Our financial institution is responsible for upkeeping of several community banks in United States which in turn are responsible for the financial upkeeping of American Citizens. But due to recent COVID pandemic, many of the businesses suffered terribly. To prevent shutdown of smaller business, government announced Paycheck Protection Program, an economic stimulus plan. The community banks were tasked to immediately pass on the relief to the citizens. This required creation of an application platform which can accept loan applications from the bank customers, allow the banks to process the application and finally submit it to the SBA for its approval.

This is where our company had the first tryst with Intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurship allows company employees to behave like an Entrepreneur while working within a large organization. A team of 8 Developers, 3 UX designers, 2 QA and 2 Architects started working on creating a platform from the scratch. Within a span of 28 days, an entire E2E application was ready for the use by borrowers as well as the bankers. A total of 436 releases were made over a short span of 28 days. More than 100 thousand lines of code enabled the processing of 1.4 billion-dollar loans which helped our community to survive the pandemic.

This group of developers was acting as a small company just like entrepreneurs who were free to take decisions. The velocity at which the application was developed led to one of the fastest deployments in the production environment in the entire company’s history. At one point of time, the leadership team comprising of this group were working with the developers to process as many applications as possible. A combined process involving the principles of Scrum and Kanban were used to facilitate the entire program. Multiple sprints were running in parallel to ensure round the clock development. Kanban board was used to track all infrastructure level tasks. Team members were distributed in 2 shifts so that we were able to work round the clock. This entire journey of 28 days allowed us to feel how entrepreneurs work and gave a sense of achievement to the team members.

This case study proposes an Agile framework for adoption of new technologies in an existing team. Considering the present scenario, everyday new technologies are being introduced in the market to increase quality, efficiency, and speed. If the organization does not adopt new technologies, it will become obsolete in the market in comparison to its competitors and will soon run out of business. However, the challenge is to upskill the existing team or replace the entire team and to do all of this in very short durations. Replacing a team is not always feasible due to investment, moral ethics as well as due to the existing domain knowledge possessed by them. So how do we help a current team upskill as well as continue to deliver their current commitments, along with implementing their new skills in new requirements.  Failing in the adoption could be a huge impact on investment infrastructure as well as team morale, not to mention sprint failure towards customer delivery. Thus, failing was not an option for us. In this case study, we will come to know how we were not able to use agile practices in the current form. We will learn how we found out a way to hit the balance between learning and day to day work but also to identify the best way forward with high success rate.  As you participate in this case study discussion, you will come to know how we handled the challenges, what worked for us in terms of agility, team moral and at the same time meet business commitments.

In our situation, we had to adopt block chain technologies to start delivering new solutions as per client expectations in decentralized finance. The current team had knowledge in programming as well as possessed profound domain insight. The main challenge in the adoption was the vastness of the blockchain technology as well as the complex intricacies of creating an application using it. And to compound to the difficulty, we had to create a learning path from scratch for the team. All this was supposed to be achieved without effecting the current deliverables which were already in the pipeline.

We turned towards Agile methodology and ended up creating a technology adoption framework using Scrum and Kanban principles. You will come to know that it is technology agnostic and can be used for adopting any of the technologies. We started with a minimum version of the framework aimed towards ramping up the team with the new technology. As we started our journey, we kept on enhancing the framework using the experiences accumulated in implementing the previous draft version. We made sure that the team is motivated enough with the help of awards, incentives, learning opportunities and senior management appreciations. During the presentation, you will come to know that we were not only able to ramp up the team as well as we create a deliverable product, all within the stipulated time frame. We further got brownie point by promoting design thinking as well as intrapreneurship principles within our team. We will talk about this entire case study, the framework we developed, the success criteria and the sense of accomplishment which the entire team felt.