What was the motivation behind putting yourself up for this award?
We wanted to recognise the hard work and achievements the project team made adopting an innovative approach while delivering an innovative programme. It’s a great opportunity to recognise the value our colleagues bring to driving innovation for our clients and consumers.
The project you have entered
The Open Banking programme was mobilised to pursue opportunities resulting from new regulation which compelled banks to make transaction data from consumer accounts available. These opportunities resulted in new Experian innovative products being developed across both B2B and D2C markets to ultimate help consumers empower their personal data.
The successful outcomes of the project
A plan is already in flight across the organisation to make it more agile and embed innovation.
- Ultimately the project achieved its ambition in line with the Experian mission to ‘Unlock the power of data’ and continues to do so as Open Banking becomes a norm in the financial market place.
- As part of this we have completed a program to change how teams physically sit together with office moves across the entire Nottingham estate. Teams are organised into value streams enabling relevant product, development and operational teams to work more closely together. This move impacted approximately 3,500 colleagues.
- A programme is underway to review current infrastructure and tools. Where these rapid change, improvements are made to enable the organisation to quickly respond to customer needs, react to changing market conditions and improve customer experience.
- An innovation programme is underway to shift away from the traditional approach of proposition development. This programme focusses more on innovating against many ideas and quickly funnelling out those which do not have the required value. A culture shift of failure being seen in as an opportunity to learn is evolving through this programme.
The innovative approaches used
The Open Banking programme was the first adopter of the SAFe Agile methodology in the UK integrating multiple organisations and business lines. For many, this introduced new concepts and delivery practices knitting together teams exposed to agile (scrum / Kanban) with those typically operating waterfall. The key risk of innovation was resistance as this changed working practices across all teams. As a result, we phased in SAFe over time. We innovated by introducing concepts over 4 programme increments using the scaling of Mt Everest as a visual to evolve team learning and adoption. Throughout the delivery cycle, an education programme was in place to introduce and embed tools and techniques.
