Applying Agile in business teams

The Vodafone Consumer Agile Pilot started when Matt Williams, then Director of Consumer business unit decided to bring agile mindset and ways of working to his business teams. The success of his Mobile Prepay, Mobile Postpay and his Broadband portfolios hinged on making the transition smooth and efficient. Vodafone experience with Agile change was limited so partnered with Radically to bring our expertise and knowledge to support the business goals.

Kicking-off Agile Pilot Teams

The Consumer Agile Pilot was designed, and this required a ground-up build of everything. Teams rebuilt in a cross-functional manner. New ways of working designed and rolled out to these new teams. From there the day to day coaching and support proved invaluable across the board, from the stakeholders and leadership team all the way to the teams working on the customer problems on a day to day basis.

There were some challenges along the way, understanding what Agile methods and practices worked best for the teams and what would not be necessary, deciding those in true Agile fashion by running experiments on a sprint by sprint basis. Figuring out how to handle the friction caused by high performing Agile teams dependency on non-Agile teams and vice versa. Deciding the best way to handle critical impediments the teams were not able to resolve and what the role of leadership was in the whole process.

Using Learnings from pilot to start Agile Transformation

Through all of these challenges though, everyone involved in the pilot grew. The team was learning by identifying the best fit for purpose processes and methods, and leaders got to flex their Agile muscles and this would be needed when Vodafone moved to scale the Agile transformation to a much wider set of the business.