INTRODUCE AN AGILE CULTURE AND APPROACH

When it comes to operations, most companies are stuck in the past. This can negatively affect a company’s speed and adaptability to change. To be competitive in this digital age, businesses need to achieve agility at scale and move away from their traditional management structure and waterfall approach to project delivery (i.e. business requirements, design, build, test, deploy).

At Capco we help our clients with their agile journey by touching all elements of their operating model and addressing structures, governance, people, and technology. As part of the agile transformation we ensure the transformation instils collective ownership and accountability.

The transformation to agile entails a fundamentally new way of working, and is a revolution at the heart of the organization, driven from the very top and centering all activities on the customer and their needs.

While there is an ambition for a ‘nirvana’ agile organization, in reality the maturity shift needed is too great and risky to undertake in one go and a phased approach is required.

We believe that in order to succeed in the agile transformation journey phase, it is imperative to correctly scope, create and empower critical roles in the organization such as product manager, product owner, agile coach, scrum master, supported by the cross-functional pods who are responsible for delivering business value.

Culture within an organization is the key driver required for the agile transformation to drive a vision. We ensure a collaborative culture is achieved by focusing on the following:

• EMPOWERMENT: empower pods to manage their own backlog and self-organise to deliver outcomes. This is critical to motivation and embedding agile as a new way of working
• CREATE ONE CARING TEAM: there is only one team who own and deliver fantastic features. Remove cultural barriers that are preventing staff, Contractors, Consultants and Suppliers by having all Pod members on an equal footing and who care about each other’s welfare. We address this through creating a collaborative environment, a role sharing approach (T-shaped people) and inclusivity
• ENCOURAGE RAPID CREATION: ‘failure’ is okay, if the team learns from it and improves in the next iteration. We help create a culture of acceptance in the organisation for getting it wrong, learning and improving the next iteration
• HELP PEOPLE TO GROW: make agile a career choice that is rewarded with clear value for the individuals. A critical facet of this is to allow the individual to make their mark on the work they do and feel pride in delivery; enable this by encouraging pods to be creative and deliver world class features