Host Intro (Gene Kim)

[0:02] All right, the first speaker of today is Jennifer Wood. She is the COO of Services at RBS, where she served for three years. I met her last year when she presented, and it was phenomenal. During my conversations with her since then, I was so impressed by her business perspectives, and I've learned so many interesting things.

[0:19] I'm going to share one with you. One of them was the way that technology transformed the business of banking. So before the advent of large telephone call centers and operation centers in the 1980s and 1990s, I didn't know that the majority of bank transactions were actually processed in the local bank branches.

[0:35] So that meant all the back office functions, like check clearing and even storage of all customer records, that was actually stored at your local bank branch. I didn't know that. That was one of many things I learned from her. So she will be sharing her story about her role at RBS in shepherding the technology transformation. It is breathtaking in scale, and I think what is so remarkable about her work is that she is working closely with almost all the top business leadership across the RBS family of companies.

[1:01] So I am so delighted that she is our first speaker for the conference, and I trust that you'll find her journey as intriguing as I do. Thank you. Come on out, Jennifer.

Jenny Wood

[1:16] So thanks for having me here today, and thanks for the amazing introduction, Gene. What an amazing conference we have ahead of us, and it's one that I'm really proud to be a part of and to be able to share our story at. But before I start, let me give you a little bit of context and let me introduce myself. In a previous role, I had the opportunity to spend some time with a mob of Australian indigenous people, and one of the things we were looking at was how our unconscious biases worked and how subtle or real they could be.

[1:44] And I walked out of that learning that when we introduce ourselves at these types of events, we tend to introduce ourselves with our title, the status, what we do at work, because for some reason, we think that's the most important thing. But before I go to that, what I actually want to do is introduce me, the person who's speaking to you. So as you can hear from my accent, I didn't grow up in the UK.

[2:09] I grew up in Australia, and I moved to RBS about three years ago with my husband and my two daughters, and you can see the photo up there. I have to say, we're having a fantastic time in Scotland. We love the UK. We're 26 hours closer to half the world, and we can travel, and we love traveling. We love learning. We love going to new places and having new experiences.

[2:28] And we've had a number of new experiences. So we now use the term wellingtons, not gumboots. And when I'm shopping with my daughter in the shoe section in summer, and I ask her if she needs a new pair of thongs, she very quickly turns bright red and corrects me to the fact that they're flip-flops.

[2:46] I've also learned that in Edinburgh, it doesn't actually snow. It might get cold, but it doesn't snow. So when you promise a recalcitrant 10-year-old that you're moving to somewhere where they'll get snow in winter, check first. But at least they've now had a blizzard, which means that they understand what snow is. But in Australia, they've never had a heat day, so they had a day off school.

[3:06] So over onto what I do and who we are. So I work for RBS, and we're a bank of brands. We provide a wide range of products and services to personal, commercial, large corporate, and institutional customers through a number of well-known brands. You might recognize some of them up there.

[3:23] The main ones are NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank. You might recognize Coutts. And there are some lesser-known brands that you might not have associated with us. So we have about 13.4 billion pounds of income, about 19 million customers, and of those, we have 8.6 million digital customers. About 70,000 people work for the RBS group of companies, and over 14,000 of those are in technology, with another 3,000 more working on change within the franchises.

[3:53] So what we're doing is big. Our mission is to be number one for customer service, trust, and advocacy, whilst continuing to focus on strength and stability, customer experience, simplifying the bank, supporting growth, and employee engagement.

[4:11] What do I do? I'm a technologist by training, started my life in banks, as you heard from Gene's introduction, coding. And what I do now is I'm the chief operating officer for services. And you might say, "What does that mean?" So that means my teams and I enable about 16,000 people, plus our partners across eight countries, to deliver technology, payments, data, property, and anything else the bank shares to our frontline colleagues who are supporting our customers.

[4:40] I also have the ultimate privilege of leading our Ways of Working program, which is the way we're transforming the bank. So for us, this is a cultural journey, and when I spoke at the conference last year, we'd only just started. We were about 18 months in, and I say only just started because this is a long transformation.

