Taking the Agile Transformation Journey

TAKING THE AGILE
TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY
FINANCIAL SERVICES
TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY:
PERSPECTIVES ON NEW IT

At the same time, firms should remain
vigilant about ongoing regulatory
compliance—which can be a moving
target—while reducing operational risks
and time-to-market, staying ahead of the
competition, and embedding top talent into
the business. Finally, in today’s increasingly
digital environment it is imperative that
firms tightly align business with IT.
What all this adds up to is that firms now
have an overarching strategic need for
agility in their organization so they can
quickly respond and adapt to their evolving
business environment and thus deliver
greater value in every area of the business.
These days, clients demand and expect
that businesses will be able to rapidly
change in order to meet customer needs.
Many smaller players, such as startups,
are much better at doing this and thus
pose a risk to larger players. The
solution? An agile transformation across
the enterprise that embraces iterative,
cross‑functional collaboration to harness
the full potential of digital technology.
2 TAKING THE AGILE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY
It’s a hyper-competitive and ever-changing business environment
out there. Financial services firms find themselves pressured from
many fronts to innovate faster, better, and with escalating frequency
to achieve customer‑pleasing services, greater operational
efficiency, and improved return on investment (ROI).
WHY BECOME AGILE?

TAKING THE AGILE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY 3

For example, many firms have invested
in building up agile teams and Scrum
capabilities (a simple framework for
completing complex projects), but
have failed to fundamentally transform
front‑to‑back delivery capabilities across
their entire business and IT environments.
In a truly agile organization, every aspect
of business operations is engaged in
an ongoing cyclical process of discover
and evaluate, prioritize, build and operate,
analyze…and repeat (see Figure 1).
Experimentation, collaboration, iteration,
and a focus on the customer are key themes
throughout this process.
While the notion of adopting an agile methodology is familiar to most
financial services firms, the execution of an agile transformation is often
unintendedly incomplete.
WHAT DOES AGILE REALLY MEAN?

Figure 1. The Agile Way to Deliver Business Value
*A Sprint is a compressed period of time during which specific work or a task has to be completed
and be ready for review.
Source: Accenture, June 2017
DISCOVER EVALUATE ANALYZE
PRIORITIZE BUILD OPERATE
START HERE Conduct experiment
Assess external,
non-discretionary demand
(e.g. regulations)
Identify
technological
opportunities
Gather customer
insights
Empathize with
customers
Agile DevOps
Encourage collaboration
Scale teams
Create a flexible architecture
Extract and prioritize
with focus on customers
Build a strategic
themes backlog
Scrum of
Scrums
*Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint “n” Release “x”
Release
Iterations

Business strategy planning
Developing an agile strategy is an iterative
process that mimics the agile product or
service development process. Therefore,
strategic planning requires a strong linkage
between IT and the rest of the business.
A lack of coordination in the strategic
planning stage could jeopardize the
entire process. Budgeting issues should
be addressed up front as well, to avoid
a gap between traditional budgeting
and controlling processes and funding
an agile implementation. Misalignment,
misperceptions, conflicting priorities,
or failure to execute can stall or stop
the process.
Build
Sometimes firms have difficulty scaling agile
teams from the single to the enterprise level,
meaning the transformation never takes hold
across the organization. Additionally, many
firms continue to execute both waterfall
and agile projects, which is perfectly
acceptable. However, these projects need
to be synchronized for timeliness and
scope. Otherwise, teams could fail to meet
deadlines and delivery requirements.
Operations
Effective agile organizations should
have foundational operational elements
that support speed and flexibility.
Incomplete tool integration requirements
and a lack of automation in regression
testing, deployment, and infrastructure
provisioning is expected to slow or stall
agile development processes. Inflexible
release schedules can both impact and
reflect slow development speed.
Cultural transformation
Adopting the “agile way” is more than
simply implementing a new approach
to innovating. It requires a fundamental
culture shift and a strong leadership
commitment. Additionally, firms
should be able to both attract from the
outside and develop from within the
right skills, knowledge, and talent to
sustain agile operations. If any of these
elements are missing, we expect the
transformation to falter and full realization
of its potential to be compromised.
ROADBLOCKS THAT
CAN GET IN THE WAY
Transforming into an agile organization—one that is holistically able to
rapidly deliver innovation in response to new demands—sounds ideal
in theory. Agile transformation in practice can be a different story.
There are a number of common roadblocks financial services firms
might encounter along the way that can derail the transformation.
These roadblocks typically fall within the following areas.

