Breaking away from a parent company and moving in-house with LexisNexis
Industry: Legal Research and Publishing
How we helped: Assessment, Leadership, Team Capability and Delivery Teams
Key Takeaways
Delivery as a standalone function
Allowing for greater visibility and confidence in what the engineering teams were producing
Improved agility
By connecting the product function with the teams
Functional programming
To speed up delivery and innovation
About LexisNexis
LexisNexis is a leading global provider of legal, regulatory and business analytics. For 200 years it has put customer experience at the heart of what it does. LexisNexis helps lawyers across more than 130 countries win cases, manage their work more efficiently, serve their clients better and grow their practices. It assists corporations to better understand their markets, monitor their brands and mitigate business risk.
“LexisNexis was the first of the early information services to realise the vision of a future in which large populations of end users would directly interact with computer databases, rather than academic libraries,” comments Michael Seipp, Technology Director, 101 Ways.
“101 Ways is great! I loved working with them – knowledgeable and pragmatic drivers. Great people,”
Kieron Wray
Legal Technology Director, LexisNexis
The Challenge
The LexisNexis team in the UK inherited much of its technology from its parent company in the US, with development being undertaken remotely. So they could better service the needs of local clients, the UK team wanted to take ownership of the codebase and move deployment processes in-house.
At the beginning, the team utilised a traditional waterfall methodology. However, after multiple failed attempts to deliver in this way, it attempted to move to a more agile way of working. But without utilising external help or coaching this had varying levels of success.
“Unfortunately, LexisNexis was limited by its reliance on a mainframe database in the US. It was also struggling to form a viable plan for execution as the skill sets it had available internally was limited,” said Seipp.
The Solution
101 Ways conducted a two-week assessment of the company’s technology and delivery capabilities. This led to a proposal to coach people already in leadership roles and expand the team by 14%. This was done by creating four further leadership roles and increasing the number of delivery managers and senior engineers to boost both capacity and skills. The team at 101 Ways proposed a ‘phased’ approach where 101 Ways initially focused on the leadership roles and allowed them to bring in the relevant skills as and when the need arose.
“LexisNexis wanted to improve the ways it was working with its clients, however needed a first-class engineering structure to be able to facilitate that. We collaborated with the team to put the processes, and talent, in place to accelerate the development of new solutions to ensure it could remain ahead of the competition,” added Seipp.
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