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Like many transformations, BMG’s transformation started on the technology side, which began by creating squads—small, cross-functional teams that could deliver software more effectively and more quickly.
This, I believe, is a relic of the way internal technology organizations in non-software businesses developed: as service organizations whose job it was to install, maintain, and operate third-party computers and software that could be used by “the business.”
if the bank could focus the conversations on creating behaviors
Ingrid and her teammate Jeroen Schouten, BMG’s business architect, began the process of socializing and building support for the idea of outcomes. They met first with Robert and Paul Koopmans, the bank’s COO/CFO.
The Working Group included representatives from across the organization—from Mid-office, Sales and Account Management, Finance, Treasury, and the Change Team. This cross-organization representation was critical—because this is “the business.”
The key difference: It’s possible to build something that no one uses.
This is a simple but powerful transformation in the way work is tracked and managed and in the way that progress is communicated. Instead of discussing features, epics, story points, and velocity, the conversation about this initiative is very simple and stark: Are our customers using the technology that we’re building? And, if so, how many?
CEO Robert told me, “If someone comes to me with a proposal, then I challenge the individual: What’s the outcome? What’s the impact? Does it move the needle in one of our six important [strategic] Impact Categories? If it does, then I’m a sponsor.”
How would the manager of an iOS mobile app team work on a broadly-defined initiative like re-engaging customers? Sure, she can do it within her limited scope, but wouldn’t it be better to coordinate her team’s activity with the folks running other customer touch-points? What about with the marketing team that’s responsible for SMS and email outreach? What about the print advertising team that works on flyers and leave-behind promotions in retail stores?
“We wanted to do it, but we realized that we’d have to change nearly everything,“ Eric told me. “The way we took work in, the way we prioritized, the way we executed on work and tracked the results.”
In outcome-based work, teams need to be really clear about the value they are trying to create, and they do this by specifying two critical outcomes of the work: the outcome they are seeking for the customer or user, and the outcome they are seeking for the business.
If we create this outcome for the user, it will deliver this outcome for the business.
“A lot of it was about focusing more on wireframes and lo-fi design, both with users [during pre-release testing] and with developers. So we’re making fewer assumptions and focusing more on early engagement between devs and designers.”
They started by wiping the slate clean. They threw away their backlog of work. The whole thing.
One stakeholder, Jeff Levy, Head of Consumer Marketing, recalls, “frankly, it wasn’t going to get done anyway. We didn’t lose anything except the false hope that it would get done.”
To do that they broke the year into quarters, and began holding goal-setting meetings with the executive leadership. The idea was to understand and agree on the top three outcomes executives wanted to get to in the next quarter. “We have annual goals,” Hellweg said, “but we look at them each quarter to find the top three near-term goals.”
A crucial difference this time was that they asked stakeholders to be more outcome-oriented. Instead of requesting features, “the ticket submission template asked for the problem, the hypotheses, baseline data, and what they hoped to achieve.” Emily told me. ”That made everything more problem-focused.”
It turned out though that simply asking stakeholders to think about outcomes, while a step in the right direction, wasn’t effective. Emily continued, “I would then go meet with the department heads as a group to prioritize the tickets. I remember that I initially asked them, “What do you think the priorities should be?’”
“In the next meeting, I asked them to talk about what they were worried about. It was night and day. They started telling their stories about their business.
