Project
Agile governance and portfolio management in the Financial Service industry
Challenges
The subsidiary of an international bank had launched an innovation initiative to enable idea generation for the digital age
- This initiative was very successful and resulted in a multitude of different projects
- Too much work was in the system resulting in:
Lack of transparency of all the projects simultaneously launched and worked on, a lot of duplicate work, too few finished projects, a general sense among employees of being overburdened and at their limit - Also, there was not enough alignment among members of the Board of Managing Directors regarding the value-add of the digital initiatives, since almost 100% of the current business was generated by traditional value streams. A clear strategic view on what and how digital initiatives contribute long-term to company success was missing
- Ultimately, a new governance and steering structure needed to be found for gaining speed and quality in decision-making
Our Approach
After two meetings with the board, it turned out that the issues lay deeper and were more complex than everybody had expected
- We set up monthly 4-hour workshops with the entire board to discuss and decide on more agile approaches to: Strategy development and alignment, creating transparency and estimating the work involved in different initiatives, portfolio steering and decision-making
- We worked with representatives on the divisional level and set up pilots for different approaches to test their feasibility and acceptance in a digital innovation environment
- We enabled employees vertically in these pilots to work in more agile ways to get comparable results
- We aggregated the findings and discussed those in the board workshops to adjust approaches
- We agreed on new processes and ways of decision-making on board level to be reviewd on a yearly basis
Results
- A new governance and steering process for innovation and digital projects was set up, enabling better and faster portfolio management
- Innovation accounting KPIs were adopted resulting in quicker and more substantive pivoting / start /stop decisions
- Transparency over the entire portfolio was established for the entire organization, paired with a stringent entry process for new innovation projects
- C-level and C-1 level were enabled for the newly developed language, processes and steering models
Lessons learned
- Balancing “new” and “old” business portfolios in a risk-assessed way without cutting off innovation (ambidexterity) is a challenging task
- New ways of working take time to be explained, understood, tweaked and adopted—also for C-level
- Not taking the time and cutting short discussion will result in failure
- Data-driven decision making is not always loved
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