[5:01] And you'll remember, if you've watched that, that I spoke about the first few stages, where we were and what we were doing and how we were transforming and seeing some results in our technology and change areas. But we had more to do, and we had some challenges. And for us, I'll reemphasize, this is about taking our company on a cultural journey. It's not about doing DevOps.

[5:23] It's not about doing SAFe. It's not about doing LeSS. It's not about doing Scrum. We don't count our feature teams. It's about creating a learning organization where our people do the right work with the right tools at hand to do that. So I can now give you some perspective, and I'll take you through our whole story, but with a lens that might make you consider the way you're going through these types of transformations slightly differently, and it's a different context. But in a way, hopefully, when you get to some of

[5:53] those dark times, and I had some of those dark times where I hit my head against the brick wall, when the mountain seems just that little bit too high for you to climb and you sit there and you go, "Is this really worth it? Do I really think that this is going to happen?" That you might get some green shoots. You might get something that helps you pull through that process. So, I'm going to talk to you about a hero's journey.

[6:14] And many of us know that in every good story, there are a few common ingredients. You've got a main character. You've got an ordinary world where things are normal. Something happens. You've got baddies, you've got mentors, you've got difficulties, and eventually, you get green shoots of victory.

[6:31] Something changes. It's not actually random. And many of the stories that you hear, and many of the movies you watch, many of the stories you read follow this pattern. And it was popularized by a gentleman called Joseph Campbell. And what I'm going to tell you today is our RBS journey through this lens, and it has many of the same ingredients.

[6:52] The title's plural, I want to be really clear on that, because there are many heroes in our journey. This isn't about one hero. Many, many stories go together to make a transformation of this scale work. And like any good story that you're going to watch on your streaming services, I was going to say TV, but that dates me, I'm going to start with a recap of what happened last episode. So if you haven't seen my speech last year, what Gene asked me to do was continue on from the speech, but I'm going to give you a recap of last episode, so what I spoke about a little bit last year, then tell you where we are, and then in good old DevOps Enterprise Summit terms, I'm going to tell you where we're going and the things

[7:30] we're still struggling with. So, the ordinary world, recap from our previous episode. It's where do all good stories start? They start in the world before the journey. The so-called ordinary world, where things are as they should be, maybe as they have been for a while. Life's comfortable. It's predictable.

[7:49] You know what you're supposed to do. You go to work, and things that you expect happen. And many of our favorite characters in our stories have this in common. So for Harry Potter, it was living in the cupboard under the stairs at Privet Drive. Life wasn't exactly pleasant, but it was predictable.

[8:03] For Simba, it was playing in the Pride Lands as heir to the throne and with his father, Mufasa. For RBS, prior to starting this journey in 2016, we'd seen significant change, massive change as an organization. But the way we delivered that change was our ordinary world.

[8:21] Like many other organizations, we delivered big projects. We delivered them in Waterfall. We had pockets of agile. We had our digital area. And we moved in stages through design, plan, and test. We planned our budgets in years, and every year we threw it up in the air and we started again.

[8:39] And we had functional IT towers, and the business and technology relationship was often strained. But that was our ordinary world. That was the way we worked, and we put processes in place to make sure it worked. But as everyone's aware, the world's changing at pace. The expectation of our customers goes far beyond our ability to react using that ordinary world.

[9:00] And we recognized that our customers needed more from us, our people needed more from us, and we could no longer keep up with the pace of change that the market was demanding. So we started our journey, and we knew we had to do something different. So, there was a call to change, a bit like in "The Matrix" where Neo, red pill, blue pill. Do we keep doing what we're doing?

[9:21] Do we pretend that our ordinary world's good enough? Or do we actually take a choice and plunge into something that was a bit different for us, that was unknown, that most large organizations don't really successfully do at scale? The number of failures of people embarking on these types of journeys is huge.

