ANZ catches up to rivals with “agile” work practices

Pizza’s optional, but “agile” working teams are now so mainstream they’re almost compulsory, even for ANZ.

​Across the financial services industry, eyebrows remain fixed in the elevated position after ANZ Bank’s announcement that it would blow up its hierarchy and adopt the “scaled agile” work practices used by leading digital companies such as Spotify and Google.

The reason for the bemused looks?

Well, there’s absolutely nothing new about going agile — not here, not overseas, and certainly not among the other major banks.

All three of ANZ’s domestic rivals have implemented agile work principles, arguably at scale and dating back many years, to respond more quickly to customer needs.

It’s the way of the future.

The traditional way of organising the workplace around silos and a production-line approach is unable to cope with a fast-paced, ever-changing business environment, where updated products and apps need to be pumped out every six weeks or so instead of once a year.

Small work “scrums” of about seven to ten people are formed using the two-pizza rule coined by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who believes that the most effective teams should be no larger than two pizzas are capable of feeding.

The theory is that more people only create bureaucracy and get in the way of quick decision-making.

Agile principles enabled ANZ to progress the Apple Pay initiative from concept to market in under 10 weeks, with the bank already using the technique in about 20 per cent of its projects.

Elliott’s agile-based transformation will start in the Australian business, where it will be launched at scale early next year.

Meanwhile, across the road in Docklands, ANZ’s neighbour National Australia Bank, started going agile about 10 years ago in its wholesale and markets business.

It now has more than 8000 people using Jira, one of its agile tools.

Agile is also widely used in its technology and digital teams, as well as the digital bank UBank.

More recently, it’s been extended into NAB Labs, nabtrade, marketing, and the net promoter system team.

The new mobile banking app, launched late last year, was developed using a full agile approach, including a number of 90-day “sprints” to deliver certain components.

Westpac is no different, with about 35 per cent of the bank following agile practices.

The figure rises to 95 per cent of the New Zealand information technology team, compared to more than 30 per cent for the Australian IT team.

Agile is already in place for areas such as digital banking and implementation is scheduled for key customer/banker relationships, including consumer and business banking.

Across the group, 53 per cent of major projects follow agile practices, including wealth manager BT’s platform project Panorama and the new payments platform.

Commonwealth Bank, for its part, started using agile about five years ago.

At any one time, the bank has 45-50 scrum teams working on digital apps, with a further 150 delivering projects to other parts of the bank.

More than 3500 people have been through agile programs so they can deliver apps that rely on a customer’s intuitive thinking rather than an instruction manual.

It all goes to prove the maxim that game-changing announcements in banking are extremely rare.

In the end, it comes down to execution.

Richard Gluyas’ next Four Pillars column is in tomorrow’s paper​.