From the outside, NewsUK is a compilation of individual brands with their own business goals. However, behind the scenes, we in Tech need to constantly communicate and ensure we are aligned to ensure we are delivering value for money, reusable and still provide high quality products for our audience.

From The Times and Sunday Times that live behind a paywall to The Sun, Sun Betting, Sun Racing and our Wireless brands such as Virgin Radio and Talksport, we face the challenge to achieve the right outcome for all stakeholders across multiple businesses.

Some of the issues we would hit include:

Global Mandate

Back in August 2021, we decided to overhaul how we approached quarterly planning. With the support from a third party — JCURV — we implemented PI Planning (part of the SAFe framework). This required buy-in from the entire business to come together for a two day event to align work for the following quarter. We had meetings with the Execs and each leadership team throughout the business to ensure they were aware, understood their role and were committed to making this work.

Our first PI Planning

For our first PI Planning we had only 3 weeks to pull our plans together across the business and prepare for the two day event. By the end of the two days we had managed to provide the vision, top 10 features which we then broke down into 30 and 90 day outcomes and key results and a portfolio view of all our dependencies and risks across all of Tech. The main tool we used to do this was Miro.

We walked away with plans for each title across all teams agreed and a greater understanding of problems. JCURV provided guidance and support to ensure that we followed the steps properly and gave an ‘outside eye’ to provide constructive feedback to everyone in the business and tech. Everyone in Tech and the business knew what was happening and why in the next 3 months. Doing this process allowed everyone across the teams to hear directly from the business for the first time.

Creating Transparency and sustainability

I was brought in at the start of Sept to embed PI Planning to our day-to-day process. The first thing I wanted to solve was how we were going to track and report what was agreed in PI Planning.

Using our current tooling — Jira — I created our own Scrum of Scrums board where every initiative raised was a piece of work that was agreed in PI Planning. Using swimlanes to show RAG status it focused our conversations on what needed to be discussed.

For our first and second iteration, there was a lot of manual work for all teams to raise initiatives. Today we put all the information we need into a spreadsheet and from there we run an automation that creates all the Jira tickets for us automatically. This saves us 40+ hours in manual work across all the teams.

Previously, teams would complete up to 5+ different reports every month which would provide different levels of detail on progress of work. Tracking all our work in Jira meant that not only are ALL updates now captured in one space but it meant we could take advantage of another tool in our Atlassian estate: EazyBI.

EazyBI is a multi dimensional data cubes add-on which takes a snapshot of Jira everyday. With Jira as our source of truth, all our reports are automatically updated each day in Confluence with the latest updates and stored into Jira, providing our stakeholders with the confidence of progress of work removing the issues around lack of clarity, earlier heads up and removes sending mixed messages. It also streamlines the amount of work teams are doing on providing updates.

Benefits

Through the changes we have made so far we have already seen significant improvements in how we collaborate and our transparency with the business.

We know what work we are doing

Reports

Documentation

Buy in

This is not waterfall planning. Things can change, but what we are doing now is consciously changing, knowing the costs and benefits of any change, and if something is added, agreeing what needs to be dropped.

What’s next?

We still have some work to do which includes better prioritisation, product alignment, long term strategy and improve how we visualise benefits.

With having the right buy-in across the entire business, putting the right people in the right roles and utilising the right tools we have seen a massive culture and mind shift across the business in how we approach quarterly planning.

James Veall, SVP Technology, Chief of Staff at News Corp

The level of partnership across technology and business teams is unrecognisable. Business and technology leadership rallied around the new processes, bringing together over 100 staff members, consultants and third parties for two days of intense planning and prioritisation sessions.

Additionally, the PI Planning process has been so successful it has been expanded to become the overall approach to all business planning. These changes have resulted in several News UK initiatives being leveraged across News Corp globally, including the Wall Street Journal.

Paul Wilson — CTO, News UK Tech

This new approach has had a huge impact on the transparency of our work and fostered better understanding and a much more collaborative relationship with our business colleagues and the Executive team.