BigHand Case Study

BigHand, a UK-based software company, faced challenges including a backlog of features and limited capacity to work on new product development, resulting in lower customer satisfaction levels. They engaged Understanding Solutions to provide an Agile Delivery Manager who prioritised and managed workload efficiently, refined features, and developed new functionality. This led to improved customer satisfaction levels and successfully completed milestones.

Client Overview

BigHand is a UK-based software company that specialises in providing productivity tools and workflow solutions for the legal, healthcare, and financial services industries. Established in 1996, BigHand has since expanded to have offices across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Its flagship product, BigHand, is a digital dictation and workflow management system that allows professionals to dictate, transcribe, and manage documents securely and efficiently, integrating with various document management systems to automate administrative tasks.

The Challenge

Before working with Understanding Solutions, BigHand faced several challenges that hindered their ability to meet the needs of their customers. One of the main challenges was having a backlog of features that needed to be developed, which required a Scrum project to prioritise and manage the workload. BigHand's existing team was fully occupied with strategic initiatives to move to the Cloud, which had limited their capacity to work on new product development and improvements required to meet their customer demands.

This backlog had a negative impact on customer satisfaction levels and prompted BigHand to consider building a new team to tackle the issue. However, the prospect of creating a permanent team was deemed too risky, and traditional consultancies were viewed as too expensive. These challenges left BigHand searching for a cost-effective and low-risk solution to help them address their backlog and improve their customer satisfaction levels.

The Solution

BigHand engaged Understanding Solutions to help maintain and develop their existing software products and lifecycle, including ongoing maintenance and development.

Understanding Solutions provided a comprehensive solution that effectively addressed BigHand's challenges by deploying an experienced Agile Delivery Manager. The Agile Delivery Manager worked remotely and provided independent advice, guidance and Scrum project management support to the BigHand team, allowing them to efficiently prioritise and manage their workload.

One of the objectives was to create an environment where BigHand's internal team could deliver with predictability, building and organising the delivery management community internally. The Associate coached, trained, and documented all delivery managers to improve performance and introduced process improvements to ensure that the implementation of new functionality was secure and performant.

Another one of the critical objectives of the partnership was to refine features that were to be developed, creating POCs, UX designs, and a detailed list of requirements covering functional and non-functional aspects. They also developed new functionality in the Workflow platform, ensuring that automated tests were in place and measuring the success of new functionality.

Results

In just over 12 months, Understanding Solutions completed all the deliverables and helped BigHand build and roll out training, improving the skills of its internal team. This helped the internal team to become high-performing and deliver with predictability, which in turn, allowed them to work on new product development and improvements to meet customer demands. BigHand was able to focus on strategic initiatives while Understanding Solutions maintained and developed their existing products, ensuring a seamless experience for their customers.

By working with Understanding Solutions, BigHand experienced an improvement in customer satisfaction levels, as well as successfully completing deliverables and milestones. The Associate's contract was extended twice over the period, demonstrating BigHand's satisfaction with the quality of service provided.

Key Outcomes

• Bolstered with the addition of Senior DevOps Engineers, Software Engineers, Architects and Business Analysts / Delivery Managers
• Augmented with internal employees
• Deployed a team of 12 within 5 working days
• Provided total flexibility to scale up and scale back resources depending on project needs