[9:39] Also, you get the number of people who actually don't get the results because they haven't done it in the right way. And so we chose to do a different path, and we started with a diagnosis phase, and I spoke about that last year. What actually was the organization seeing and experiencing? And we spent six months doing that, learning and unlearning.

[9:56] And it taught us about how change was delivered, the handoffs, the impediments, the delays, the processes, the systems involved. And this phase let us understand that not only did it take us potentially six to 12 months to get something into production, but what it actually taught us was that the process map was five meters long.

[10:20] And in that five-meter long process map, there were far too many handoffs, far too many people involved, and far too many people checking that the work was done, and far too few people actually doing the work. It just wasn't good enough. So, every good story has mentors, people who take you on this, people who teach you and help you understand, and we've had lots.

[10:40] They change through the time, and as we go through different phases, we end up with different mentors, different people who reflect on your journey back to you and help you understand what you might need to do next. So "The Karate Kid's" a great story. The mentor is Mr. Miyagi, and you think about the way that he coaches Daniel through that story. For us, we had a hugely powerful set of mentors, and they started early in the process. I spoke last year about our change investment director, Michael Geslak.

[11:08] He championed us thinking differently about the way we did change and investment. And he spoke about it at our executive. He made sure that when we went through and tried to change the way we did investment, which we were starting to do last year, that we had the right people and the right concepts in place, and we had support to do that.

[11:27] Our CIO, Patrick Eldridge, who's now gone to Nationwide, was a key sponsor and advocate, and he'd worked this way before. But what he understood, which was really clear, was the risk of transformation was very much outweighed by the cost of not taking that step. So the potential disruption to technology was going to be worse if we actually didn't take the step of making this change.

[11:55] So the other thing is that we wanted to lead this change from internally within RBS. We didn't want someone else to tell us how RBS should work. And so one of the key things we did was we spent a lot of time with the agile community. We spent a lot of time with people like you, people who understand how organizations work in the work, people who understand what large organizations do and don't do, people who could tell us why they'd never work in agile in a large organization. And we spent some time, particularly in Edinburgh, engaging the community. We went to conferences, we spoke at conferences, we shared our journey.

[12:30] We also listened. We got people in to talk to us. And as a result, we ended up building a team of people who were passionate about embarking on a challenge of taking a large company like RBS on a fundamental journey of change. Because this is around culture change.

[12:48] It's not about us rolling out new practices. We could've had it over in five minutes, not five minutes, a year, if we'd actually decided to go, "Everyone must run Scrum, everyone must do feature teams." But that wasn't what we were after. That wasn't where we were going. So before I go any further, let me recap on what we set out to do.

[13:07] So we talk about agility, and we talk about it in three ways. So we talk about creating faster time to value for our customers, and that's all we do. As a business, wearing my COO hat, I would not do this if I didn't get faster time to value for our customers. That's why we're here.

[13:25] It's not about agile, it's not about DevOps. It actually is about delivering better things for our customers. So we talk about the process. We talk about going through three steps with our teams. Talk about organizing the work, understanding the work we need to do, what goals we want to achieve, what are our strategies, what's the outcome we want to make? We then talk about organizing our people.

[13:45] How do you line your people up behind that work? And then we talk about how you speed up the work. And we actually don't start talking about speeding up the work until we know what work we're doing, and we've agreed that work. I frequently talk about the work, and one of my peers, the CTO of RBS, has a swear box that he puts a pound in every time he mentions the word work.

[14:08] For us, work is what we do. It's about how we deliver value to customers. And being in the work is about directly delivering value and working to directly deliver value. Watching the work is where you're helping, but you're not actually in the direct line of delivery. And we recognized we needed to get more people in the work and less people watching the work, and that's why we spent time organizing the people.

[14:33] So our journey has three stages, and I've talked about the organize the work and organize our people and speed up the work. What we did was we organized our people into domains, value streams in any other language. So we mapped our value streams, and we organized our organization behind those value streams.

[14:49] We kept them in check by the centers of excellence who own standards, practices, tools, principles, career paths, and the role families that we've moved our people into. So that's what we've been doing, and that's how we've been doing it.

