(uplifting music)
I was the managing director and COO on an interim basis,
and the senior vice president of operations
of a very large, multi-lateral development bank
with global operations.
We came upon the agile way of working
because we'd really seen instances,
primarily at that time, in the private sector,
where it had done three things.
One, it had spread products to market.
It had led to higher level of client satisfaction.
And it had also had noticeable impact
on staff engagement and empowerment.
So, those were the key elements that we were after
to really change the organization.
We did a lot of initial analytical work,
to really get a feel for how things
were working within the organization.
We did work on a manager's span of control,
we looked at our operational processes,
we looked at how our performance management system
was working, we looked at our meeting culture,
and we looked at the way people were collaborating.
So I think the first thing we did
is tried to get a real basis
for what were the issues and what were the pain points,
to form a basis for how we moved forward.
And so first, we took a pilot approach.
Second, we took an approach where we really spent
a lot of time really working with the people in the pilots
to help them understand what it meant
to work in an agile way.
What the sort of agile techniques were,
such as stand-up meetings, kanban boards,
and things like that that allowed them to understand
how the agile ways of working, what they were,
and how they could utilize them more effectively.
The initial outcomes were that 90% of the staff
who were engaged in the processes
felt that they saved time and yielded a higher
value output for the client.
So there was, on the staff engagement,
there was an immediate feedback
that the ways of working were quite positive.
The research department did some work
and found that the agile had saved
sort of $8 to $10 million a year,
in the areas that it'd been implemented.
We were able to shorten processing times
and improve quality by ten, measurable, by 10 to 15%.
We also were able to achieve a shortening
of the loan documentation by almost 65%,
with some estimates would say that,
when rolled out across the organization,
that would save 27,000 staff hours.
So I think all of the initial outcomes
and the ongoing outcomes have been very positive.
There's one example, I think, that just recently,
the World Bank has put out a Human Capital Index,
which is an index that allows the assessment
of the level of human capital development,
and what happened there was that that was an index
that needed to be developed very rapidly,
and when they began the development,
one of the agile fellows was in the vice presidency
that was going to put together this index.
And because of the speed that it needed to be done,
they did it through agile techniques,
and I think they got it done very quickly,
and it's been very successful,
and I think that's an indication
of how much the agile way of working
is ongoing in the culture,
and how it's changing the way the bank works.