Agile development, Agile management: How to keep teams productive, wherever they are

Consultant Deloitte says forward-thinking CIOs are distributing Agile practices across global teams and creating flexible enterprise IT departments that deliver great results quickly, while a recent report by digital transformation consultancy Contino and Tech London Advocates suggests tech chiefs are helping to change mindsets, introduce new processes, and redefine their business’s digital capabilities.

Gary Delooze, CIO at building society Nationwide, has spent the past 12 months helping his globally disparate IT organisation to embrace what he refers to as a distributed Agile way of working to help counter the challenging circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic.

While he’s always been a keen advocate for Agile, his team’s use of the working style – which involves the application of the principles of Agile software development to business-related tasks – ratcheted upwards during 2020. 

Evidence suggests that’s been a growing trend during the past 12 months. Experts claim Agile management produces benefits in two key ways: it gives workers the empowerment that research suggests they crave, and it frees up leaders to focus on higher-level tasks, such as refining strategy and developing new business models. The challenge for Deeloze now is to keep up that momentum in his organisation.

“So we are now challenging ourselves to say, ‘Well, we did it through the pandemic, what’s stopping us doing it that way forever?’. That’s really challenging some foundational thinking and we’ve changed some of our models and ways of working,” he says.

The company’s first distributed Agile teams worked out of the company head’s offices in Swindon. The IT department’s workers are now spread across a series of Agile teams working in not just Swindon, but also in London, India, from home and even from the firm’s branch network.

“They’re using collaborative technology and they’re now doing daily standups through Microsoft Teams; they’re working in a fully remote way,” he says. “I thought doing Agile in that manner would be one of our biggest challenges. We seem to have – I’m not going to say we’ve fully cracked it – got the majority of the way to making that work really well.”

One explanation for this successful shift is necessity. Like other CIOs, Delooze recognises that a big move to a distributed work model before the pandemic would have required a long period of thinking, including analysis, debate and executive agreement.

That drawn-out process changed in 2020 as COVID-19 created a need for rapid change. Rather than considering how employees might potentially work in a distributed way, the coronavirus pandemic and social-distancing requirements meant the organisation simply had to work in an Agile way. “And we’ve worked very hard to make that work,” says Delooze.

Teams work on a range of digital transformation initiatives. Project progress and best-practice lessons are shared via virtual whiteboards and collaboration toolsets.