[15:07] So when I spoke last time, I highlighted that one of our challenges was that we were about 12 months in, 18 months in, and we were struggling to understand what to keep standard and what to let evolve. And we were seeing a tide of movement in the organization, because what we'd done is we'd encouraged the organization to learn.

[15:27] We'd encouraged them to spend time learning agile practices, to automate, to do things that they could do to improve their own work. But what we didn't want them to do was to start to organize their own work, organize their people, and then focus on speeding up their work systemically. It was about learning agile.

[15:43] It was about understanding the mindsets. But we actually discovered that they weren't willing to wait. We had this brilliant plan that we'd limit our work in progress. We'd go value stream by value stream, learning as we went, delivering value in short, sharp increments. Organization decided not to let us do that. They decided they wanted to do everything at once.

[16:03] And if we weren't going to be ready to do everything at once, they were going to do everything at once without us, which suddenly caused us a massive issue. We'd scaled to be in the work. We had a whole group of experts who went and worked with the value streams to help them do the things to their work.

[16:19] We were very clear this wasn't a program that was doing things to the organization. If we were going to change change, it happened from the change team. If we were going to change the way we managed risk, the risk team did it. It wasn't going to be a process that was centrally slapped over the top. Organization decided that wasn't the way we were going to do it.

[16:37] So that caused us a problem, and the problem it caused us was one of scale. But like Voldemort and Harry Potter, or the Luck Dragonfalcor in "The NeverEnding Story," every journey has its tests, its allies, and its enemies. And the challenge of scale meant that we fundamentally needed to change the way we were approaching the journey, and that meant we needed investment. We needed money. We couldn't do it out of some budget I'd managed to hive off to run a small team of people.

[17:06] We actually needed money at scale, and that meant a business case, and the business case needed to go to our executive. And so we didn't frame the work we were doing as an agile transformation. It was about how we aligned to the culture and leadership values of the company.

[17:19] It was about value and the way we deliver to customers. Never once mentioned agile or DevOps in any of the conversations we had. And the first time we took our business case up, we didn't get endorsement, and it was devastating. We thought about how we had to go around the organization, but the reason we didn't get endorsement was actually because when I spoke last year, I mentioned that our CEO believes that transformation happens through leadership and had a very strong leadership culture. We didn't get endorsement because this wasn't, in his mind, a transformation we had to make with just technology and change.

[17:54] It was a transformation we had to do across the entire company. And so what we'd asked for wasn't broad enough. So he sent us away to make sure it was broader, to make sure we understood how this was going to impact every single part of the company. 70,000-person company, I remind you.

[18:12] So we'd engaged our risk and HR colleagues early, and we'd started that process with them, and that actually meant that they were really supportive of what we were doing. We then had to come back, and when we came back, we had the support of the entire executive, and he made sure that every single person around the executive actually positively confirmed that they were going to support us in doing what we were doing, which was absolutely critical.

[18:41] So as soon as that happened, we could actually start speeding up. Suddenly, all those blockers around the things that slow you down in your ordinary world went away, and we were able to start appointing leaders. We were able to start changing processes.

[18:55] And we had far more engagement from the teams around us. And that was just phenomenal, because it meant that the transformation, whilst we'd slowed down during that process, started to speed up. We ran a bank-wide upskilling campaign, and we did something similar to this. We ran an internal conference called Agile Fest, and we invited a lot of our external speakers from the community. We had a lot of internal speakers.

[19:17] And the penetration of that conference was to over 50% of the organization. That includes our front office staff. And so we had questions from the branch about, "How does Agile work in a branch? How do we think about the things that we might need to leverage or what could we do?" It wasn't all plain sailing. We had our enemies, and we had our tests as well. We had groups going, "I don't need to do this.

[19:39] I can just get better. I can get better people. I can go faster. I can just improve my current processes. See? Here's how I'm doing it. Let me give you the report." We call it wink management, where you sit there and you go, "Yep. I'm doing it. I'm doing it." But when you talk to the people on the ground, change isn't quite happening. So we had to address that.

