The Client
Our client, a Fortune 100 financial corporation, acquired an online retail bank in the US. With typical acquisitions, the parent company drives the acquired organization to adopt their processes but, in this case, the online retail bank was quite a strong asset with a forward-thinking development process that had already transitioned to an Agile methodology.
The Challenge
The new parent company identified the Agile maturity within the business unit being acquired and wanted to bring one of the online bank’s senior leaders on board to lead the Agile Transformation. With a business unit of 1,600 people, the first order of business for this division was to bring everyone up to speed on what Agile meant moving forward. The senior leader was asked to identify a consulting company and the appropriate tools required to support the transformation.
The major challenge for this Fortune 100 firm was getting products to market and ensuring those products were built in a quality manner. These were recognized as areas of strength within the acquired company.
The Solution
Eliassen Group’s Agile Practice was brought in by the acquired business unit to assist with the parent company’s Agile Transformation. The organization was split into 160 teams and Eliassen Group immediately established the core elements to prepare for an enterprise transformation. We established a guiding coalition representing many of the functions within the parent company’s business, quickly scaled to support a “big bang rollout” of Agile, and leveraged training and coaching as the key elements of support needed to drive the transformation. There were 25 Agile coaches working with the company in the first six-month period of the engagement. We delivered training to all employees who were affected by the acquisition and provided coaching services to all teams transitioning to Agile.
The Result
The most significant aspect of this engagement was that the company transformed from a traditional financial services company to a technology company that offers financial products. This was not just a different way of delivering software for the company; the company went through a complete business and IT Agile Transformation, which resulted in the following:
- Average 200% improvement in team speed, productivity, and quality
- One line of business reduced cycle time from 18 months to 6 weeks
- Scaled to multiple lines of business/teams
Scope & Scale
- Organizational Agile Transformation – Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, DevOps
- 45,000+ employees, 6K plus in IT
- 4 major US locations and 2 international locations
