No Longer Struggling with Agile
The Challenge A top financial institution recognized a need after they found themselves struggling with Agile. They understood the importance of incorporating Agile, but had a poor initial experience with trying to apply Agile and were looking for a partner who could make their “relaunch” a success. As a big supporter of Agile, especially Scrum, the CIO was willing to shine a spotlight on the organization’s challenges and put the right resources in place to implement an Agile strategy.
The Solution The client chose to have Watermark Learning develop and deliver a customized Agile Boot Camp training to meet their specific needs as well as provide a custom Agile Leaders Workshop so that management knew what to expect and how to best support Agile. Just as importantly, they turned to Watermark Learning to provide onsite and virtual coaching to maximize their investment in Agile skill development and rollout.
The Benefits Having buy-in through a key stakeholder, like the CIO, is extremely important and beneficial because a company and its people need to be open to change with the right management to support it. After the completion of the Agile Boot Camp training, team members began implementing an Agile strategy immediately as part of their project planning process and have developed a successful Scrum team structure. This in turn has established internal customer satisfaction and a more timely delivery of project outcomes.
The organization will have further coaching onsite and virtually from Watermark Learning to help support and apply skill development, as well as uncovering other areas they want to improve upon.
Going Forward Following Agile Boot Camp, they had Watermark Learning deliver an additional course called Consulting Skills to Solve Business Problems, which supplies a formal process around internal business consulting with effective methods like asking the right questions, objectively analyzing issues, gathering supporting data, and to recommend areas for improvement. Next steps include meeting with the PMO Director and Business Relationship Manager to find other areas that need additional coaching, skill development, and assessments in order to fine-tune their projects and portfolio management.
Revamping Project Delivery
The Challenge An insurance company that provides solutions for customers to better manage their risks and grow profitably, was challenged with finding a way to move multiple insurance products from their legacy system to an enterprise system and have those projects move in parallel as opposed to one after another. The need for Agile as a project approach was recognized by the Application Development Director for the promise of completing projects more quickly in parallel, and without quality suffering. Some teams were using a hybrid version of Agile, applying it inconsistently, and were unsure how to make it fit their needs.
The Solution Three different groups, including IT contractors, attended a one-day Agile Boot Camp workshop to learn Agile basics, Scrum framework, developing the backlog, sprint planning, and self-organizing teams. An Agile Leadership session was facilitated for leaders to help with buy-in to Agile principles and to help remove barriers to adoption. Most attendees were from the business side as opposed to IT, which helped them in understanding the projects.
“Agile Boot Camp was a great overview. Provided touch points of end-to-end Agile and we can identify where we want deeper knowledge,” said one participant.
The Benefits
- Watermark Learning's solution adapted real world examples to educate people and in answering questions.
- The approach helped revamp their project delivery.
- The client applied tips and techniques to improve daily leadership of teams and was able to challenge how they approach projects and work today.
- Participants gained a better understanding of the scrum process, including incorporating daily scrum meetings.
Watermark Learning offers comprehensive Agile and Scrum training and mentoring to help discover and define business needs and achieve enduring results. Click here for an overview of how we can make it work for you.