Optimising eCommerce Delivery for a Leading Supermarket Retailer

A supermarket retailer now uses Jira to digitise their in-store experience and release new features more often

See how Quirk helped them get there

Client: A Major Supermarket Retailer in Australia
Industry: Retail / eCommerce
Project: eCommerce Delivery Pipeline Optimisation

“Working with Quirk has been transformative for our eCommerce division. Their insights into our delivery pipeline and their strategic recommendations have dramatically improved our ability to deliver innovative solutions to our customers.

The results speak for themselves—we’ve seen significant improvements in staff retention, time-to-market, and overall efficiency.”

Strategic Alignment

A leading supermarket retailer in Australia is focused on delivering on its purpose through three strategic pillars: becoming the destination for food and drink, accelerating digital transformation, and consistently delivering for the future. Underpinning these pillars are foundational elements such as financial discipline, technology, and data, which are crucial to driving value for stakeholders.

Aligned with these strategic goals, we partnered with the retailer’s eCommerce division to accelerate their time-to-market for delivering innovative omnichannel solutions. Our objective was to remove critical bottlenecks that were hindering the delivery pipeline, ensuring that the eCommerce division could meet its ambitious targets and contribute to the company’s broader strategic objectives.

Key Challenges

Before our involvement, the eCommerce division faced several significant challenges:

Ambitious Targets: The division had set lofty goals for delivering innovative solutions but was falling behind schedule.
High Staff Turnover: Chronic staff turnover was a result of the perception that the teams were underperforming, despite the presence of systemic bottlenecks that impeded their ability to deliver.
Ineffective Optimisation Efforts: Despite efforts by senior leadership to optimise feature delivery teams and reduce cycle time, these improvements were not translating into tangible enhancements in the end-to-end delivery of strategic initiatives.

These challenges were creating significant barriers to the division’s ability to meet its strategic objectives.

Solution and Implementation

To address these issues, we implemented a comprehensive approach to optimise the eCommerce delivery pipeline:

Value Stream Mapping Exercise: Over the course of a month, we conducted a Value Stream Mapping exercise that combined quantitative analysis of the team’s delivery performance in Jira with qualitative insights gathered from staff interviews.
- Key Findings: The analysis revealed that the delivery teams were already optimised and were utilising nearly all their available capacity. However, the discovery phase of strategic initiatives was causing significant delays, with a cumulative total of over 13 months of idle time, leading to automatic delays of over a year for any date commitments made by senior leadership.
- Operational Inefficiencies: A frequently recurring outage in one of the testing environments was identified as causing over $2 million in annual operational waste.
Strategic Recommendations: Based on our findings, we made a series of recommendations to the senior board, which were subsequently implemented:
1. Reduce Upfront Commitments: To prevent the delivery pipeline from overloading, we advised reducing the number of commitments made upfront.
2. Optimise Product Discovery: We proposed optimising product discovery efforts to reduce the overall lead time to a quarter, enabling faster delivery of strategically aligned products and features.

Key Technologies Utilised

Atlassian Jira: Jira was used as the system of record for all work management. We leveraged the underlying APIs to extract the necessary delivery performance data for the Value Stream Mapping exercise.

Measurable Results

The implementation of these solutions resulted in significant, measurable improvements:

Reduced Staff Turnover: Staff turnover decreased from 20% quarter-on-quarter to less than 5% over the span of 12 months post-implementation.
Increased Benefits Realisation: The eCommerce division saw a 40% increase in benefits realisation during the same period.
Faster Time-to-Market: Time-to-market for new products and features was reduced by 50%.

Stakeholder Impact

The project had a profound impact on various stakeholders within the retailer’s eCommerce division:

Staff Retention: A significant reduction in staff turnover, leading to a more stable and motivated workforce.
Enhanced Efficiency: A 50% reduction in time-to-market, enabling the division to deliver innovative solutions more rapidly.
Strategic Alignment: The eCommerce division was better positioned to contribute to the company’s broader strategic goals, with increased benefits realisation and a more efficient delivery pipeline.

Comparative Advantage

Quirk distinguishes itself through deep expertise in Atlassian tools and a business-centric approach to ways of working. We don’t implement generic frameworks; instead, we create tailored solutions that meet our clients where they are and drive real value. Our commitment to client success is demonstrated in our dedication to going the extra mile, ensuring that clients can sustain and build upon transformation efforts long after our engagement ends.

What our clients say about us.

Our client’s satisfaction is at the heart of everything we do. Here are some words of appreciation from those who have experienced the Quirk difference.

Partnering with Quirk to develop our Atlassian-based suite for work tracking and code management was a crucial decision for Finspo. Quirk's deep understanding of both the business and technical space led to a seamless integration of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket into our digital stack. This integration significantly enhanced our security framework to align with our AFSL and ACL requirements. The team at Quirk expertly implemented robust security controls and crafted precise, compliant workflows that are vital to our core operations.

Quirk Consulting partnered with the City of Whittlesea Council to help us uplift our current Jira implementation and provide expert advice on a range of operational and process improvements. Brad was able to provide comprehensive expert advice that was successfully implemented and well documented. We are happy to endorse Quirk Consulting and look forward to working with Brad again soon!

Brad and his team are very knowledgeable with Atlassian tools. They are easy to deal with and provide outstanding service. Brad is very business focused and is able to use this skill to be able to deliver excellent value to his clients. I highly recommend Brad and his team if you are implementing Jira and want to get more value out of the tool

I had the opportunity to collaborate with Brad and his team, and I must say, they are truly remarkable individuals. Their professionalism, creativity, and dedication significantly contributed to the success of our project. I highly recommend them for any collaborative endeavor.

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