Why test and learn is the competitive advantage every business needs
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Taking a service-led approach to improve customer outcomes, productivity, and team alignment at BT Group
The client
BT Group is the UK’s leading provider of fixed and mobile telecommunications and related secure digital products, solutions and services, and is the world’s oldest communications company. It has over 90,000 employees and a revenue of £20.4bn.
As part of its mission to become a more agile, digitally native technology leader, BT set out to overhaul its operating model and modernise its service delivery. It engaged PD to help bring that operating model to life, breaking down silos and shifting to agile, service-aligned teams.
What we did
We improved customer-centricity, team alignment, and productivity
To support BT’s new operating model, we established multidisciplinary, agile teams and helped them apply a test and learn approach. This approach enabled teams to mitigate risk, giving them a safe environment to experiment, adapt and build practical capability where it matters most.
Rather than focusing on standalone projects, these teams were structured around the end-to-end service, allowing them to prioritise the complete customer journey and more effectively meet customer needs. We reinforced this approach by coaching teams to define high-value outcomes and utilise data to measure impact.
The shift to service-led teams connected the dots across formerly siloed areas of the business, resulting in better autonomy, prioritisation and communication, and also translating into higher employee satisfaction. This approach cut the tribe’s product feature delivery cycles from 18 months to just 2–3 months, representing an 83% improvement in delivery speed.
We first tested this way of working in a ‘beacon experiment’ in BT’s Business Marketplace. Here, the team saw a marked increase in productivity and the opportunity to significantly reduce the cost of service delivery thanks to greater efficiency.
We de-risked changes to BT’s operating model
The beacon experiments were an example of PD’s test and learn methodology in action.
They not only provided a space where ways of working and redesigned processes could be trialled and refined, but they helped stabilise the process of transforming BT’s operating model, testing new structures and agile practices before wider adoption. This strengthened compliance and governance by embedding secure, adaptive ways of working into the delivery process.
We supported BT to scale success
The proven impact of the beacon projects created rapid buy-in across the business, growing momentum around these ways of working.
As we worked to support BT’s newly formed delivery teams at pace, we helped them lay the foundations for scaling success. This involved codifying new ways of working adopted by their tribes by recording beacon experiments in a ‘Wayfinder’ service: a living playbook which supported practitioners across BT to understand and adopt the best delivery practices.
As the success of service-led, outcome-focused teams became a model others wanted to follow, change became a shared ambition, setting BT on a path towards greater productivity and efficiency.
