How do you make a bank as proficient in new ways of working as the people doing the teaching?

The challenge

The success of any operating model depends on the skills of the people who put it into practice. In its quest to become a truly customer-focused organization, Sainsbury’s Bank devised a Future Operating Model. The challenge was to ensure that the new skills, knowledge and ways of thinking within it were available among the people implementing it.

Sainsbury’s Bank needed a training provider that could deliver on the immediate need for new skills while embedding the resulting new capabilities right across its organization.

Approach

Our training work with Sainsbury’s Bank was based on our Value, Flow, Quality (VFQ) principles yet bespoke to the context. Crucially, this was not a single activity. Its sequencing, its depth and its spread were geared to deliver lasting impact.

Through our Learning Skills & Capabilities approach, we established an Enterprise Change Lead Pathway to create a cohort of self-reliant Agile coaches within the bank. We established two Agile development teams so the bank had a clear roadmap for building and scaling processes to meet the ongoing needs of its Future Operating Model.

Finally, we established a Product Management Pathway to instill the skills and capabilities to define, develop and launch products, services, and features that customers love.

In my experience, it’s rather rare for a consultancy of your caliber to devote so much time as you did at the very start really getting to know our organization’s needs and aspirations, and quite simply making our context your business.

The fact that you did all this while also adopting such a strong partnership to developing pragmatic work-based solutions that met our unique needs, resulted in our colleagues experiencing a very relevant, high-quality and engaging learning journey that produced a real mindset shift.

Thank you for all your passion, commitment and flexibility to delivering such a great experience and for making it so much fun too.

Head of Capability & Resourcing, Sainsbury’s Bank, Claire Marr

Our impact

The results of our engagement with Sainsbury’s Bank are best measured by the capabilities and impetus for change among their own people.

One Agile development team led a Customer Journey Mapping workshop and challenged her team to really get to know the customer.

Another Agile development team worked with the Audit team to understand the flow of their work. Then how to optimize it to reduce waste and delays in the pipeline and to improve the way it contributed to the business.

An Agile development team created a task board, and initiated Scrum ceremonies with her team to support the visualization, prioritization, and flow of work within the team. Also collaborated on a new discovery process, enabling her team to work more closely with their internal customers.​

Meanwhile, another Agile development team encouraged groups to articulate needs through relatable User Stories before testing their work with consumers to keep on adding value.

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