Sparking End-to-End Agility

Nationwide Insurance had a "Scrummerfall" approach, with long, linear, upfront planning cycles that eventually fed work to agile delivery teams, only to then have the completed work languish in further waterfall steps toward deployment. While IT had been agile for close to a decade, with around two hundred standing agile teams, business partners still struggled with inordinately long lead times for setting up projects, long waterfall requirements development cycles, and especially long funding cycles. In late 2016, the Enterprise Digital group began a business transformation to improve speed to market and increase flexibility in the highly competitive digital customer-facing channel environment. Working closely with LitheSpeed’s master consultants, the Nationwide executive team partnered across business and IT to successfully pilot an end-to-end model that is sparking business agility across the entire company. These “sparks” included reorganizing from functional silos to product-based value-stream teams, redesigning the business requirements process to achieve a continuous flow of minimal marketable products (MMPs) into the teams, utilizing big-room-planning techniques to create alignment across a wide set of stakeholders and dependencies, and creating a portfolio-level visualization system to track the flow of MMPs across multiple investments simultaneously. Join Sanjiv Augustine and Charles Kennedy to learn how they did it.