Case Study Abbey - Introducing Agile into a Regulated Environment

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Prior to engaging IndigoBlue we spent nearly six months of planning to the point that we felt we had a clear understanding of our needs and had specified what we believed to be an optimum set of functionality. IndigoBlue helped us to understand where real value would be derived, and how to approach delivering this. Within 3 months of the 9 month project we had a production system on our directors’ desks.”

“At Abbey we were faced with the challenge of providing an HR reporting system to provide the Retail bank with reporting that included absence, FTE and headcount, turnover, vacancies and the main source of the HR data was PeopleSoft. In the broadest of terms we had created an architecture which moved data from PeopleSoft into a Data Warehouse against which we planned to initially deploy Microsoft Reports Services, or an in-house ASP reporting tool.”

IndigoBlue was engaged by the Information System’s group at Abbey to provide Agile services within a CMMI framework on a number of key projects that were felt not to be delivering as effectively as possible. IndigoBlue provided project management mentoring and consultancy services, assisting in running the projects and interfacing with the end user community. End user feedback on the business benefit and speed of delivery were excellent and a number of initially sceptical managers were bought into the process.

The overall programme was broken into a series of incremental deliveries, starting first with the technical platform, then against a set of objectives prioritised in terms of value to the business and the ease with which a successful outcome could be obtained. Coaching was provided by IndigoBlue to Abbey Delivery managers on how to use cards to prioritise the requirements in terms of business value, and the in-house team was organised into fortnightly sprints with a series of stories expressing the value of each work item in very digestible chunks. Developers paired together and moved to sit with the analysts and reporting teams to maximize efficiency of communication. Stand up meetings were held every day. Feedback was that this felt a bit strange to start with, but had real value when focussed in on three simple things against the plan:

• What progress had been made in the previous day against objective
• What was planned for today
• Are there any difficulties or uncertainties that need addressing before progress can be made

“As we increased in confidence we began to run retrospective meetings and then look forward meetings, the former to learn from the previous two weeks and the latter to plan is reasonable detail the next two weeks and in less detail the following two weeks.”