Collabify case study · Delivery leadership

Empowering Engineering Teams in Financial Services

From a group of individuals taking directions to teams that decide for themselves.

case-study --teams --ownership --flow

Headline results

decisions: one manager → the teams
flow.metrics: none → cycle time, velocity, defects
sprint.reviews: status reports → live demos

Context

An engineering department in financial services, organised as three Scrum teams.

Challenge

The teams worked as groups of individuals following directions from a development manager, who was also the architect. Team members were left out of strategic decisions, and their involvement stopped at sizing the backlog.

Approach

  1. Decision-making in the teams. Decisions moved into sprint planning and daily stand-ups.
  2. Deeper backlog engagement. Teams discussed the reasoning behind stories and added technical debt and infrastructure items themselves.
  3. Refocused stand-ups. Stand-ups changed from status updates to focused discussions about progress against sprint goals.
  4. Shared retrospective actions. Actions were spread across the team, building accountability.
  5. Metrics and real reviews. Cycle time, velocity trends and defect rates were introduced, and sprint reviews became live product demos.

Results

Decisions got faster, morale rose, collaboration improved, and the teams adapted successfully to remote working.

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