Agile Transformation

Strategy and Design - BT

 

Background

BT Consumer undertook large structural change in 2018, bringing the BT and EE Digital Teams under one leadership. Many changes swiftly followed, the most important being the decision to move all of BT / EE Digital teams into agile squads.

This would be a disruptive change, as ways of working differed greatly. Some teams already worked in fully agile teams, some were stuck in vastly inefficient waterfall processes, and most were somewhere in between.

A diagram I personally designed to illustrate the creation of agile squads

 

The ambition was to make the entire team agile, driven by creating customer value, and always working to the key principle of: Build, Measure, Learn.

 

Execution

A leadership team was created to plan, coordinate, and communicate this huge transformation. My role in this team was to represent the Design departments, across both BT and EE brands.

The team met regularly to plan the structure and composition of the new organisation. We also worked through huge potential issues, like how our new structure could work with the wider organisation, which was not changing so rapidly.

Communication was key throughout the process, and I personally designed diagrams, and collateral, to share progress and educate the wider team.

 

A key part of my role was to be an advocate for the Agile transformation, and help educate my team, and the wider design team, on the scope and detail of the changes.

With the initial framework decided, we moved to a series of workshops, constantly iterating, and ensuring the entire Digital organisation was engaged.

 

Results

By mid-2019, every team in BT and EE Digital had completed the process of moving into Agile Squads. Huge increases in efficiency and output were already recorded, with some squads more than doubling their optimisation output over the first few months. This is only the start of this transformation, however, as the process will constantly iterate, and drive further improvement.