Case

Jyske Bank’s Capital Markets Development identified the imperative to enhance agility across various teams and improve their capacity to deliver customer value. To meet this objective, they enlisted the expertise of an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach.

The Solution: Over a 9-month on-site engagement at Jyske Bank’s Silkeborg and Lyngby locations, Rasmus Kaae worked diligently. His mission: to assist existing and newly appointed Scrum Masters, agile teams, and leadership in advancing their agile maturity and amplifying value creation for customers.

In the realm of coaching and support, Rasmus played a pivotal role, instilling a culture of continuous improvement among Scrum Masters and leaders.

Empowering the agile teams was a focal point, allowing them to assume greater responsibility and ownership across the entire development lifecycle—from design and development to testing and maintenance.

The emphasis on collaboration not only refined team dynamics but also cultivated a more cohesive and effective approach to problem-solving and project execution.

Addressing the challenges of work overload, the initiative underscored the consequences of simultaneous high workloads, accentuating the importance of maintaining high-quality standards and completing tasks effectively.

Successful onboarding and training of two newly hired Scrum Masters ensured their seamless integration into the agile framework.

Strategic discussions with the leadership team provided valuable insights and sparring on organizational design, aligning the structure with agile principles.

Expected outcome

Effective execution of strategy, early identification of dependencies, visualization of bottlenecks, capacity issues, business units can pull activities, alignment of initiatives across the organization.

The agenda for a big room planning is:

Welcome and setting the stage
Presentation of key deliveries and activities from the strategic initiatives
Introduction to the planning process
Planning and identification of issues and bottlenecks facilitated by business unit directors
Presentation of plan presented by business units with emphasis on the identified issues
Re-planning fix of identified issues facilitated by business unit directors
Presentation of plan with identified fixes
Wrap-up and evaluation

Preparation for business units

In preparation for the event, each business unit must get an overview of the customer-oriented roadmap and determine the deliveries for each month. This is to make sure that we only plan activities in business units with available capacity for a given month. We want the input to be as sincere as possible. No matter if the capacity is high or low.

Preparation for initiative leads

In parallel, the initiative leads prepare a range of inputs for the big room planning:

Key deliveries and expected month of delivery

– Ranked order of deliveries
– Activities with an indicator of magnitude of involvement, need for competencies, and target group

The key deliveries are placed in the top swim lanes of the planning board. This visualizes the combined plan for all initiatives. This plan is ranked and prioritized in a collaboration between sponsors and initiative leads before entering the big room planning.

In addition, the initiative leads facilitate a process of breaking down the key deliveries into activities identifying the magnitude of involvement, need for competencies, and target group from the surrounding business units.

Planning and identification of issues

During the big room planning, each business unit director facilitates a process of pulling relevant activities from the strategic initiatives into their swim lane. This is illustrated by a post-it in the chosen month for the actual business unit. The relationship between activities and strategic initiatives is visualized using different colored post-its, i.e., one initiative is written on yellow post-its and another is written on blue.

The business unit must consider their available capacity, the competencies needed for the activity, and if there are any synergies to relevant customer-related work. Identified issues and risks are illustrated by a colored post-it on the activity.

Re-planning and prioritization

When all business units are done pulling activities into their swim lane, the plan is presented in plenum to the sponsors and stakeholders. Initiative leads and sponsors validate if the plan matches the expected end state for the 4-month period. If this is not the case, the sponsors and business units must work together afterwards to decide which key deliveries must be postponed or changed for the plan to succeed. Depending on how the plan materializes, it may be necessary to rework the customer-oriented roadmap for the business unit because of the decisions made by the sponsors and stakeholders.