Agile at scale

Agile

A legacy accounting system presents a significant risk to businesses, opening the door to cyber criminals who want to steal financial data. In enterprise businesses, the accounting system touches every facet of the operation, making it a rich target for cybercrime and a complex programme to take on. When Allianz Commercial needed to upgrade their accounting system, they turned to big consultancy. Three years and millions of Euros later, the programme hadn't even started. The Impact The key challenges were identifying business critical processes, so they can be replicated, understanding which data was important so that it could be migrated properly, and turning a large, disparate divisional enterprise business into a single cohesive unit. Progress had completely stalled. It was clear that the programme required a different approach. The organisation needed to cap the sunk investment, reduce reliance on consecutive consultancy firms, remove complication and switch focus from theoretical iterations to relentless delivery. This would add simplicity through a single, executive-sponsored framework that the business could communicate internally to all major stakeholders. The new delivery approach would reduce duplication and friction in an inherently siloed divisional environment. Methodology The programme needed to move from a complex structure of advisors to one specialist and properly incentivised delivery provider. This would create a single source of the truth and a central fulcrum for the programme. We selected the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as the right approach, structured around disciplined Program Increment (PI) planning cycles. We reconfigured resources into an array of teams representing Finance, two development teams and an infrastructure team, all using a common language of change. They began working to the same cadence and communicating freely, under the supervision of a central coordinator with appropriate authority, all under the servant-leadership of a Lean Agile Centre of Excellence (LACE) At each collective planning session the teams were able to demonstrate progress with a level of detail and data that had previously not been possible. Suddenly, project success was measured in weeks, not in months or years as had been the case before the change. The Outcome Within the first eight weeks, our new process had deployed more functional code than in the last three years combined. Every division was showing progress. Within 18 months, the organisation had a complete, tested, modern, secure, and functional financial management system. All data had been migrated with staff fully onboarded, with completion achieved at a fraction of the previously sunk investment. Thanks to its proven success, the SAFe methodology we developed was adopted throughout the business's change management function and over the next 12 months was applied in every change where iterative delivery was the right choice.