Find out where your organisation is and how you can improve
Do you have challenges balancing a deadline against delivering the best outcome possible? Are you facing issues fitting your delivery model into a predetermined methodology?
Many successful financial services organisations are using Agile to navigate their increasingly fast-paced and more digital industry. But it’s a methodology that’s often misunderstood - many think they’re doing it when they’re not, or their expectations aren’t matching their outputs.
It’s why we at Openbox encourage businesses to focus on the ‘Why’ - why certain Agile principles work (or don’t work) for you rather than blindly following a trend and hoping for the best.
But first you need to know where your organisation is today and ask if you’re Agile, Wagile or Fragile? It’s a question that will highlight how certain principles are impacting your productivity, and what changes you can make to improve.
What is Agile?
It may have been around for more than two decades but Agile still isn’t fully understood by everyone. In essence it’s a ‘fail fast’ product development philosophy that uses short sprints for cross-functional teams to work towards achievable goals.
Think of it like using a satnav system, such as Google Maps or Waze, when navigating a car journey rather than a paper map. You’ll start with your end goal and work in short bursts to get there, while constantly taking stock of variables like heavy traffic or road closures to plot the routes and detours you might use.
Agile leans heavily on an adaptive approach, where minimum viable products (MVPs) are developed quickly then iterated and improved based on continuous customer and user feedback. This can make it significantly more cost-effective than a traditional process - reducing preparation and planning time to ‘cut the fat’ from traditional protocols.
In financial services specifically, businesses are using Agile to try to keep up with customer demand by taking advantage of the methodology’s promise of getting value to consumers quickly.
Are you Agile?
The answer is likely to be yes, in some way. Agile has been rapidly adopted by the financial services industry over the past decade or so to the extent that, as of 2023, almost 70% of FS companies are using or piloting Agile practices.
The central tenet involves keeping the customer at the heart of your products - ensuring user feedback is collected early and frequently in development phases rather than the business dictating user needs.
And while Agile promises to deliver value to customers quicker and more efficiently, the popularity of it has levelled off - and even seen a very slight dip - over the last year or two, which tells us Agile doesn’t work for everyone.
Financial services as an industry deals with complex legacy systems and a heavy burden of regulation so it’s difficult, especially for large companies, to be as nimble as they need to be.
Agile does often lead to the development of digital products that are more fit for purpose than if they had been developed using a traditional ‘Waterfall’ approach. So on that basis, we at Openbox do see Agile working for most organisations in some way – just not using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.
Are you Wagile?
To understand how Wagile differs from Agile in financial services, let’s return to that car journey analogy.
Wagile – or a combination of Agile and Waterfall methodologies – is more like using a combination of an old-fashioned Ordnance Survey map (Waterfall) alongside your satnav. You’ll plot the main stops on your map, like overnight stays, but each day you’ll be led by your navigation system.
A hybrid approach is often borne out of organisations transitioning from one methodology to another, where they see the benefit of Agile or Waterfall in certain situations, or where Waterfall is proving difficult to move away from.
It’s true that Agile allows teams to adapt products as they go instead of designing first then building, which is important where constant change is a given such as in modern banking and digital finance. However, it’s also true that sometimes Wagile is the best methodology for you.
A lot of financial services companies are Wagile because full Agile doesn't work for them, largely because of regulation and system complexities.
Wagile is often a compromise between Waterfall and Agile but it can be a happy one that allows a company to deliver on its promises without massive upheaval.
Certain funding mechanisms within financial services companies are still based in a Waterfall approach from the beginning, for instance getting a project budget assigned and appointing a cost centre to charge to.
And when it comes to architecture, financial services companies often rely on complex, large-scale applications meaning long-term plans involving multiple teams are necessary – and much more difficult in an Agile-only framework. Architects should sit in delivery teams but only in an advisory capacity as they tend to design up front (which is very much a Wagile method).
When we talk about Wagile, we’re discussing a wide spectrum where some businesses are very close to Agile while others are not. The problems come when trying to be Wagile because you can end up with the worst of both worlds – and that’s the definition of a ‘Fragile’ organisation.
Are you Fragile?
What we mean by Fragile is that your organisation could be more robust by changing your approach or processes in some way to maximise your output.
