How Agile By Design Nurtured the Growth of the Agile Team
THE CHALLENGE
Scotiabank's Global Payments Group (GPG) was well along the path to transforming a fragmented working environment into an Agile model, managing to expand its small team-based initiative into an ecosystem of autonomous yet interdependent units. By being intentional about scaling rather than allowing it to happen by accident, and by expanding Agile concepts to embrace larger contexts, the payments group managed to grow and maintain its newfound identity and shared purpose.
But there was frustration among frontline “edge” teams. Edge teams were dependent on a centralized platform group to build capabilities dedicated to making developers’ lives easier—deployment pipelines, cloud environments, monitoring, a common-event platform. That group mandated universal tools and products, which often didn't fit the edge teams' needs.
THE APPROACH
Agile By Design and Jonathan Galperin, then a technology director with Scotiabank, saw a different way. Rather than mandate tools, products and features to the edge teams, a new modelwould send the tools, expertise and support the teams needed out to the edge. Rather than have the edge teams send requests to the centralized platform group, where they could languish for weeks or be dropped entirely, an enablement team would market its services to the edge. This approach reflected a fundamental premise of the Agile model: Work should flow out from core enabling teams to edge, market-facing teams, not vice-versa.
Under team lead Vlad Vracaric, this platform engineering team spent the majority of its time working where the developers worked, as travelling team members. Early in relationships with the development teams, the travellers would spend most of the time listening: What tools were they using? What products? What were the pain points? Then they would go after the low-hanging fruit, the tasks with an immediate return inefficiency for the edge team. The team estimated bespoke features using cost of delay based on developer time saved. They also measured the usage of features and used that to guide their focus.
The travellers used the same visual management tools, linking them to the edge teams. This allowed them to develop strong relationships with a number of edge teams, while still keeping focus on each team's individual goals.
THE IMPACT
Importantly, the teams used a modified return-on-investment metric, which calculated ROI based on development hours saved. Within months, the investment was breaking even; within a quarter, it was in the black. After a year had passed, the impact was massively positive.
Taking the enabler approach at Scotiabank brought the solution to the edge team, rather than responding in isolation to team demands. This allowed Scotiabank to focus on providing solutions that fit the purpose, rather than imposing hierarchical mandates.
“Helping people is always useful. Mandating that someone take your help, never helps.”
-Jonathan Galperin, Former Technology Director, Scotiabank
