The client is a publicly traded global customer experience and BPO company with over 50,000 employees across dozens of markets. The engagement was sponsored by the CTO and VP of Transformation PMO — an 18-year company veteran with direct accountability for technology and delivery outcomes.
The problem wasn't a single broken thing. Work arrived with no intake process, no prioritization framework, and no standard delivery model. Engineering time was untracked. Tools were fragmented. The portfolio had 60+ competing ideas with no mechanism to sequence or eliminate them. Each layer fixed revealed the next one underneath — the engagement ultimately spanned six parallel workstreams.
Work arrived via email, chat, and executive side requests. No standard mechanism to capture, score, or prioritize before resources were committed.
Engineering time not tracked against OpEx or CapEx. Leadership had no visibility into what initiatives were consuming resources or whether spend was generating returns.
Asana and Jira operated in silos with no integration. Planisware running at $172K/year with low adoption. Portfolio visibility was zero.
An accumulated backlog of competing initiatives with no forcing function to eliminate, score, or sequence them. Every idea consumed attention whether it deserved to or not.
No standard methodology. Different teams ran different processes with different vocabularies and no shared model for how work moved from idea to execution.
Engineering structured around functions rather than flow — creating coordination overhead, unclear ownership, and the delivery friction Agile is designed to eliminate.
"The job wasn't to fix one thing. It was to build the operating infrastructure that made everything else fixable — intake, prioritization, tooling, spend visibility, delivery cadence, and team design. Each layer revealed the next one."
| Outcome | What It Means | Value |
|---|---|---|
|
$172K licensing eliminated
Planisware decommissioned
|
Confirmed annual cost of a low-adoption tool replaced entirely by the consolidated Asana + Jira stack. | $172K/yr saved |
|
OpEx leakage made visible
First-ever initiative-level spend tracking
|
Engineering spend that had been flowing without classification is now tracked, attributable, and recoverable. Baseline for all future ROI reporting. | Leakage recoverable |
|
60+ initiatives → ~20
WSJF scoring · payback gate
|
~40 initiatives scored, deprioritized, and removed from active consideration — freeing delivery capacity, leadership attention, and engineering resources for the work that actually moves the business. | Portfolio focused |
|
Delivery model installed
Agile Playbook · full org
|
A $2.2B global operation now has a shared delivery language, a documented operating model, and a governance reference that onboards every new team member the same way. | Operating model live |
|
Engineering restructured
No headcount impact
|
Reporting lines redesigned for product-aligned ownership. Handoff delays removed, decision rights clarified — velocity improvement without additional cost. | Friction removed |
|
AI capability deployed
Enterprise rollout · ahead of market
|
Enterprise AI tooling approved and deployed across delivery and operations — positioning the organization to capture productivity gains before the broader market has moved. | AI unlocked |
| Confirmed annual savings | $172K/yr + ongoing |
The $172K is what fits on a receipt. The harder-to-quantify value is what a 50,000-person global operation gains when it goes from no portfolio governance to a scored, sequenced, defensible system — when OpEx that was invisible becomes trackable — when an engineering org restructures without adding headcount and ships faster. That's the kind of value that compounds. It doesn't show up in a single line item.
This engagement was sold, executed, and handed off inside a complex, politically layered enterprise where every change had to be socialized before it could stick. That's a different skill set than building something from scratch. Both matter. This one is harder.