One of the largest banks in Middle East with over 10,000 employees and over USD 180 billion dollars of total assets had been three years into its Agile transformation journey. With team members in different countries, cross-team communication and dependency tracking were major challenges.

 

Few teams had Agile ceremonies implemented well especially for more digital products whereas majority of the legacy support teams were only utilizing basic Scrum ceremonies. The bank, headquartered in Dubai, had gone through initial Agile training with fundamentals of Agile, Scrum and Agile roles but the team size had drastically increased over the course of few years. The leadership team wanted an external firm to come and perform an Agile maturity assessment and help them create the transformation roadmap for the next few years and train their internal Agile coaches to perform these assessments iteratively in future.

The bank engaged Agile Brains to assist with their Agile maturity assessment initiative. Our team of Lean-Agile consultants from United States and India embarked on their journey to United Arab Emirates and started with an initial charter with the leadership team. The assessment was scheduled for the 36 Agile squads currently supporting delivery teams. Our assessment included Interviews with leaders including IT and division heads on current structural and organizational challenges. It allowed us to Identify and current and future training capabilities available to the squads for future delivery.

 

For each squad, our coaches conducted interviews with scrum masters, product owners,

team leads and members on current and future state of Agile delivery. We also observed the teams in action, attending the agile ceremonies for individual squads not limited to daily

standup, backlog refinement, sprint review, sprint demo and retrospective and evaluated he current state of backlog including user stories. Each team had a maturity health radar created with a detailed SWOT analysis for their people, process and tool-usage.

 

One of our biggest goals was to provide a baseline for the bank to evaluate Agile maturity for each team and create the recommendation path for improving maturity. Agile Brains also partnered with the internal Agile Center of Excellence within the bank reviewing the playbooks and role-maps created for internal use.

Agile Brains was able to spend a few months and evaluate all the Agile squads within the bank and train the internal coaches to do future engagements in-house with minimal support.

 

• Tailored current state evaluation for Agile transformation within the bank

• Delivered 36 health radar charts including current role challenges, process-roadblocks and tool-usage recommendations

• Trained the team of 15+ internal Agile leaders to conduct future maturity assessments in-house

• Created the internal training roadmap for training scrum masters, product owners and team architects

• Created 4-6 hour-boot camps for training teams on Agile concepts including user story writing, estimation, prioritization and retrospectives

• Proposed Agile day events for the bank to be conducted twice a year with success stories from product teams

• Shared and finalized training and coaching plan for the next 12 months to improve Agile maturity within the bank