Reduced Time-to-Market with Agile Transition ( Case Study)

Agile has long crossed the scope of the IT industry. It has found use and application in almost every business setup. Financial organizations are no exception to this. I am Mark and I am a PMI-ACP certified project manager. In this case study, we will have an overview of Agile transformation for a Financial service provider which became a client of mine recently.

Overview of the company

The company in question is a Financial service provided and has clients distributed over various geographical space, business spectrum and field of operation. With this much diversity, the company realized that its traditional project management setup will not be prompt in addressing the client's needs. They believed that the Agile methodology could be an answer to their problem. Although they were positive, they understood that the transition might not be smooth and might require considerable investment in terms of time and money.

Objective

Inspired by the Agile success stories, the company was willing to invest in Agile technology. The initial objective was to reduce the time-to-market for the applications. The company was also interested in training their employees on Agile methodologies.

Challenges

The major challenge for the company was to respond to the ever-increasing competition and making their process prompt enough to address the diverse business solutions that they had to create for their clients and deliver high-level business solutions with minimal investment.

With the initial analysis, I discovered that the company also faced challenges because of:

• Requirements of detailed documentation
• Complex quarterly planning
• Phase-gate approach to software development

The company desired smooth transformation to deliver high-value solutions along with ways for the better follow-up process.

Solutions

After carefully analyzing and understanding the business, it was clear that the transition for a stand-alone process would have created more issues than solutions because of the high interdependence of various systems. The solution to this would have been an organization-wide transition.

In order to maintain uniformity, the usage of a common ALM tool was suggested for all the teams.

As one of the major objectives was to train the employees on Agile methodologies, setting up of Agile coaching center was suggested as well. Rallying the leadership team around for an industry-wide change roadmap was suggested as well. A plan was designed leveraging Scrum, XP, Lean Start-up and other change approaches and techniques. It started with Scrum then XP was introduced in the teams. Lean start-up approach was taken for Product Management which helped only in building features for which the customers were interested in the product.

Result

With the Agile coaching center up, the PMI-ACP certified professionals worked with the rest of the teams to deliver high-quality products to the market quickly and consistently. With the new system in place, there was increased visibility into the product delivery obstacle.

With the plan being executed, the company not only saw a smooth Agile transition but is also set to invest more in optimizing its processes.