Anthony Mersino — June 10, 2020 Do you think that your organization is too large or too old to succeed with Agile and Scrum? Think again. This success story describes how Bank of America successfully transitioned to Agile and Scrum, proving that Agile can be made to work in a large and established organization.
Read about how the leadership team for the Global Markets at Bank of America successfully transformed by investing in Scrum Training and Agile Coaching. The move from waterfall to Scrum was the firsts step in a broader Agile Transformation which was led by key Agile Leaders.
Agile Transformation: Going All In!
The Agile transformation in Global Markets at Bank of America began in late 2012. The Director of Global Markets Technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch wanted to improve the time to deliver solutions and reduce key person dependencies across the 100+ people on his technology team.
He recognized the need for a framework to help organize teams around products, share knowledge, and deliver solutions in a predictable way.
The Director and his leadership team went all in on Scrum. They led by example and took Scrum Master certification training themselves before planning Agile training for the rest of the organization and key business stakeholders.
They provided an environment where people could experiment and take risks. They empowered team members and even went so far as to allow the team members to organize themselves into cross-functional feature teams capable of end to end delivery. And they hired Agile Coaches to help them apply Scrum effectively and reinforce the new habits.
Within 6 months, the leadership realized there was no turning back to their previous ways of working. Within a year, the organization had achieved its goals of predictable delivery and the elimination of key person risks. Plus, the framework provided a means for continuous improvement.
The agile success story for Bank of America Agile included the following:
1. Leading by Example
The leadership team went first in terms of their Agile and Scrum training, and several of them made personal sacrifices to add value to the organization.
2. Outside Expertise
Rather than try to do it on their own, the leaders invested in outside training for Scrum and brought in Agile coaches to help reinforce new habits and ways of working.
3. Managing Expectations
Expectations were properly set that Agile would not be a silver bullet that would magically fix the organization. In fact, everyone was told to expect it would be chaos for six months.
4. Developing Effective Product Owners
Product Owners with the proper budget authority and ownership were selected to work with the development teams.
5. Encouraging Slack and Scrum Team Experimentation
Rather than pounding the team for deadlines and throughput, teams were encouraged to plan up to 20% slack time for learning and team experiments.
A detailed report of the Bank of America transformation to Scrum is available free for you to download. Get your own copy of the Bank of America Client Success story below.
Will your team be the next agile success story?
This article originally appeared on Vitality Chicago’s Blog and has been republished with permission.
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