Agile implementation of
enterprise strategy
The first is an effective agile enterprise
strategy, based on a decentralized definition
of the firm’s strategic themes. Customer
insights, market demands, regulatory needs,
and technological opportunities drive the
strategic planning process. “Success”
factors for developing this strategy include:
• Applying an evolutionary process
in defining what needs to be built
• Taking a collaborative and cross-
functional approach to strategic planning
• Leveraging an iterative and repetitive
planning cycle
Figure 2 outlines what this process could
look like.
Effectively implementing an agile enterprise
strategy involves moving away from project-
based planning to theme-based planning, in
which regulatory requirements, technology
opportunities and marketing strategy
mingle in a mix of continuously shifting
priorities. Cross functional teams work
together to brainstorm and identify the most
provocative opportunities and regulatory
requirements, which are then pitched
to the portfolio board and ranked within
the strategic initiatives backlog. Product
development is cued according to needs,
then pushed through the iterative cycle of
build and operate, analyze, and improve.
Mastering agile build at
enterprise scale
Agile teams, flexible architecture, and
efficient release management provide the
foundation for scaling agile capabilities
and approach at the enterprise level. At
this point in the journey, team Sprints (for
creating an incremental product release)
are synchronized into common program
increments. Timelines and architectures
are aligned to create releases and Scrum
Master roles are assigned on a program
level. Both onshore and offshore agile
teams are utilized to support these
efforts. By establishing offshore-capable
development and test environments,
firms can leverage different time zones
to accelerate development cycles.
Micro‑services and open APIs (application
program interfaces) create a flexible,
extensible architecture that can manage
diverse technologies while reducing
costs at the same time. A dedicated
release management function facilitates
ongoing management, verification, and
communication about the scope of
releases in multiple iterations. Application
release automation tools should be
applied to support continuous delivery.
GETTING STARTED
Establishing the right foundation for an agile transformation helps firms
avoid common roadblocks and sets the stage for desired results. There are
three key needs for achieving end-to-end agility throughout the enterprise.

Figure 2. Strategic Planning Process for Enterprise Agility
ENTERPRISE STRATEGY
• Consumer insights
• Market demand
• Regulatory needs
• Technological opportunities
PORTFOLIO
BOARD
2CreatePitch
Ideate
Prototype
Experiments
STRATEGY
LAB
STRATEGY
HACKATHON
1 Ideate on the Bottom-up Strategic Theme
3
4 Prepare
Implementation
Build and
Operate
5 Feedback
Strategic Initiatives Backlog
1
2
3
5
6
7
4
“ROI”
“VALUE”
“COST”
“RISKS”
“OPPORTUNITIES”
Source: Accenture, June 2017
Automation and collaboration
in DevOps
An agile approach drives increased
implementation speed, which translates
into reduced time-to-market and a
stable production process. DevOps
(Development and Operations) is key
to delivering this outcome. DevOps
combines software development with
operations in a collaborative environment
supported by automated processes,
resulting in fast but small incremental
releases of new features. The DevOps
collaborative operating model includes
full product owner accountability, quicker
team decisions around new features
to add to new releases, and greater
overall efficiency through toolchains
that handle incident management,
testing, deployment, and monitoring.

That being said, there are accelerators
that can help a financial firm become
agile much faster.
Engage stakeholders
Agile is more than a process. It’s a mindset.
Leadership is encouraged to reach out
to and engage all stakeholders early
and often—championing collaboration
through cross-functional teams across
locations and taking the right steps to
create a forward-thinking, proactive
culture of innovation and experimentation
in which performance is based on the
collective rather than perfectionism. Over
time, the organizational culture should
transition from doing agile to being agile.
Choose the right approach
While agile principles are fundamentally
standard, not all organizations are
the same. Every firm will have its own
characteristics and agile maturity level.
Therefore, best approaches will differ.
For some firms, Lighthouse or Showcase
projects are the best way to get started.
This might mean, piloting an agile
approach in a specific area, thus giving
firms the opportunity to highlight the
approach and its benefits, then apply
lessons learned to follow-on projects.
Other firms may want to start by creating
a complete agile business unit that covers
the entire value chain and then use
learnings to broaden the transformation
across the enterprise. In this model,
agile‑knowledgeable individuals can move
from one business unit to another to apply
their knowledge, experience, and skills
toward transforming the entire organization—
business unit by business unit.
Finally, firms have the option of focusing
on developing specific agile capabilities
in a step-by-step process along the
solution delivery value chain. Once
a capability, such as automation, has
been mastered, the teams can move on
to developing the next capability, such
as the scaling of a Scrum framework,
until the entire enterprise is agile.
ACCELERATING THE AGILE
TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY
The foundational elements for an agile transformation are fixed. All
aspects of the enterprise should be aligned under a strategic imperative to
discover and evaluate, prioritize, build and operate, and analyze the results
in an ongoing process of continuous improvement—whether in regard
to solutions and services intended for customers or internal operational
processes that make the business more innovative, nimble, and competitive.

