Overview Avanza Bank underwent a comprehensive agile transformation to address internal inefficiencies and enhance its market responsiveness. Initiated by a need to overcome inter-team dependencies, increasing lead time to change, decreasing staff motivation, and leadership silos, the transformation sought to implement systemic changes across the organization, aligning with its customer-first culture. The Challenge Initially, Avanza’s structure comprised component teams that had naturally evolved as the organization scaled. This setup, while beneficial in the early stages, had led to deepened dependencies among teams, slowing down decision-making and product delivery. On average, teams depended on >5 other teams to complete their work. Visualization of how many teams a standard project…
agile transformation at Avanza: a case study
Agile Transformation (capital A and T) and agile transformation. Same words, vastly different concepts. An “Agile Transformation” is a cookie-cutter product that anyone can buy off the shelf. It comes with manuals, guides, predefined role descriptions, and everything else you need to get your organization looking and sounding like an Agile organization. Plug and play! Some call it the starting point and some call it all you’ll need, because it’s better than whatever you have today, right? “Agile Transformations” are a tool on the tactical level, and, while there’s certainly some value in them, I believe there’s more value in lowercase a and t agile transformations. agile transformation is a…
Case Study – Optimizing Cycle Time for Data Center Maintenance
Overview Most teams do not measure lead time and cycle time [1], missing opportunities to improve their system’s value flow. Here’s an example of how a data center team I worked with managed to reduce their cycle time from 32 days to 5 days by starting to measure it. Initial Setup and Discovery We visualized our work on a physical board and tracked our metrics manually because the available tools (Jira, Trello, LeanKit Kanban) did not meet our specific needs. We did not know what we would discover, but once we measured our metrics, we learned that our cycle time was significantly higher whenever work involved scaling a part…