training materials. We had both a SAFe consultant, myself as an agile design leader, and scrum-certified teachers doing training and consulting at all levels of the team. It would take us several sprints to get the scrum team delivery in order, and a couple of program increments to get the program and portfolio participation working as intended.
Identify and Define Features
As a program leadership team, it was our job to manage the backlog at the feature level, with epics being defined by a portfolio team, and to identify appropriate sprint teams to deliver the work.
Retro, Learn & Pivot
Implementing programs at this scale is a difficult prospect, especially early on. We would need the teams running healthy sprint retros with the ability to filter retro feedback up to the program level and make pivots both horizontally and vertically.
Retail Workstations
Printing and shipping functionality were pulled into the same experience so that all Fedex Office retail functions could be performed from any workstation.
Managing Seasonal Demand
Retail shipping workflows needed optimization for iPad devices to handle managing lines during the holiday season at all shipping locations.
Design System
We created the interaction patterns for the full omni-channel suite of products, then built and maintained a portal for vending design system patterns. For my role, this was mostly about facilitating the connections between this team and the rest of the release train and optimizing patterns for everyday technical implementation.
Online Print
Online print experiences were optimized to be consistent across retail and online consumer experiences. This would provide a strong experience for print customers and reduce maintenance costs for the business.