Case Studies
These are real leadership, team, and agile product delivery coaching engagements. They’re real humans who did the work and came out the other side stronger, more aligned, and better equipped. Every situation was different. The approach was always tailored. The results speak for themselves.
Leadership Coaching Case Studies
Client: A Product Company
Engagement Category: 1 Team, Private, IT
Type: Strategic Planning and Leadership Team Coaching
Problem: An executive leadership team requested a five-day team retreat to assist in their strategic planning initiative.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions conducted initial interviews with a broad sample of company team members to gather feedback, insights, and biases regarding the people, processes, technology, and culture of the organization. We used this information to develop a five-day strategic planning session that would serve as the guiding map moving the company forward. Additionally, we facilitated conversations to resolve issues and concerns that were revealed during the initial interview process.
To address the underlying issues preventing the company from high performance, we planned a series of interventions using engaging tools meant to reveal the hidden assumptions and information locked within the organization, as well as leadership development training, focused on Adaptive Leadership. Tangible action items were created throughout the offsite, and plans were developed to track the completion of those items. After the success of the initial five-day offsite, Pliant Solutions was re-engaged to support additional organizational development as well as ongoing executive team coaching and change management, building on the initial work done during the team retreat.
Client: Large Government Agency
Engagement Category: Division-wide, Public, IT
Type: One-on-one Executive Coaching & Leadership Coaching
Problem: The Division Chief of a large government agency wanted to build his leadership capabilities and better communicate with those in his division.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions’ engagement started with one-on-one Leadership Coaching for the Division Chief. Seeing first hand the benefits of his increased awareness of his communication style and how it affected the group, he enlisted us to coach the Branch Chief. Aspects of the training were then extended to the rest of the division in the form of a two- day off-site focusing on communication patterns and how to become a cohesive unit.
Client: Large Government Agency
Engagement Category: Leadership Team of 18 people, Public, Non-IT
Type: Leadership Coaching
Problem: Lack of leadership skills, failure to collaborate, personality differences, and a non-cohesive approach to achieving a shared organizational vision created a fractured team.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions facilitated a team deep-dive workshop based on Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead curriculum. Over the course of 12 weeks, the team learned new conflict management skills, coalesced around a single approach to accomplishing their shared vision, and gained a new perspective of how to show up to work.
Client: A rapidly Growing DC-Based Fitness Company
Engagement Category: 1-10 Teams, Private, Non-IT
Type: Leadership & Team Coaching
Problem: Rapid expansion has caused siloed teams and difficulties in creating culture in recently acquired opportunities and expansion sites. This resulted in friction within the leadership teams and created conflicts and confusion around roles, responsibilities, and future direction.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions provided individual leadership and team coaching. We presented a four-day leadership development workshop focused on creating more adaptive leaders. Similarly, we created workshops on change theory and worked closely with the teams on defining vision, role definitions, and working agreements, leading to organizational alignment. The ORSC team coaching model was used in this engagement.
Client: National Plumbing Supply Company
Engagement Category: 20+ Teams, Private, IT
Type: Training & Leadership Coaching
Problem: A bi-modal organization (agile-hybrid) needed assistance in “relaunching” their agile initiatives and baselining the knowledge throughout the IT department.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions provided training at multiple levels of the organization. We provided agile training to teams to help them baseline and relaunch their efforts; training to Product Owners for product vision and road mapping; and leadership training to help executives listen & receive feedback from teams & understand the environments that support the emergence of high performing teams & good product delivery.
Client: A Rapidly Growing DC-Based Fitness Company
Engagement Category: 1-10 Teams, Private, Non-IT
Type: Team & Leadership Coaching
Problem: Rapid expansion has caused siloed teams and difficulties in creating culture in recently acquired opportunities and expansion sites. This resulted in friction within the leadership teams and created conflicts and confusion around roles, responsibilities, and future direction.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions provided individual leadership and team coaching. We presented a four-day leadership development workshop focused on creating more adaptive leaders. Similarly, we created workshops on change theory and worked closely with the teams on defining vision, role definitions, and working agreements, leading to organizational alignment. The ORSC team coaching model was used in this engagement.
