Miłosz Stachaczyk
Head of Product & Agile Consultant
This is a real engagement, anonymised for confidentiality. The client is a mid-size bank operating in Central Europe with an internal IT team of around 40 engineers and 6 project managers.
When I first met with the Head of IT, the picture was familiar: 18-month delivery cycles, bloated requirements documents that were obsolete by the time they were signed off, a 60% on-time delivery rate, and a team that had lost confidence in their own estimates.
The CTO had decided to move to Agile. The problem was that nobody on the team had done it before, and they'd been burned by a failed Scrum implementation two years earlier.
We started with a structured IT process audit. I interviewed all 6 PMs, the lead architect, 4 team leads, and 3 business stakeholders. The findings:
- No shared definition of done - Requirements sign-off process taking an average of 6 weeks - No backlog prioritisation framework - Daily standups that were status reports, not blockers discussions
Rather than imposing a textbook Scrum implementation, we designed a model that fit the bank's constraints. Two-week sprints. A simplified backlog with 3 priority tiers. A definition of done that included security review (mandatory in banking). A Sprint Review that included one business stakeholder per team.
The first sprint was rough. Estimations were off. Scope crept in mid-sprint. Two ceremonies ran over by 45 minutes. This is normal, and we used each retrospective to fix one thing.
By sprint 6, the team had found their rhythm. Velocity stabilised. The definition of done was being applied consistently. The business stakeholders started showing up to Sprint Reviews voluntarily.
At the 90-day mark: delivery cycle for a standard feature reduced from 18 months to 8 weeks. On-time delivery rate increased from 60% to 88%. Team confidence, measured by a simple survey, improved significantly.
The transformation is never finished — but the foundation was solid.
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