The Human Capital Project came about
because the Bank had much stronger evidence
that human development outcomes directly impact
on economic growth and poverty reduction.
We've all known it's intuitively important to make sure
that all kids are healthy and well educated,
but now we know it's really important for the development
of countries as a whole.
And so we were trying to help countries to see
how they compare on making progress on these important
health and education outcomes,
the ones that really track directly to growth.
And our bosses set us a really ambitious goal
to come up with an instrument that we could actually present
to countries to really show how well
they were doing relative to each other.
I think you would probably expect a year
to deliver something like this.
The time we were given was very short,
it was just three months.
So we were up against a very serious deadline.
It was a hard deadline, because the index had to be launched
at the Bank/IMF annual meetings in Bali in 2018.
And so there was no getting past that,
we just all had to be delivered and done.
So Agile, like the World Bank,
we think of it with two different meanings.
There's capital "A" Agile and lowercase agile.
The Bank is trying to be lowercase agile,
trying to be more nimble, more efficient, more effective.
To do that, we pull from capital "A" Agile the method,
the principles, the tools, the techniques.
We started with regular check-in meetings even before
we were seated together.
We collectively designed an open space.
I also think that one of the things that the Agile mindset
brought was this idea of sprints, right,
so we had a number of core deliverables.
And we were able to define those and sort of bring
our collective energy almost sequentially.
We were blessed in some ways that we started
with a new team.
And that allowed us to think right away about
how could we utilize a cross-functional team?
How could we work in iterative ways?
How could we focus on minimally viable products
that then build?
How can we generate as much value as possible
for our clients--internal and external?
We utilized an open space, we had large whiteboards,
we maintained a backlog of ideas and activities.
All of these things were agile ways of working
that we basically just used as our normal mode of working.
One of the reasons I like Agile
is because I think it turns our organizational structures
upside down, and it empowers the frontline teams.
Often I think in big bureaucracies there's a real breakdown
in communication between the frontline team
and the senior management.
And this actually creates a direct channel if you like.
Because the way the teams approach solving their problems
and the sense that they get that they can actually
take control over some of the things that they feel
are standing in the way of them being successful is really,
in a way, it's revolutionary.
And I really hope that that can be a great legacy here
at the World Bank, because we've got great, fantastic people
working in our frontline teams.