Case Study
International Investment Banking Company Drastically Increases Agile Maturity with AgilityHealth®
A very large investment banking company embarked on a top-down maturity assessment initiative across its organization to move from waterfall to Agile, led by their Agile transformation team. The team implemented AgilityHealth® across 1,500 teams (now 2300), saw a marked increase in flow (speed) metrics of 26% including release frequency, a 37% increase in the throughput of their teams and a 53% jump in leadership maturity.
With an average program engagement rate of 98% over the course of two years, this company is dedicated to measurement and continuous improvement, and consistently finds value in the qualitative and quantitative insights that AgilityHealth provides.
Challenge
This investment banking company was trying to measure maturity in disconnected areas of the organization with homegrown assessments and Survey Monkey surveys, and couldn’t measure the maturity of their Agile and non-Agile teams. They had output related metrics from their ALM but that wasn’t enough.
As a result, they didn’t have an effective way to measure their Agile transformation efforts in a scalable way. They wanted to measure maturity, performance and adoption of new tools and methods all at once across 23k people and provide actionable data for their leadership for where to invest to accelerate the overall productivity of the organization.
Solution
AgilityHealth Continuous Improvement Program
The AgilityHealth platform was selected for its scalability, security and capability to manage large enterprise needs.
What we did:
- Program vision and ‘why’ was communicated broadly from central program team
- Different portfolios identified internal program leaders and data collectors
- Assessment was customized and tailored to meet specific needs. A custom maturity model was created
- Training and certification for 400+ facilitators and 200+ managers related to the program
- C-level buy-in and communication of the program goals was critical
- Data for all teams was uploaded and synchronized using a file automation process
- 1500 teams completed the assessments (2 weeks), attended facilitated retrospectives and built team improvement plans (2 weeks)
- Managers analyzed organizational obstacles emerging from teams and committed to ones they will work on (2 weeks)
- This process is now repeated across 2300 teams a few times a year.
Implementation Process
Explore the 5 implementation steps below to learn about the process
The joint strategy sessions defined the scope of teams, target facilitators, data sources, identification of stakeholders, configuration needs and building the rollout roadmap and timeline. Given the size and scale of implementing the platform across 1,500 teams at the same time, we developed a 2x2x2 strategy to accomplish this.
Based on the custom maturity model, we created an org structure view of the radar to rollup data based on this company’s reporting structure from the teams to the CIOs. In order to keep the team and organizational data synchronized, we created a file integration system wherein the company provided us with multiple daily updates to their team, team member and organizational structure data which we processed to update the platform (which continues to this day). We chose this model to enable large amounts of data to be synchronized without manual intervention while still adhering to strict security requirements.
This step includes certification for 400+ AgilityHealth Facilitators (AHFs), program overview for leaders, managers and scrum masters.
This step included execution of communication from leaders related to the Continuous Improvement program. Plus, assignment of facilitators to teams and scheduling of retrospectives and readouts.
Successfully launched assessments for 1,500 teams (now 2300). Executed a 2x2x2 strategy to launch assessments to all team members to take independently in a 2-week window. During the next 2 weeks, retrospectives were facilitated, followed by 2 weeks of managers and leaders reviewing organizational level improvements and prioritizing them.
Results
Flow (process) metrics significantly improved
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People metrics drastically improved
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Conclusion
Overall, performance and maturity metrics experienced double-digit growth as a result of using AgilityHealth assessments on a consistent basis.
The organization’s adoption of its new Agile model was embraced by lines of business that were highly engaged, as shown by leadership’s commitment to resolving impediments and listening to their team members’ input. Leadership desired a holistic view of maturity and performance, the ability to analyze patterns and implement improvement plans – with the end goal to provide value to their customers.
Without AgilityHealth, the new Agile model’s impact would have been slowed and the results would not have been easily visible.