A west coast credit union with six decades in the business, over $800 million in assets, and more than 40,000 customers ran technology as four separate groups: development, testing, operations, and project management. Hand-offs were everywhere, and the culture needed a reset.
The challenge
Business chose the initiatives and technology implemented them, with decisions held by management on both sides. The leadership team knew training alone would not change how work moved. They wanted a partner to shift the organization from projects to products.
How we helped
We started at the top, with an Agile for Executive Leaders workshop that put business and technology leaders in the same room and made the transformation a joint initiative. Three coaches then ran value-stream mapping across lending, commercial, personal, and savings, prioritized the portfolio P1 through P4, and built cross-functional teams with business product owners and dedicated scrum masters. Sprint 0 launched three pilot teams, a role-based playbook was created, and Jira was restructured around customer products instead of functional groups.
The result
In four months the credit union trained over 15 leaders in Agile and design thinking and more than 120 employees in role-based workshops, delivered its first mobile app in a record eight weeks, and stood up an Agile Center of Excellence spanning business and technology. Time to market fell by more than 34 percent, and the organization's mindset shifted from project-centric to product-driven.