Colart: Turning three merged teams into one delivery unit through workflow design

Over six months we turned three newly merged teams, Global Marketing, Development and Business Intelligence, into one working Digital Team. The work was process and workflow design: agile processes built for a cross-functional team, Jira workflows aligned to how the business actually worked, clear communication channels, a matured backlog that cut downtime, and data-guided prioritisation, with critical issues escalated to senior leadership when needed. The result was a cohesive, predictable team, transformation work that progressed consistently, and an e-commerce website that shipped successfully. The discipline behind that, one agreed definition of a finished piece of work and one route for moving it, is what turned three merged functions into a single delivery unit.

Because the merger creates a team on the org chart before it creates one in practice. When Colart merged its Global Marketing, Development and Business Intelligence teams, the new Digital Team had no shared alignment, no established communication channels and no consistent way of delivering, and key transformation work stalled, including a new e-commerce site. Nobody in that situation is underperforming individually. The connective tissue is missing. So the fix at Colart was structural, not motivational. We agreed processes for the cross-functional team, matched workflows to the real work, made the communication channels explicit, and gave the team a route to senior leadership for the issues it could not resolve itself.

Yes, when the process is designed for the mixed team rather than borrowed from software engineering and imposed on everyone else. At Colart the new Digital Team combined Global Marketing, Development and Business Intelligence, and we designed agile processes for that cross-functional shape, with Jira workflows aligned to how the business actually worked. Clear communication channels and data-guided prioritisation did the rest. The team became cohesive and predictable, and the stalled e-commerce website shipped successfully.

It was at Colart. A workflow that mirrors how work actually moves through the business gets used honestly; one that mirrors a tool's defaults gets worked around, and the board stops telling the truth about delivery. We aligned Colart's Jira workflows to how the newly merged Digital Team really operated, as part of a wider redesign covering agile processes, communication channels and a matured backlog. Delivery became consistent enough that the stalled e-commerce build progressed and shipped. The workflow itself is not the point; it is the state model that makes a piece of work unambiguous, and that is what the merged team had been missing.

A matured backlog means the next piece of work is already defined, understood and ready when the team finishes the current one, so nobody idles while requirements are chased or decisions are awaited. At Colart, maturing the backlog was one of the specific levers we used, and less downtime is the result the study records. It matters most in a newly merged team, because the person who used to answer a quick question across the desk may now sit in a different part of the organisation, and every ill-defined item turns into a wait. Combined with data-guided prioritisation, it kept Colart's Digital Team delivering consistently.

Data settled it. Three merged teams arrived at Colart with their own views of what mattered, so we used data to guide prioritisation and the backlog began reflecting evidence instead of whichever function argued loudest. Two other mechanisms mattered alongside it. A matured backlog meant every item was well enough defined to be compared honestly. A clear escalation route meant the critical issues the team could not settle went to senior leadership before they festered. Prioritisation disputes are usually a symptom of missing structure. The people are rarely the problem. Once the structure existed, Colart's Digital Team delivered predictably.

At Colart it took six months to take three merged teams, Global Marketing, Development and Business Intelligence, from stalled and misaligned to cohesive and predictable, with the e-commerce website shipped along the way. Most of that time went into design work. We shaped agile processes for a cross-functional team, matched the Jira workflows to the real work, set up communication channels people actually used, and matured the backlog to the point where downtime fell. The honest caveat is that six months describes this organisation, not every merger. The pattern transfers. The number is theirs.

Yes. The e-commerce website was among the key transformation work that stalled while Colart's merged Digital Team lacked alignment and consistent delivery, and it shipped successfully once the team was working as one unit. The causal chain is worth being clear about. We designed the processes, Jira workflows and communication channels that let the merged team build the platform, and Colart's own engineers built it. That distinction is one to check in any consultancy's case studies. The delivery discipline was ours. The engineering was Colart's own people, unblocked.

More than it first appears. An AI agent needs the same things Colart's merged team needed. It has to know what a piece of work is, how to move it through a state model, and where to escalate when it cannot proceed. Design those well for people and you have designed most of what an agentic operating model needs later. Colart is what that groundwork looks like in practice. Three merged functions ran off a single backlog and a single state model, and a stalled e-commerce site shipped once the team worked as one unit.

Colart is one of the engagements delivered under the Tenhaw banner, alongside Anglo American, Yondr, Greggs, Tecknuovo and Globelynx. Several of those predate the company's incorporation and were delivered by James Rooney personally on contract, and we will walk you through which is which on a call rather than blur the line in marketing copy. The delivery experience is the same either way, because James leads every Tenhaw engagement personally today. We keep this separate from the HSBC, Microsoft, Sky, F1 and Discovery track record, which were the founder's delivery and transformation roles inside those organisations.

With the team. A retail AI operating model is mostly a set of agreements about how work is defined and moved between functions, and Colart is the pre-AI version of that argument. When Global Marketing, Development and Business Intelligence merged into one Digital Team, the team had no shared alignment, no established communication channels and no consistent way of delivering, and a new e-commerce site stalled. Six months of process, Jira workflow and backlog design made it cohesive and predictable, and the site shipped. If those three functions cannot agree today what a finished piece of work looks like, no agent will settle it for them.

Often, yes. If leadership is aligned and the merged functions already trust one way of working, run it in-house and keep the fee. It gets harder when the shape of the merger is the problem. Colart's new Digital Team combined Global Marketing, Development and Business Intelligence, and a process shaped around any one of those sets of habits tends to be quietly ignored by the other two, so whoever designs it has to work for the mixed team without belonging to a part of it. That took six months at Colart, alongside a standing route to senior leadership for the calls the team could not make itself. If your own managers can hold both, you do not need us.

Then the escalation route is decoration, and no amount of workflow design compensates for it. Escalating critical issues to senior leadership was one of the named mechanisms at Colart, and it only counts as a mechanism if somebody answers. A team that raises a blocker and hears nothing learns to stop raising blockers, so the risk log goes quiet while the risks carry on. Test it before you design around it. Take one properly blocked item, escalate it, and time how long a decision takes. If the answer is never, that is the thing to fix first, and no board redesign will hide it.

Less than a governance framework and more than a new chat channel. Colart's merged Digital Team spanned Global Marketing, Development and Business Intelligence, and making its channels explicit meant agreeing where each kind of request or decision gets raised, who the three functions go to for what, and where critical issues go when the team cannot settle them itself, which at Colart was senior leadership. A merger quietly removes the informal routes people relied on before anyone notices they have gone. The symptoms then look like poor delivery rather than poor plumbing. It was one of the levers that got the stalled e-commerce work moving again.