Client: A Successful Custom Home Builder
Engagement Category: 1 Team, Private, Non-IT
Type: Team & Leadership Coaching
Problem: A high-performing team wanted to “level up” by creating better vision, alignment, and a healthier work environment.
Our Work:The team initially engaged Pliant Solutions to facilitate a Dare to Lead workshop. However, after the initial assessment, it became clear that more focus on team coaching would be more beneficial. Pliant Solutions designed a customized workshop to kick-start team change resulting in tighter alignment, connection, and vision. The workshop concluded with focusing on team collaboration on small, concise, and easily implemented skills they could use “tomorrow.” Ongoing team coaching sessions and individual coaching have helped to keep the team’s skills and progress improving.
Client: A Public School Administrative Team
Engagement Category: 1 Team, Private, Non-IT
Type: Team Coaching & Leadership
Problem: A team of highly skilled individuals needed assistance coming together as a team because toxic communication patterns had prevented the team from moving forward.
Our Work: Initial assessments revealed a team “stuck” in the past and unable to communicate effectively with each other. Trauma around promotions, tenure, hurt feelings, and poor communication created hostility and prevented a lack of a shared vision. A three-day intervention focused on skill building and communication was designed to help the team move past the “stuck” place and begin to map out a new vision together.
Client: A Product Company
Engagement Category: 1 Team, Private, IT
Type: Strategic Planning and Leadership Team Coaching
Problem: An executive leadership team requested a five-day team retreat to assist in their strategic planning initiative
Our Work:Pliant Solutions conducted initial interviews with a broad sample of company team members to gather feedback, insights, and biases regarding the people, processes, technology, and culture of the organization. We used this information to develop a five-day strategic planning session that would serve as the guiding map moving the company forward. Additionally, we facilitated conversations to resolve issues and concerns that were revealed during the initial interview process.
To address the underlying issues preventing the company from high performance, we planned a series of interventions using engaging tools meant to reveal the hidden assumptions and information locked within the organization, as well as leadership development training, focused on Adaptive Leadership. Tangible action items were created throughout the offsite, and plans were developed to track the completion of those items. After the success of the initial five-day offsite, Pliant Solutions was re-engaged to support additional organizational development as well as ongoing executive team coaching and change management, building on the initial work done during the team retreat.
Client: Government Agency
Engagement Category: 4 Business teams, 11 IT Teams, Government
Type: Strategic business agility, program, and team-level coaching
Problem: This large government organization identified the need for agile development and delivery framework to increase collaboration between business units and the Office of Information Technology (OIT), align acquisition and governance processes, and facilitate the delivery of solutions while lowering risk and driving speed-to-value.
Our Work: In the first month of execution, our team completed an agile assessment through 21 interviews, composed of 124 people, and across all OIT and Business divisions. We then created a tailored agile adoption strategy based on risk tolerance, willingness for change, and organizational feasibility. The Agile Strategy was memorialized through a 1 year agile roadmap; normalized through the creation of an Agile Playbook (to be used for all Agile implementations across the OIT to include Readiness Assessment, Agile Coaching Support, and provide Scaling Practices); and operationalized through 7 agile pilot programs, 3 of which pilots occurred in the business to explore the concept of product strategy and ownership, and the other 4 pilots occurred within OIT focusing on software delivery practices. In parallel, we were able to create an Agile Center of Excellence (ACoE), with the primary goal of creating an agile community at the agency with regular ACoE meetings, bi-monthly Agile Newsletters, Lunch and Learns, and agile training for both contractors and federal employees.
