In today’s complex and ever-challenging regulatory environment, expectations from the regulating bodies are continuous and demanding. No longer are trade-offs allowed between quality and time. Complicating this picture is the journey towards Scaled Agile delivery that many companies are in the middle of.
Yet Agile, by definition, is exploratory in nature, allowing the journey to be defined iteratively. It has the trade-off of not knowing exactly where you are going to be, or when you are going to get there. In our experience, truly agile organisations, paradoxically, learn to be both stable (resilient, reliable, and efficient) and dynamic (fast, nimble, and adaptive). Nowhere is this stability more important than in the regulatory context.
How we work
Our multi-layered approach operates at both executive and delivery level, while also orchestrating the interactions between these two. Our skills and understanding are unique, bringing together knowledge in regard to the journey, the regulatory context, orchestration of complex programmes within the context of Agile, the knowledge of how to embed change within an organisation, as well as the pragmatism of knowing when to prioritise maturity over delivery, and vice versa.
We do this across the entire chain, from the executive through to the team level, without building an additional empire. Implementation is customised against your requirements, your maturity, and your ambition – we adapt to your needs.
Clients have often experienced that there is no shared ownership of the problem or that they are lacking control. The pressure of delivery deadlines and quality is felt almost tangibly by the senior management in the financial organisation. However, the delivery teams, while being committed and professional, often see control as a “bad word”, in fact the lack of control can often be perceived as a virtue – manifesting in freedom and flexibility – which are two cornerstones of the Agile manifesto.
Agile itself is not the issue, however, Scaled Agile cannot be implemented overnight. Moving to Agile itself is a journey that needs to be managed and supported, until the organisation is mature enough to understand their roles and responsibilities naturally.
Pieter Vrieleman
Senior Consultant