Solving Organizational Problems Using Agile
Overview
First launched by a group of MacDill Airforce Base personnel in 1955, Grow Financial Federal Credit Union (Grow Financial) is a leading credit union serving its members from over 30 branch locations across the southeast. Recognizing an opportunity to enhance IT delivery and work more effectively, Grow Financial sought AgileThought’s help to establish more predictable delivery using agile methods. Following a series of training and coaching sessions, Grow Financial saw immediate success in their IT department with increased transparency and effectiveness. Based on these results, Grow Financial stakeholders decided to leverage AgileIgnite to initiate an agile transformation across their organization.
Client Challenges
As part of the AgileIgnite offering, AgileThought conducted a two-week assessment — with multiple stakeholder interviews and thorough environment analysis — to determine the entire organization’s agile maturity and identify four key areas of focus:
- Determining a viable process and approach for executing and delivering internal projects
- Improving the prioritization of goals and objectives
- Establishing the appropriate team structure and organizational design
- Reducing organizational silos for optimal transparency and collaboration
Value Delivered
Predictable Delivery
Using the agile knowledge and techniques taught by AgileThought, Grow Financial IT implemented Scrum and Kanban with a focus on removing impediments and continuously improving its product development process. These agile practices enabled teams to hold themselves accountable to delivery goals. As a result, IT improved its work prioritization and reduced its work-in-progress to focus on the most impactful business items. Seeing this success, Grow Financial leadership asked AgileThought to scale these practices to all departments including the executive leadership team.
Transforming the Problem-Solving Approach
The AgileThought team helped Grow Financial leadership establish agile goal setting by defining Objectives and Key Results (OKR) and forming a cross-departmental Scrum team to focus on these assigned OKRs. This framework encouraged the leadership team to revisit goals more frequently and promote aligned autonomy throughout the organization. As Grow Financial continues to use the OKR framework and mature their agile approach, they now recognize the value of eliminating silos, improving cross-departmental communication, and increasing the transparency of their work.
Executive Portfolio Management
Based on the success of the cross-departmental Scrum teams, the Grow Financial executive leadership team asked AgileThought to help them with strategy execution. AgileThought helped Grow Financial form a cross-functional executive team and taught them how to manage their portfolio using agile leadership practices, such as employee empowerment, cross-functional transparency, and utilizing an executive standup. The team learned how to visualize their work on an executive Kanban board as a way to organize and drive the execution of portfolio products and programs.
