PA Consulting shows how technology business Arm has ambitious plans for growth.
Arm, named one of Europe’s most innovative companies by Forbes magazine, design the microchips found in 90 per cent of all mobile devices. To achieve their goals they need an IT organisation that can deliver new projects quickly and reliably. They asked us to help transform their existing IT function. They wanted to replace their traditional project management culture with an Agile approach – and prioritise collaboration and creating value.
There were four main strands to our work. We designed a new operating model allowing Arm to organise IT delivery teams in a way that reflected business priorities like customer experience and employee engagement. We set up a programme office to manage the transformation to the new model and support leaders moving their teams to new ways of working. And we coached over 25 delivery teams and trained more than 200 people in the principles of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), the Agile way to deliver enterprise-scale IT.
The fourth strand was crucial – a communication workstream to engage around 300 employees and win support from senior stakeholders. It included building a community of change champions, running ‘town hall’ events, and creating an intranet site to share news about the transformation.
We’ve run over 80 such complex transformations. So we could draw on our library of Agile tools, templates and patterns to hit the ground running. We were able to bring together the right mix of people and talent specialists, business design experts and professional Agile coaches, fast. Within eight months, 80 per cent of IT staff were using Agile techniques, laying the foundations for an IT function fully equipped to support Arm’s growth ambitions.
“Given the pace of change at Arm, we needed to work with someone who could really help us accelerate our programme, achieve results quickly, and build our internal capability to take this forward ourselves. PA has helped us to do just that.”
Andy Smith
CIO, Arm
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