[19:55] We also had teams where they were already Agile, and they went, "Well, I'm just going to keep doing what I've been doing. I don't need to integrate with the rest of the organization. I don't need to speak a common language. I can do the same as I've always done."

[20:07] And our organizing the work went relatively quickly. Our organizing the people took us much longer. And then we hit our abyss. That point in your program where suddenly you just don't think it's going to work. And so if anyone's seen Tom Hanks in the film Cast Away, it's a great example of setback after setback after setback, and you suddenly reach a point where you just don't know how this is going to work. Didn't know how he was going to get home.

[20:32] And then you realize you've just got to actually keep learning and moving forward, and at some point, the path's going to become clear. And that alignment of the executive, that support of the executive, that broader point, was actually what brought us to our abyss. We'd been progressing with challenges and successes, but we'd been scoped on tech and change, and then suddenly we had to align with the entire organization.

[20:54] And we thought, "Align. That's okay. We'll just work alongside them. We'll be together in com-- We'll get common language. We'll work out the things we need to intersect on, and that will be fine." We very soon worked out that alignment wasn't going to work. It had to be integration. And that meant we had to stop.

[21:09] We had to slow down, and we had to wait. And then we actually had to relearn together. And that was really hard. We'd spent a year and a half, two years mobilizing a technology and change community that the world was going to be different, promising that we were going to get rid of the impediments to their work.

[21:24] And then we slowed down to relearn. And it felt devastating. But it was the right thing to do. And when we restarted, we restarted with a co-business sponsor. We restarted with our PB, our personal banking franchise, and our consumer banking franchise absolutely being on this journey with us. And that actually meant that we went even faster than we had before, and we went deeper than we had before. And we've now integrated the way that our teams work together in PB. We've now integrated our technology with the people who own the P&Ls

[21:58] for the products. It's just been fantastic, and it was something we wouldn't have expected. But it was dark. It was dark as we went through that. And so once you actually get out of the abyss, you start to see your heroes finding something has changed. So in The Wizard of Oz, the Lion gets his courage, the Tin Man gets his heart, the Scarecrow gets his brain, and we started to see things changing. We'd reached a point where the momentum and support for what we were doing actually meant that we reflected that if we shut down the program and got out of the way, it would actually just keep going.

[22:30] We signaled our intent last year to change the way we managed investment. We did that this year, and we reduced from over 60 business cases to 19 business cases. Since 2014, we've reduced the number of critical incidents from over 300 a year to less than 20. Sorry, 2014. And in that time, we've increased the number of changes per year by 25% and halved the number of applications we have. We're simplifying our environment, we're getting more value delivered, and we're doing it in a more stable, controlled way.

[22:59] And we started seeing our functional areas starting to use Agile techniques to manage and plan their work. I was on a walkthrough of our payments operations team. Nothing to do with technology, nothing to do with change. They manage the fact that we get international payments through between countries.

[23:13] And they proudly showed me their Kanban board and how they were managing the work they need to do on their Kanban board. And our corporate governance teams have started flaming committees and reducing unnecessary checks and approvals and making us justify where we want to have meetings that are minuted and approve outcomes. Our transformation has started.

[23:33] We started seeing some of the green shoots. So when you think about these types of transformations, after a lot of hard work and setback, our stories seem to turn a corner. For Tom Hanks, he makes it back home, and he has to start on a new journey in this new ordinary world.

[23:50] For Simba, he gets back to the Pride Lands and starts a family of his own. And for us, there was a pivotal point when we suddenly realized that we were on that road back up towards a new ordinary world. We'd been using a SAFe technique called PI planning, program increment planning, to plan our program.

[24:08] It really works well when you have multiple dependencies that you can't separate, either technical dependencies, business dependency, team dependencies. And we were working across over 30 domains and COEs, and we needed to make sure they were all heading in the same direction. We'd been using the technique for a little while, and then suddenly what happened is we discovered the business areas wanted to plan their value streams using PI planning.