The first – and often most obvious - sign of fragility is that your end-to-end delivery is stymied by the slow processes of someone else, either outside your team or your organisation entirely. It’s vital to remember that good processes can never defeat poor corporate structures because, regardless of your methodology (Agile or Wagile), any model will be killed by the breaks in the flow when your slick process runs into the poor process of another team.
It’s normal to be dependent on other teams and organisations, especially in financial services, but your end-to-end delivery will only ever be as good as the least productive element in the process.
A good example at Openbox was our support for a large enterprise, whose team had a great process but their delivery depended heavily on another. The other team’s front door process added six months’ lead time onto projects because they were so busy.
To remedy this, and provide a pragmatic solution in the short term, we supplied a dedicated resource into the second team to allow us to jump the queue.
It’s not only people and corporate structures that give us problems. The second sign your organisation might be Fragile is the relationship between your product teams and engineering teams.
Collaboration here is essential and should be like a choreographed dance but, often, it resembles something more like a tug of war for control.
A balance between the needs of the customer, a good product and the technical feasibility of a project is crucial and, ultimately, success will depend on the product and engineering teams’ relationship because almost always compromise is required on both sides.
At Openbox we see different viewpoints and objectives that lead to significant challenges because product teams want the best features to satisfy customers and the market, while the tech teams want to focus on security, feasibility, technical debt and performance.
Another clash often comes in the argument of time versus quality, where product teams want to get to market quickly but engineers want to fully test platforms and ensure everything is done properly.
A third sign that your organisation might be Fragile is when your people haven’t bought into your overall vision for change or are finding it too hard to do so. This can take many forms, including not taking part in Agile ceremonies or people falling back into old habits. Either way, this discord can only lead to increasingly difficult conversations the longer it is left to slide.
Six top tips to set you up for future success
So, having diagnosed your organisation – Agile, Wagile or Fragile – what can you do with this information? At Openbox, we like to set a few benchmarks that we consider to be good practice and will set you up for your next success.
They are:
Tip 1: Be clear about your methodology
At Openbox we have a proprietary approach that brings tech and product together as early as possible, which means everyone gets a view on what is desirable and feasible.
Tip 2: Develop a collaborative roadmap
Make sure you have representatives from all teams who’ll be involved in any given product to lay out your roadmap, so there are no nasty surprises for anybody later.
Tip 3: Establish cross-functional teams
When you set up your teams, make sure to do so with all the required disciplines involved, and empower those people to make decisions as they go.
Tip 4: Create a collective goal
Make sure everyone in the extended team knows what the goal is, as this will ensure everyone drives towards a common purpose.
Tip 5: Automate testing
Complex regulations can make this tricky in financial services, which does lead to most of our clients having a manual testing phase before go-live as well, but automated testing can be extremely useful to have. It means that, when someone makes a code change, you simply press a button and automatically test that the code performs the functions it should before passing it over for a manual human check.
Tip 6: Define your metrics for success
Make sure your metrics are relevant to everyone, useful, measurable and assessed properly. Metrics can be anything from short-term to long-term metrics, or they can be used at several levels. For example, this could include how the Agile process has worked, how staff feel like it is working or how happy they are using the processes you’ve established. The key is to make sure you know what you want to achieve and how to measure its success.
Diagnose and improve
Don’t be fooled into thinking Agile is a silver bullet that will solve all your problems – it’s not. Neither is it true that Wagile is wrong. At Openbox we’ve seen many businesses have great successes working in a hybrid way that suits them and what they want to achieve.
That said, some of the core themes contained within the Agile methodology will almost certainly improve any Fragile organisation – the trick is to find out which ones and how you can implement them properly.
And that might be something our experiences can help you with.
About Openbox
Kevin Ryan is Co-Founder of Openbox, the premium digital experience partner to the financial services industry that seamlessly connects technology and customer. He has been leading and delivering technical projects for the likes of JP Morgan, Clydesdale Bank and RBS for more than 20 years and is invaluable for his ability to simplify and explain complex concepts to stakeholders at all levels.
Openbox is armed with decades of experience and our consultants work with you to deliver high quality digital experiences that meet industry regulations and customer expectations, every time. Our dedication to exceptional collaboration and communication, paired with our deep industry knowledge, sets us apart from other digital experience partners. We work with you to drive successful digital adoption, strengthening your customer acquisition and retention. Be the only choice for your customer with Openbox by your side and be the digital experience leader in financial services.
