Agile techniques at CBA needed to secure funding

A three-year initiative to overhaul the Commonwealth Bank's approach to developing new digital platforms is still hamstrung by last millennium funding practices.

A shift to Agile development techniques which allow rapid software prototyping means that the bank no longer requires comprehensive product requirements to be documented in advance. But executive general manager of digital channels, Lisa Frazier, yesterday acknowledged that development funding is still tied to annual strategic planning and comprehensive business cases.

Given the rate of technology-fuelled disruption facing the sector, Frazier told delegates attending the Agile 15 conference in Sydney yesterday that she had needed to develop a workaround in order to properly fund Agile projects.

"We do one business case once a year, then have a monthly meeting of the executive to move money in and out of that," she said. In practice, this meant allocating funds to projects according to business priorities which are largely determined by CBA staff working in Agile teams - known as scrums and guilds - in the bank.

Frazier, who joined the bank in 2012, said that she had 800 people skilled in Agile techniques on her books, and that there were many more Agile enthusiasts across the bank. ITNews this week reported that CBA had 144 Agile projects currently underway.

What has yet to catch up are some of the back office processes. Besides the funding challenge, Frazier said she had also revamped the way compliance was addressed.

She said that in the past, CBA's compliance team was only brought in at the end of a systems development project to ensure that a product or service met regulatory requirements before it was formally launched.

The problem with that approach is that if a product is complete, and the budget spent, learning at the last moment that it does not comply with regulatory requirements represents a huge waste of resources.

Now the bank runs fortnightly risk and compliance workshops, allowing compliance to kick the tyres on software much earlier in the process when a design can still be tweaked or pivoted.

Frazier acknowledged that there had been a mixed reaction to Agile from the executive ranks of the bank, and that she had occasionally had to run "Agile Anonymous" sessions to encourage senior leaders to participate in the process.

However, she said that, while, "yes, we were the freaky people at the beginning", adoption of Agile practices was increasing across all areas of the bank as the benefits were recognised.