#5

Agile
Transformation

     

Description
of our service

Traditional business models of large enterprises are increasingly challenged by small and fast-moving digital companies. As a response, many of them are investing in improving enterprise agility. They would like the speed of innovation of their smaller competitors.
 
While many organizations have effectively worked on more flexible technology architectures, e.g. by shifting infrastructure capacity into the cloud, very few have successfully adopted agile ways of working. Agile can improve the quality of products and their time-to-market. But in order to achieve that they must replace siloed organizations, legacy delivery models and rigid standard processes with a flexible, collaborative and customer-oriented work style. Moreover, they must be willing to try, learn from failure and improve.
 
We help technology and other service organizations to adopt agile delivery models for projects and project portfolios. We apply and train methodologies like SCRUM, Kanban, SAFE, Lean and establish or deliver in roles such as Product Owner, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer or Portfolio Manager.
 
We also support clients on bringing agile beyond projects into their enterprise value chain. We help them to rethink their operating models, develop pilots, implementation roadmaps, governance structures, metrics and accompany organizational as well as cultural changes.

Case study

Global Finance Transformation Programme, Global Reinsurance Company

300

Project Members

400mio

Programme Budget in $

5 years

Programme Duration

Sponsors —
CFO, CIO

Drivers for change — The finance department of the company had been operating on a diverse landscape of custom-built and isolated financial ledgers and sub-ledgers with tactical interfaces to integrate technical, investment and financial accounting. Provision of year-end results was a matter of months and reporting was mainly manually performed by finance experts who had to pull data together from a variety of finance systems.
 
Project objectives — The company started a large finance transformation programme in order to enable finance as a trusted advisor and co-pilot of the business. The key objectives were to build a market-leading ledger and sub-ledger system that enables full automation of finance processes, a five-day-close process, real-time financial reporting on multiple valuations and on-demand simulations and analytics. It was decided to run the transformation programme on an agile delivery model because its size, complexity and duration required the ability to deliver on emerging customer and external requirements in staged product rollouts while maintaining stable and reliable run processes during the transition.
 
Project approach — We helped the programme to design and implement the agile delivery model by …

    1. Helping the company to define a scalable agile model specific to company characteristics and a transition roadmap to a “DevOps & agile organization”.
    2. Designing and establishing a project organization and governance that can interact with dependent projects and run organizations in a hybrid environment.
    3. Introducing a fit-for-purpose product backlog management process and progress reporting based on incremental product implementations.
    4. Maturing the agile delivery model based on retrospectives and learnings to improve delivery speed and product quality over time.

    Achievements — The agile delivery model was successfully deployed and scaled to 13 scrum teams working in parallel and successfully delivering a common product release within the first year. The project organization efficiently coped with a major scope change driven by an external requirement to introduce the new valuation standard IFRS9/17 with on time delivery. Meanwhile, four additional releases of the market leading software have been successfully developed and incorporated. The agile delivery model has been scaled to additional projects focused on DevOps implementations.