Fusion offers many project services – project strategy development, agile program management and delivery, root cause analysis, agile project reviews, change readiness and business improvement. One other service which has been successful over the past couple of years is Lean Inception services for early project framing and product design thinking.

Fusion was asked to deliver a project inception process for a major commercial project for a multi-national oil and gas company. The project’s intent was to dramatically improve the organisation’s capability in assessing asset and production opportunities through a complex decision support process. As the process was multi-functional team handoffs, data lineage, case workflow and version control were cumbersome, time consuming and error prone.

The Fusion inception process allowed the product (case management application) and its surrounding processes to be defined and agreed by all parties, users and IT. A Lean approach makes the inception process more effective focusing the process on the users and how they interact with the product and strive to achieve their goals, i.e. complete a revenue forecast or finalise costings. This case study was different in the process being more case workflow in nature and therefore more feature centric, rather than user persona centric.

Following a feature discovery process, features were mapped into a sprint plan and MVPs agreed upon. The IT development team, involved in the entire process, were able to move rapidly into a prototyping or production development phase.

Many collateral benefits arise with the cross-functional team alignment and camaraderie being the most significant ones.