Perform an agile capability
maturity assessment
At the outset, firms should perform an
agile capability maturity assessment to
identify the starting places for their agile
transformation. This assessment will help
diagnose current agile competencies,
evaluate strengths and weaknesses, and
drive an actionable plan for where to
implement agile capabilities and approach.
The assessment should be performed
across the following dimensions, using
agile benchmarks, such as these:
• Leadership
• Agile methods and tools
• Agile delivery team and community
• Agile supporting functions and
continuous improvement
“An agile road map defines capability gap priorities, feeds
into the overall organizational road map, and leverages
industry-leading assets and accelerators.”
Assessments will help reveal gaps in
current agile capability maturity levels,
around which the firm can establish
strategies and a path forward to bring
each capability to a maturity target.
These strategies should include high‑level
improvement recommendations,
quick‑win opportunities, and avenues to
improve capabilities through coaching.
An agile road map defines capability
gap priorities, feeds into the overall
organizational road map, and leverages
industry-leading assets and accelerators.

First 30 days
The first step in an agile transformation is
identifying the right executive sponsors and
key contributors (including business, clients,
regulators, and IT). This is accomplished
by asking the following questions:
• Where in the business is agile already
being used?
• Who has an incentive to leverage agile?
• Which current projects or services could
benefit from an agile approach?
• Which future challenges or opportunities
could be best addressed with an
agile approach?
The next step is conducting an agile
capability and maturity assessment
to identify the most beneficial areas
for transformation, followed by defining
the appropriate transformation approach
and creating an actionable plan.
First 100 days
In the next phase of the transformation, key
contributors should be fully engaged. This
is the point at which to consider additional
areas for transformation, based on a more
detailed “level 2” capability and maturity
assessment. This time period also presents
a good opportunity for completing an
agile showcase project to bring more
visibility to the process across the entire
enterprise. Finally, the first 100 days is the
time to identify and address any potential
roadblocks or obstructive stakeholders.
At this stage of the transformation, the
organization is ripe for a mindset shift.
Leaders should broadly communicate
tangible results as well as behavior
goals, focusing on the collective and
the abandonment of perfection as a
performance goal. Leaders should also
nurture new talent through empowerment
and by forming external partnerships.
GETTING TO AGILE IN 365 DAYS
Sponsorship for transforming to an agile methodology and mindset is
initiated from the top down. However, the actual implementation takes
place from the bottom up. By taking a 30/100/365-day approach, leaders
can engage the entire organization in demonstrating transformation
results quickly.
“Opportunities for deeper involvement of the business,
clients, regulators, and IT should be identified so that by
the end of the first year, all stakeholders and contributors
are deeply immersed in the transformation.”

