Ellis has been an enthusiastic agile and lean practitioner since 2014, having helped to deliver various business and technical transformation as an analyst, coach and change manager. His career has taken him from Procter & Gamble, to working on Government transformation projects with Accenture and now HSBC where he is leading the business agility practice within Retail Banking & Wealth Management Transformation. He has a passion for language learning, speaks Mandarin Chinese and enjoys reading, thinking, and speaking about culture.
Topic
Combating uncertainty with business agility in a traditional retail banking environment
Abstract
Context
Retail banks are facing shrinking revenue streams and increasing margin pressures within the fast moving financial environment. Customer communication preferences have evolved, with a shift towards online channels for transactional services, while maintaining a desire for human interaction in more complex scenarios. These changing relationships have influenced HSBC’s Wealth & Personal Banking (WPB) business to invest significantly in digital capabilities over the last few years, giving birth to a series of standalone online propositions and mobile applications. Such circumstance has led to an influx of new people who come equipped with digital tooling, methods and mind-sets that continue challenge traditional ways of thinking and the so called “status quo”.
The Problem
The number of agile change teams organising around backlogs, incremental plans and visual work boards is increasing all the time. Some describe this as a new form of work culture, others look at it as an improvement to the delivery process, and a better way of realising business value. The creation of Rewards+, a credit card loyalty app in Hong Kong, is one example of where agile adoption has led to a genuine positive impact on the external market. However, use cases like this are somewhat isolated to particular pockets of the organisation – the “early adopters” – which, to an extent, have greater autonomy than the norm. Beyond engineering, a typical change programme will involve people from marketing, propositions, risk, legal, compliance, as well as interaction with the bank’s physical branches and contact centres. To meet the need for greater ‘flow’ across silos, the Business Transformation team has had to evolve, combining new work practices with an evolving leadership style to increase its flexibility and enable greater collaboration.
Presentation Overview
This talk aims to provide insight into the agile journey within WPB (Wealth & Personal Banking); the good, the not-so-good and plans to evolve further. It is a personal story which describes experiences at the team level, how this shaped a broader transformation, and why moving onto the business side shifted perception of what agile really means.
The content is divided into three parts:
- Starting with teams: Learning at the coalface
- The case for agility: “Big A” to “Small a” agile
- Making it matter: connecting to strategy and leadership