[24:32] They wanted to start thinking about their work in its entirety end to end. It was like we'd had the baby and we'd taught it to walk, and suddenly off it went running. Our first domain started actually getting to speed up the work. The work started to flow. Our CoE started issuing job role families, as well as training paths and training careers for our people.

[24:55] And the results were happening, and our teams are starting to move towards speeding up the work. And the change is happening faster. In our mobile platform, we've increased our releases by over five times compared with three years ago. And we've delivered more features for our customers last year than we had in the previous four years put together.

[25:12] We've seen idea-to-value cycle times of less than eight days in our credit card teams. And we can now provision public cloud 44 times faster than our building on-premise infrastructure. And our projects have been set up in less than 24 hours rather than days or weeks.

[25:31] Our customers are starting to see the change too. So we're the only bank with a paperless mortgage process, which is driving up our NPS scores and we now serve one in seven of the UK population with a mortgage. We've launched a new biometric credit card. If you've not seen that, it's a really quite cool one, NatWest.

[25:49] And we're also simplifying our business and have identified over 500 tools that we actually need to decommission. We are starting to see that rebirth and that reward for the work that we've done over the last two years. And so looking forward, Gene always asks us to tell you what still challenges us. And then, my story, this is what's our next episode?

[26:10] What's going to be different as we go through next? We're only just starting. You might think that we've got to the top of the hill, but we've got to a top of a hill and there's another hill ahead of us, and we know that. Because this journey will never stop. And if it stops, we've done the wrong thing. So we've organized the work, we've organized our people, but now we need to speed up the work. We need to have our teams look at what they're measuring, what they're learning from that, and then how they change what they're doing.

[26:34] And they need to be telling us the things we need to change. Our change is about the whole organization. We're really interested if anyone's got any experience in how non-technology and change areas use agile, i.e., risk.

[26:51] I got a question the other day, "Could you show me how agile could be effective in the boardroom?" I've got no idea of how to answer that question. I've gone and asked, because that's what I have to do. But it's really interesting to see what's happening when you start thinking whole of organization, and whole of organization ends up being whole of organization.

[27:11] We still haven't quite cracked measurement. I said last year we hadn't cracked measurement. We measure. We're using the DORA measures. We're measuring the things that you expect to measure. But our teams still haven't got over the fact that measurement's for learning, not for targets, and they're still worried that someone's going to turn a measurement into a target.

[27:30] And we still haven't quite worked out what to keep standard and what to let evolve. We know that this is a cultural journey. We've stood up a business agility CoE, and it's in HR. It's not in technology. It's not in the change portfolio.

[27:46] Our HR team owns the cultural journey towards agile mindsets, leaderships, tools, and practices. And they're working through what has to be standard to make sure our people can have a common language versus what can be independent. And the tension is around the independence.

[28:02] We want to make sure we leave as much independence as we possibly can. And so what we take from the hero's journey is that fundamental change follows a process. It follows a cycle. It involves difficulty. There's challenge. There's allies and rethinking.

[28:18] And anyone tells you there's not, isn't taking you on their journey. When we frame it this way, it helps us to understand the sorts of things our people might be going through and our leaders might be going through, the sorts of experiences that they're having. And we can actually then go on a journey together where we talk about our allies, we look for foes, we look for common enemies, we look for common challenges.

[28:40] And it helps to take you through when those times are bleak and dark. And ultimately, our people and our leaders are reaching a need for change. And every one of them is going through this type of journey, whether they're telling you or not. We know there's no end to this journey.

[28:56] Otherwise, we didn't crack what we were set out to achieve. We cracked to get our leaders to take an organization on a learning journey. And our leaders and their people will start new adventures and continue learning. And that's what we wanted. We actually wanted them to take the mantle of control.

[29:16] They're going to create our new ordinary world. And what that will do is help us as an organization achieve our ambition of being number one for customer service, trust, and advocacy. And it's going to allow us to serve our customers well with what they want when they want it. Thank you.