Front End Discovery for Better Projects: Excelsys Technologies

At Excelsys, we undertook the 4-day programme with IRDG as a way of evaluating the potential of LPD and learning more about it before diving fully in. We had challenges in our front end discovery and project pipe-line and felt there was considerable room for improvement.

It only takes one or two things to change what you are doing, and improve efficiency, and we’ve certainly achieved that. The front-end discovery piece has been hugely beneficial for us in determining the right projects to progress through our funnel. We had often spent months dealing with the dilemma of which ones to go forward with. Now we have a structured process which helps us make quick decisions in-house and get products to market faster.

We have also implemented some additional disciplines including keeping core hours free of meetings, visual mapping of our projects, and engaging a wider group across the business – all of which are yielding benefits and helping to engender a common approach and culture around product development.

For us, we particularly enjoyed the hands-on nature of the programme, working with the tools, trying them out, and in doing so, being equipped to directly implement them into our business. We’ve just undertaken a considerable integration effort into our new parent company and have plans to significantly grow our engineering team in Cork. Now is the time for this group to participate in the LPD programme for themselves. Learning from the experience of the facilitators and other participants will help us to continue to build on the benefits we’ve gained so far.