Client: Government Agency
Engagement Category: 50+ Teams, Government, IT
Type: Enterprise Coaching, Portfolio Alignment
Problem: A large monolithic program was learning, adopting, and leveraging agile software delivery practices; however, the rest of the agency, including the business, was left to figure out their role in this new “agile” environment. Their struggles ranged from meaningful metrics to tool adoption, to understanding how to align the business with IT delivery, all while delivering code daily.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions provides comprehensive agile consulting and coaching support by partnering with teams, programs, and executives to help drive this agency to the forefront of modern agile practices within the Federal Government. The scope of this engagement ranged from Team and Program level coaching – harnessing agile techniques such as Portfolio Kanban to enable transparency and management of cross-team dependencies– to Enterprise level Coaching –supporting organizational change initiatives such as leadership coaching and strategy development to foster overall organizational alignment and business agility.
Pliant Solutions fostered organizational agile adoption by establishing a Product Owner Summit, a yearly forum of over 100 Product Owners to learn and share new business agility techniques; the Agile Leadership Forum; the IT Project Manager Agile Workshops; and countless other brown bag learning events.
Pliant Solutions partnered with the Agile Architecture and Design Services team to apply the lean-startup approach to prototyping products for teams to consume, such as Design as a Service – a marketplace where teams and product owners can easily share and find style guides, interface components, and design guidance.
Client: Global Media Company
Engagement Category: 10+ Teams, Private, IT
Type: Team & Portfolio Coaching/Alignment with Business
Problem: This large international media organization sought to recalibrate its agile delivery teams. They frequently missed key deadlines and deployed, on average, once every 3-4 months. This was frustrating to the marketing team, who needed new products and updates delivered promptly to meet the needs of their rapidly shifting market.
Our Work: After completing assessments and training for baseline, we guided teams in technical agile best practices, including GitFlow, feature branches, automated test suites, and Atlassian tools; embedded within teams to model facilitation of Scrum; and coordinated with external business units to define/refine requirements, creating close alignment between business and delivery. Pliant Solutions facilitated teams in regularly delivering product increments on time for the first time in over twelve months, as well as level-set agile knowledge, practices, and procedures.
Client: Government Agency
Engagement Category: 5+ Teams, Government, IT
Type: Agile Adoption, Product & Team Coaching
Problem: An in-house research and development group at a large agency was tasked to learn agile, create an agile methodology, and deliver the first mobile application while simultaneously adhering to compliance standards under the current SDLC and legacy infrastructure. Rules not only had to be broken but created while blazing a new path for iterative delivery on three mobile platforms.
Our Work: The scope of this engagement involved partnering with our client using business agility techniques and concepts such as User Story Mapping, Minimum Viable Product, and Three Amigos to build and deploy the app within two months – decreasing overall release time by ten months. This engagement also included providing agile assessments and training to help guide the overall adoption of the new practices.
Client: State Health Insurance Exchange
Engagement Category: 22 Teams, Government, IT
Type: Program Kick-off, Program Increment Planning, Agile Adoption
Problem: With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the State opted to create a State-Based Health Insurance Exchange. New to agile, there were very limited requirements, uncertainty about coordinating 180 people from across the globe, and a culture that was not supportive of the mission.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions was an integral partner in facilitating the program kick-off and introducing agile practices and principles to their Department of Health and Welfare. Pliant Solutions’ early engagement in the kick-off helped bring together stakeholders from across the state to understand the business need and drive alignment and coordination throughout implementation, which mitigated potential integration challenges later in development. As a result of this approach, the State was able to deliver a state-based exchange within the scheduled time allotted by the Presidential mandate.
Client: National Plumbing Supply Company
Engagement Category: 20+ Teams, Private, IT
Type: Training
Problem: A bi-modal organization (agile-hybrid) needed assistance in “relaunching” its agile initiatives and base-lining the knowledge throughout the IT department.
Our Work: Pliant Solutions provided training at multiple levels of the organization. We provided agile training to teams to help them baseline and relaunch their efforts; training to product owners for product vision and road mapping; and leadership training to help executives listen and receive feedback from teams and understand the environments that support the emergence of high-performing teams.
