Agile transformation in an international financial institution
Agile transformation in an international financial institution
Industry: Financial sector
Objectives, executive summary
The transformation aims to put the operations of an international financial institution on an agile basis in order to improve time-to-market, reduce decision lead times and increase responsiveness to change, in line with the new organisational strategy. Agile cross-functional pilot teams have been set up as part of the transformation, and their number has been expanded to continuously measure results. A scaled agile operation has been developed, the organisational structure has been changed and an OKR-based agile project portfolio management management governance operational practice has been introduced.
Client background and environment
The organisation decided that a complete overhaul of its corporate strategy was needed, taking into account market trends. Dozens of initiatives were launched to improve the services offered to customers, to renew internal IT, to improve organisation and operations, and to rethink partnerships. Given that the vast majority of these initiatives had a high degree of uncertainty, senior management recognised that traditional approaches would deliver improvements at too high a risk and were unlikely to deliver results quickly enough. In view of this, the organisation opted for an agile approach, which had not been used at all before, and agile coaching and agile consulting capacity was provided to introduce and support it.
Objectives, tasks
The main objective of the transformation is to improve time-to-market, responsiveness to change and decision times, as described above, and to implement the initiatives formulated as effectively and efficiently as possible. In addition to this, we also set ourselves the objective of not introducing a "boxed" model into the organisation, but rather to embed agile values and principles as strongly as possible in the "DNA" of the organisation, to ensure that the agile approach is understood and accepted by those working in the organisation and that it becomes an essential part of the organisational culture. Our own internal expectation was to enable the organisation to continuously improve post-transformation by achieving a learning organisation status, coaching key internal actors and implementing mentoring exercises.
To achieve these objectives, the following tasks have been carried out, but are not exhaustive:
- OKR-based organisation and fine-tuning of initiatives
- Implementation of Agile leadership training, workshops
- Selection and structure of pilot teams
- Agile team and role training
- Introduction of Agile leadership big room planning ceremonies
- Ongoing support for pilot teams
- Implement scaled agility for developments involving multiple teams
- Organisational reorganisation, weakening organisational silos
- Defining and introducing new roles
- Scrum Master, Product Owner and internal agile coach mentoring tasks
- Piloting and implementation of target software to support agile operations
- OKR fine-tuning, executive coaching and support to ensure sustainability of change
Challenges, difficulties
As with any transformation of an organisation without agile experience, typical and atypical challenges arose, some of which were due to the way the organisation had been operating and others to resistance to change, as follows:
- Although the commitment of the management was high, during the transformation several compromises had to be made that were contrary to our proposals, due to the environmental conditions
- Not very deep basic knowledge of agile, stakeholders initially viewed agile as a methodology, it was a challenge to focus on the approach
- The cross-functional structure of the pilot teams was initially supported with little or no support by the existing "resource managers"
- It has been difficult to co-locate agile teams due to cultural and infrastructure constraints
- The agile team members were not allocated in 100%, besides development, they were still expected to perform other, more familiar operational tasks
- External, contracted project managers showed strong resistance to change, in several cases trying to sabotage the transformation
Implementation of the task
We have tried to implement the tasks with an incremental approach, avoiding "big-bang" transformations in order to minimize the shock to the organization and to avoid disrupting day-to-day business. In the first period, this involved agile leadership training, reviewing and organising initiatives and portfolio, refining transformation objectives, developing an OKR and selecting pilot themes.
In a second step, we defined the necessary team competences behind the selected and prioritised initiatives, gradually managed to cover them with internal capacities and to get dedicated experts from departments - albeit part-time - who could strengthen the cross-functionalisation of the teams. Agile trainings were launched for the assigned teams, backlogs were established and delivery started with continuous support. The organization quickly recognized the benefits of this approach, so the number of teams started to grow rapidly, and to support this, an internal Scrum Master and Product Owner circle was set up and mentored. At the management level, the focus was fine-tuned during regular so-called big room planning sessions with continuous prioritization and evaluation, and after the first successful releases, the issue of scaled agility was raised more and more often. The teams were given their own war-rooms and the day-to-day work took place in these spaces.
In the third step, after 4 teams had already applied the agile approach with sufficient autonomy and confidence, the first topic where scaled tools were needed appeared, as a product required the joint work of nearly 30 people. To this end, the first collaborative, cross-team planning was carried out in a way similar to a PI planning agenda. Using these and the experience and results gained so far, a pilot tribe was formed, whose objectives were defined in line with the OKRs and organised in a matrix-like organisational form.
In the fourth phase, the reorganisation was supported by change management, classical agile coaching tasks were performed with continuous support from management, Scrum Master and Product Owner, and then, with a gradual reduction of the consulting capacity, the organisation transferred these coaching and support tasks to internal staff. Informal groups were established within the organisation to share the experience gained on a regular basis. To support agile delivery, the IT support tool piloted in the previous steps was extended and rolled out more widely.
Results
- The organisation has successfully implemented around half of the dozens of initiatives, some of which were stopped at an early stage of development because it soon became clear that the ideas were not marketable or did not offer real business benefits.
- Some of the organisational silos have been weakened, and several areas have become more active and closely cooperative through cross-functional teams.
- Within the organisation's pilot tribe, the agile approach was embedded in the day-to-day work, with early results being sharpened more quickly.
- The work of around 30% of external experts working on a contract basis (e.g. business analysts, project managers) is no longer required, generating significant cost savings.
- For those working at management and implementation level, a much more transparent operation in terms of expectations and progress has started.
- By adopting an MVP approach, teams deliver working solutions and increments faster.
- Customer satisfaction and staff motivation increased among those who adopted the new approach.
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