Agile Delivery in Finance IT: Navigating in the Digital Age

Digital transformation captures the imagination of both optimists and pessimists. To the first group, digitization provides unparalleled entrepreneurial opportunities. To the latter, it breaks proven business models apart and erodes established revenue bases. Regardless of the perspective, to thrive companies need to sense unpredictable environmental changes and respond to changing customer needs - or, in short, exhibit agile behavior.
In Part I of this report, we make the case for contextual agility, or the ability to apply different agility modes depending on the circumstances. We develop the Contextual Agility Matrix to present four such modes: entrepreneurial (exploration focus), strategic (organizational change focus), core (operational excellence focus), and support (local autonomy focus).
Expanding the role of agility in digital transformation, we formulate four key decision alternatives that each CIO needs to take: Be a digital leader or follow the market? Embrace digital transformation or encapsulate digital initiatives? Rely on an agile workforce or on an agile technology base? And lastly, strive for organizational agility or software development agility?
With Part II of the report, we present four principles and eight associated practices of agile delivery that we unearthed through inquiring the IT departments of six financial services companies. We sought for insights that complement widespread agile delivery frameworks such as Scrum in IT project management and XP in software engineering.
The Agile Delivery Playbook describes ways to strengthen contextual agility capabilities, explores practices to improve organizational execution, presents approaches for decreasing engineering ramp-up effort, and offers suggestions for building IT capabilities outside the IT department.