Agile tooling implementation at a Belgian Bank
Within the context of banking and finance, a major Belgian player was slowly but steadily shifting its way of working for IT infrastructure teams from predictive planning to agile. Initiatives have been ongoing for a couple of years already, and by now this new way of working was gaining a steady foothold.
The approach so far was not entirely cohesive, however – since no comprehensive guidelines were prescribed, agile existed in many flavours within the organization as the methodology was implemented bottom-up more than top-down. Teams were using a plethora of tools and techniques. As the organization grew more mature, some of the more successful initiatives pioneered as the de facto standard within the banking group.
One of the agile programmes was still using SharePoint Online for its agile planning, and the team had outgrown the tool rapidly. Projectworx assisted in the adoption of Atlassian’s Jira platform for managing the team’s workload.
What did Projectworx do?
After an initial assessment of the current way of working, the agile planning data stored and the ambitions of the team – including pitfalls of the current way of handling things in SharePoint online, Projectworx quickly set up a demo environment in the new JIRA environment to test the new way of working in practice.
Key stakeholders within the programme were involved, including programme managers, project leads and technical experts. Other initiatives within the bank were consulted on their lessons learned from early use of Jira.
Best practices were derived and a proposed way of working was put forward after consulting all stakeholders. The approach was deliberately hands-on, as improved user friendliness and speed of working was a key driver of the project. After deciding on a common configuration, Projectworx proposed a roadmap of shifting the programme’s operational planning from one platform to the other.
What did Projectworx deliver?
After delivering the vision of what the final agile environment should look like, an agile roadmap was proposed with key milestones at which different groups within the programme would shift work to Jira. To ease the transition, the shift from one programme increment to another was chosen as the cutover moment from the old environment to the new one.
During the transition, Projectworx provided assistance and support for everyone adopting the environment. Contact was deliberately kept informal and stakeholders were consulted face-to-face to keep feedback loops as direct as possible. Training material with step-by-step guidelines for the different parties in the programme was created and shared in an online collaboration site. A roadmap for continuous improvement was set up to allow the programme to learn as it would use the platform, and keep improving not only its way of working, but the configuration applied to the programme as well.
After adopting the platform, the team reported to be fond of the new environment’s ease of use. Project leads and backlog managers could now work in a platform that was more fit for purpose in terms of agile project management than the previous system. Jira not only allows the team to align with company standards in agile methods, but also provides the programme with a unified and transparant way of handling the team’s workloads across all projects.
Realized benefits
- Adoption of a fit-for-purpose agile project management tool
- Improved ease of use and responsiveness compared to the new environment allows members of all levels of the organization to contribute to reporting progress
- Phased transition of all stakeholders within a programme, supported by training materials and direct support from experienced individuals
- Better, and more transparent management of the programme backlog according to true agile practices
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