Innovation in a large scale agile organisation

Abstract

Agile methods seem to be the answer for today’s turbulent industries, and with it roots in software development, coincides neatly with the increasingly digital world we live in. ABN AMRO also decided to implement a large scale agile framework tailored to their company. Agile methodologies are known to work well at small scale and in an IT context, however at ABN AMRO they’ve implemented it for over 6000 employees from both business and IT departments. Unsurprisingly ABN AMRO faces challenges within this agile organisation. One area in which they’re struggling is managing innovation in a way that aligns with the flow of the tailored and scaled agile organisation. The objective was therefore; To design solution that better aligns innovation processes with the flow of the tailored and scale agile landscape. In addition, literature on large scale tailored agile transformation and innovation management within financial services firms is scarce. Both areas are relevant, however no research was found that combined these topics. Therefor in this thesis we attempt to find challenges for innovation management in a large scale tailored agile framework. In order to both find an answer to this question and help ABN AMRO the challenge was approached from two different streams. Firstly, a revelatory single-case study on ABN AMRO’s tailored agile framework served to understand how they tailored agile at such a large scale and what the challenges were. Secondly, through semi structured interviews with 18 ABN AMRO employees, their innovation management efforts were investigated as well as the challenges they experience with it. Both the challenges from a large scale agile perspective and the company-wide innovation management were merged into a set of six new challenges; “governance on innovation in the agile organisation”, “deficiency of exploration skills”, “getting innovation on the backlog”, “Lack of clear guidance & leadership on innovation”, “Dependencies & Limited Autonomy”, and “Organisational and Cultural legacy”. Based on these challenges a new design challenge was posited which was to design a solution that stimulates ownership and awareness amongst idea owners in the grid landscape towards customer problems and needs. This solution needed to provide clear guidance to enable autonomous and successful realisation of these customer centric innovations in the product and system oriented agile organisation. As a solution to the design challenge and in order to help ABN AMRO with their innovation management efforts, the “User Needs Integration Canvas” was created which is an innovation process that focuses on bridging the gap between customer needs and the complex nature of ABN AMRO’s agile organisation. This study further finds that agile methods don’t cover the innovation process in full, and thus extra efforts and support should go towards managing incremental innovation, the front-end of innovation specifically. In addition traditional financial service providers carry cultural legacy, lack innovation legacy and explorative competences. The role of the individual, with their skills, mindset and behaviour are imperative in in the journey towards a nimbler and more innovative financial service provider. There is no shortcut in becoming an innovative company, whilst a large scale agile framework is a step in the right direction, still a lot of time, effort and patience is needed beyond this step