Agile by Design employed agile principles to form an effective, autonomous team
The challenge
By 2015, Scotiabank was well into pursuing a company-wide makeover towards greater use of agile methods and tools. Business and technology professionals from across the bank were allocated to a new digital organization. The bank spared little expense to make this vision a reality: Digital offices with a new hipster aesthetic; executive training; advice and coaching from Tier 1 consulting firms; the works.
The bank's Global Business Payments Group (GBP), like many of the other “traditional” business groups, was not directly involved in this transformation. Agile-related investment, for better or for worse, had not yet made its way to the payments group.
GBP’s ways of working needed a rethink. The fragmented group was functionally divided between business and technology, further chopped up by functional expertise—developers, analysts, testers—and by system, with some groups falling under completely separate areas of the bank. Offices were on separate floors or in separate buildings, their only commonality being the ubiquitous, overflowing file drawers jammed into any vacant space.
GBP's tech and business project management offices operated as entirely separate, siloed, and sometimes competing entities. The most telling sign of dysfunction was the working culture. Offices full of people were eerily silent. There was little evidence of active collaboration among staffers. Work seemed to be done largely in isolation.
GBP started the path towards agility cautiously, forming a team for one of the more sizable target outcomes: A traces and recall solution for electronic funds transfer (EFT) payments. Traces and recalls was an interesting challenge. While the customer-facing front-end of the traces and recalls solution seemed quite simple, the back end touched on many systems and platforms—and thus, many working groups, each with their own language and protocols and goals. Clearing that cross departmental fog demanded a team approach to deliver in a collaborative way to achieve a meaningful market outcome.
The approach
To deliver value, teams must work directly with market actors to achieve real market outcomes. Teams must have the skills to work autonomously—and the power to do so with minimal interference.
There is a wealth of Agile practices to choose from to help create the modern team and a frame to help members react to feedback while continuing to grow and learn. Agile By Design chose these to build an effective team at Scotiabank.
Team space
A dedicated physical space dramatically accelerates people’s ability to team. GBP’s history of minimal collaboration was amplified by functional separation and physical distance. Annexing a highly visible executive corner office for the project gave the team a sense of place, and a dedicated venue for the team’s information radiators.
Radical transparency
Radical transparency—both in terms of the problem and the workspace—can be valuable in the transition to a team-based regimen. In our high-profile corner suite, we story-mapped every customer flow, along with the behavioral flow among front- and back-office systems. We mapped high-level outcomes to thin slices—small and testable increments of system behaviour. We created a Kanban—a physical representation of a human system wherein work items are posted as cards on a board to visualize progress within a process—with individual swim lanes for each system team's work, giving visibility into the ownership of functional and systems experts. Most importantly, our display signalled to the organization that we were designing a new way of working centred around teamwork.
Cross functionality
Like most traditional enterprises, Scotiabank is rife with overspecialization. A team approach must strike a balance between the value of deep, specialized expertise with a completeness of skill sets to allow a team to function autonomously.
Our story map helped us tap into our core subject matter experts to source the rest of the team. Color-coding every story according to system skill set allowed us to the right people for each system. Guided by the story map, we identified new members whom offered up their insight, pulling in additional team members. After a few such iterations, we had (most of) our team.
When we put teams together with diversity in mind, we bring distinct skill sets, ranges of experience, and a mixture of perspectives. We bring the right skills to the team instead of relying on management to move work across departments.
Frequent market Feedback
Autonomy can allow teams to make rapid progress toward an irrelevant end. Frequent market feedback keeps a team on track and aimed at the right outcomes. By thin-slicing work, a team can deliver smaller increments of value to the market. At Scotiabank, our thin-slice approach quickly revealed ideas that didn’t really add much value to the end process—we could narrow the scope of the overall initiative.
Operating norms
Effective teams will often establish a set of operating norms to help align and interact with each other as a team. Agile provides a specific set of operating norms for planning, review, improvements, and daily coordination. We instituted biweekly planning meetings and retrospective sessions, as well as daily stand-ups. The visibility of these meetings paid unexpected dividends, generating interest and enthusiasm throughout the group.
Stability and dedication
Dedicated full-time members are necessary for a team to gel; the roster must be stable, not ad hoc according to other departments' convenience. This stable social boundary increases the efficiency, effectiveness and engagement of the team.
The impact
Autonomy is the overarching goal of a team-oriented approach to systems development. This independence allows a team to pivot to respond to a fluid environment without impacting other autonomous teams. Rather than relying on management to structure cross-department efforts, the right skills are brought to the team. This makes diversity a cornerstone of the team: a diversity of in-depth skills, breadth of experience, and mixture of perspectives.
This iterative process gave Scotiabank an approach to autonomous management for the traces and recalls department that is agile and still alive. It would be a starting point to rolling out an agile development ethos across the Global Payments Group.