While firms can achieve a great
deal in the transformation to
agile within the first 365 days,
the journey is never complete.
By nature, being agile is a
process of ongoing continuous
improvement. Creating an agile
mindset and implementing agile
methodologies are pre-requisites
for an effective transformation,
but the beauty of agile is that it
is a constantly evolving effort,
leading to ongoing opportunities
for improved performance.
Leaders and participants should
keep this in mind as they apply
agile throughout the enterprise.
Financial services firms are
encouraged to perform an
agile capability maturity
assessment with rigor. This
foundational assessment helps
firms diagnose their current
agile competencies, evaluate
strengths and weaknesses and
thus identify capability gaps,
and guide actionable decision
making on where to implement
agile capabilities and approach.
A JOURNEY
WITHOUT
AN END
First 365 days
Over the remaining days until the end
of the first transformational year, agile
capabilities should be scaled out to the
entire enterprise, based on learnings
from any pilot projects. Agile elements
should be fostered as “business as
usual” throughout the organization,
with all employees engaged in the
agile approach. Coaching and training
efforts should reinforce agile principles
to drive behavioral change. Those
employees who have become highly
skilled in agile should be appropriately
rewarded. Opportunities for deeper
involvement of the business, clients,
regulators, and IT should be identified
so that by the end of the first year, all
stakeholders and contributors are deeply
immersed in the transformation. Lastly,
toolchains and automation for agile
development, testing, and deployment
should be made available to all.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael Werder
Michael Werder, Managing Director,
Accenture Financial Services Technology Advisory.
Based in Zurich, Switzerland, Michael leads the practice’s
New IT offering group and related work, supporting
Accenture’s financial services clients in Austria,
Switzerland and Germany. With more than 15 years
of financial services and technology experience,
he works with technology and operations leaders as
they transform their IT to stay competitive in a rapidly
changing industry. Michael has played key roles in
transforming the operating models of some of the most
prominent players in the industry, embracing innovation
and orchestrating change across global organizations.
When offline, Michael enjoys spending time with his family
on the lakes and mountains of his beautiful home country.
Markus Prakash
Markus Prakash, Manager, Accenture Financial
Services Technology Advisory. Based in Munich,
Germany, Markus embraces new methods (such as
agile and design thinking) and technologies (such
as blockchain, security and resilience, and artificial
intelligence), and focuses on finding the most
effective ways of applying these for clients. With
more than 7 years of experience in financial services,
he has a keen interest in IT security, regulation
and innovation and one of his priorities is helping
financial services firms compete with agile new
entrants. At the end of the day, Markus finds a long
walk is a great way to unwind, and on the weekend,
he loves to hike and spend time in nature.
Markus Heise
Markus Heise, Senior Manager,
Based in Frankfurt, Germany, Markus specializes in
taking new technologies, including cloud computing,
and implementing them for clients, using an agile
methodology and design thinking. A thought leader in
agile methods and transformation, he is also a certified
Strengths Coach. With more than 14 years of experience
helping clients to move from a controlling mindset to an
agile mindset, he has helped transform organizations
to a new innovative collaborative management style
and a value-driven culture. In his spare time, despite
being of an age when other players are thinking of
retiring, Markus has taken up playing organized soccer.
Esther Recktenwald
Esther Recktenwald, Senior Manager,
Based in Frankfurt, Germany, she is a subject matter
specialist on scaled agile delivery and bimodal
delivery models, a DevOps transition lead and an
Agile coach. With more than 10 years of experience
in project and program management, she introduces
new agile delivery methods (lean, agile and scrum) to
clients, helping them in their agile transformation and
troubleshooting implementation challenges.
In her spare time, she loves hiking, climbing
and mountain biking, even participating
in the BIKE Transalp, the most spectacular
mountain bike stage race across the Alps.

STAY CONNECTED
Accenture Financial Services
Technology Advisory
www.accenture.com/us-en/financial-
services-technology-advisory
Connect With Us
www.linkedin.com/showcase/16197660/
Follow Us
twitter.com/TechAdvisoryFS
ABOUT ACCENTURE
Accenture is a leading global professional
services company, providing a broad
range of services and solutions in
strategy, consulting, digital, technology
and operations. Combining unmatched
experience and specialized skills across
more than 40 industries and all business
functions – underpinned by the world’s
largest delivery network – Accenture
works at the intersection of business and
technology to help clients improve their
performance and create sustainable value
for their stakeholders. With approximately
425,000 people serving clients in more than
120 countries, Accenture drives innovation
to improve the way the world works and
lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.
DISCLAIMER
This document is intended for general
informational purposes only and does not
take into account the reader’s specific
circumstances, and may not reflect the
most current developments. Accenture
disclaims, to the fullest extent permitted
by applicable law, any and all liability
for the accuracy and completeness of
the information in this document and
for any acts or omissions made based
on such information. Accenture does
not provide legal, regulatory, audit, or
tax advice. Readers are responsible for
obtaining such advice from their own legal
counsel or other licensed professionals.
Copyright © 2017
Accenture All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture. 173636

Taking the Agile Transformation Journey

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Taking the Agile Transformation Journey (20)

More from Accenture Insurance (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Taking the Agile Transformation Journey