Support the Agile journey in a financial services company

Support and guide the client’s division (60 people) in their Agile journey by implementing the Agile mindset & practices in teams working as a CIO Office (Human Resources, Cost Management, Vendor Management & Group Methodology).

Challenge

Facilitate the definition of the 2020 HR strategy of the IT Department in an Agile way

At the end of 2019, the client had its yearly “Climate Survey” to measure the engagement of the IT teams. The global engagement score turned out to be 6.1/10. IT Leadership aimed to do better and wanted to collaborate with HR to improve this score and address IT people’s most urgent concerns.

Guiding questions :

How to prioritise a backlog of over 40 initiatives?
How to make a realistic plan when HR is already working at full capacity?
What governance to put in place to check that the strategy is answering the concerns?

Are you facing similar challenges?

Key role

Agile Coach & Facilitator

Facilitation of workshops to ensure that IT & HR’s voices are heard and that the actions taken reflect both viewpoints
Ensuring that the concerns of the IT teams (conveyed via the yearly survey) were a priority
Making sure that the HR Strategy and its governance are aligned with the Agile way of working already in place in the organisation

Results

Selection of the initiatives ready to kick off thanks to Agile prioritisation techniques

In January 2020, selection of 7 initiatives out of 40 initiatives
Structured facilitation workshops
Adoption of Agile prioritisation techniques by IT and HR departments:
- Creation of an impact/effort matrix to position their initiatives using relative estimation
- Creation of an EPIC Hypothesis Statement template in order to analyse the 20 pre-selected initiatives
- Final prioritisation round using relative estimation on several criteria (e.g. 'impact of the initiative on the yearly survey pain points', 'contribution to the overall IT Strategy')
- Alignment on prioritisation and capacity
- Final selection and drawing of the conducting line for the 7 initiatives

Agile Portfolio governance

Implementation of a sustained process to follow up the initiatives progression and an adaptable process to change priorities if required for IT & HR leadership
Setting up of a physical & digital visual management for the reporting
Creation of a reporting support with visual management, managed by all initiative teams
Creation of the process to ensure the governance of the IT teams strategy:
- Implementation of a Governance Review happening every 6 weeks where IT & HR Leadership as well as teams gather to analyse the results that each initiative is producing, discussing risks and removing impediments
- Creation of an Initiative Planning happening right after the Governance Review where every team plan their coming 6 weeks workload
- Implementation of Initiative Standups happening once a week to follow up the progression of each plans and to synchronise initiatives
- Implementation of a Governance Review Preparation to prepare the next Governance Review and give the opportunity to all teams to align