Scotiabank enterprise agile and DevOps adoption

Situation

Global Banking and Markets had shown what a continuous delivery platform could do. The rest of the bank, more than 10,000 engineers, still delivered the old way: projects, hand-offs, a change process that ran on meetings. Wealth technology ran waterfall, with the costs to match.

What I did

Took the approach bank-wide. An academy that taught agile, DevOps and cloud to whole teams rather than to individuals, a playbook that said what good looked like, and a community of practice that grew to 465 people and carried the change after the coaches moved on. Ran the agile re-organisations, set up the DevOps teams and drove the migration to cloud-native infrastructure. Set the cloud vendor strategy with Google, Microsoft and Pivotal. Partnered with McKinsey on the agile transformation of Wealth technology, served as Wealth's interim DevOps leader, and replatformed the scotiaitrade.com onboarding platform on cloud and DevOps. At one point I took admin access to the ticketing tools away from thousands of developers, because the tools had become the work. They were furious. Delivery went up.

Result

Agile at scale went from pilot to the default way of working across the bank. Wealth technology operating costs down 12%.

What it took

Changing what people did on a Tuesday, not what the policy said. The academy and the community did more than any mandate could.