Growing competition, new technologies and rising customer demands are causing communications service providers (CSPs) to rethink how they do business. Becoming an agile organization is imperative to drive innovation, creativity and speed in this new world.

Vidéotron, a leading Canadian integrated communications company, operates in a rapidly growing, highly competitive and complex environment where meeting customer demands is top of mind. To respond to evolving market dynamics, Vidéotron’s mobile user acquisition team was looking to adopt an agile way of working to help improve productivity, collaboration, speed-to-market and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.

The challenge

Following the successful creation and launch of Vidéotron’s mobile phone brand “Fizz” by an agile team, the company’s mobile user acquisition team (in charge of new subscription offers and promotions) wanted to enable similar success by transforming themselves into a more agile organization.

Like many enterprise teams, the mobile user acquisition team struggled with organizational silos and a traditional marketing cycle that included a lengthy chain of validation across multiple interdependent stakeholders and teams (such as IT and finance) as well as third parties like advertising agencies.

It was taking the team too long to build and roll out new offers. When a competitor launched a new competitive data plan, it was the perfect opportunity to test the use of agile methods in the team’s marketing function to accelerate response times. The “cost of delay” could result in losing customers and millions of dollars.

Our solution

Spurred by the success of “Fizz,” CGI worked with the mobile user acquisition team’s marketing department to structure an approach that featured strong sponsorship from senior leadership, self-training, and a cross-functional, co-located team based on the “two-pizza” rule. This rule is founded on the belief that individual teams should not be larger than two pizzas can feed to improve communication and productivity, and adapt faster to change, among other benefits.

CGI agile experts and coaches had already been helping Vidéotron’s IT business intelligence department adopt agile methods. The mobile user acquisition team sought our expert advice to help embed an agile way of working in their marketing function. CGI experts helped gauge the team’s agile readiness through an assessment. This revealed that an Agile-Kanban-Lean approach was better suited to their need to deliver new products and offers quickly to the market, rather than an Agile-Scrum approach used to build and launch “Fizz.

We first provided Agile-Lean 101 training to the line managers of the newly created eight-member agile team, followed by a workshop to define the mission. The second step was to conduct a Systems Thinking Approach To Implementing Kanban (STATIK) workshop to help get started with Lean-Kanban. The workshop helped the team develop a tactical view of day-to-day activities and visualize the workflow from a collaboration standpoint to better understand the requirements of each activity, potential bottlenecks, and areas of improvement with a focus on delivering value.

Following the workshop, CGI agile experts continued to provide ongoing coaching and mentorship to the agile team supporting continuous improvement, collaboration, and a mindset that values people over processes to drive success.

Results

Shortly after putting together the agile marketing team, the company had to respond to a competitor’s data plan offer. By employing marketing agility, the team was able to deliver an offer in two days instead of the usual response time of two weeks. This led to the following benefits:

  • Retention of customers through a timely and competitive offer, and promotions
  • Reduced time-to-market that averted contract losses of nearly CAD$1 million

In addition, by adopting agile practices, the marketing team has been able to gain the following day-to-day benefits:

  • Faster decision-making
  • Improved task visibility
  • Early identification and elimination of bottlenecks
  • Reduced “cost of delay” to drive profits • Better team interaction, collaboration and transparency
  • Improved speed and responsiveness of marketing strategies

Key benefits

By adopting agile practices, the mobile user acquisition team has been able to:

  • Reduce time-to-market from 2 weeks to 2 days
  • Retain customers through timely and competitive offers and promotions
  • Minimize the “cost of delay” to drive profits
  • Become more nimble and responsive to change
  • Increase the speed and responsiveness of marketing strategies
  • Improve speed of decision-making and task visibility
  • Identify and eliminate bottlenecks early
  • Enhance team interaction, collaboration and transparency