The value delivery system is how Pecos Mutual turns a business need into a working product and then keeps it running. Every piece of work belongs to one of two workstreams, and each workstream has its own teams, cadence and playbooks.
What it is
Run is run-the-business work. It keeps the platforms that policyholders, agents and employees use every day healthy and available. Teams do Run work through two practices:
- Incident Management: triage, declare and resolve incidents, then learn from them in a post-incident review.
- Platform Health: watch reliability, cost and risk for each platform, and review it every month.
Change is work that makes something new or better. It comes in two kinds:
- Strategic projects are larger investments the business chooses on purpose. A cross-functional project team delivers each one.
- Discretionary work is smaller, ongoing improvement. The static Home Team that owns the area delivers it from its own backlog.
The Change lifecycle
Strategic projects move through three stages. Each stage ends with a clear decision, so nobody starts building before the business has agreed what to build.
- Discovery: high-level ideation, estimation and prioritization. Business Executives work with Product Managers to shape ideas into one-page business cases, review a high-level design, size the work and rank it against everything else in the portfolio. Discovery ends at Gate 2: Ready for planning.
- Planning: Resource Management and planning practices turn a prioritized project into goals and milestones the team can deliver within about 3 months. Planning runs on a fixed quarterly cycle and ends at the Quarterly Planning session, where Business Executives sign off the plan.
- Delivery: the project team practices Scrum, in two-week sprints, to deliver the milestones.
Discretionary work skips most of this. A Home Team takes it through a light intake into its own backlog and delivers it with the same Scrum practices. See Run, Change and Discretionary work for how to tell which path an item takes.
Why it matters
Naming the workstream and the stage answers the questions that slow teams down:
- Who owns this? Run work belongs to the team that owns the platform. Strategic projects belong to a project team. Discretionary work belongs to a Home Team.
- What happens next? Each stage has playbooks with named roles, inputs and outputs.
- Where does capacity go? Planning reserves capacity for Run work before it commits anything to Change, so incidents don't quietly eat a project's plan.
How it connects
- The five roles each show up at different points: Product Managers lead Discovery, Program and Project Managers lead Planning, and Scrum Masters and Product Owners lead Delivery.
- Each stage has an overview with its playbooks: Discovery, Planning and Delivery.
- Reports show how the system is doing, from platform health to sprint goals.