One of my first challenges at the BBC was to take the organisation on a journey, and gently ease in good agile practice. This looked like having daily catch ups, reviewing progress regularly and adapting plans as we went. The proof to the organisation that agile works was in quick and fast releases of software, often once a day. Frequent releases allowed the Mobile Apps team to build up trust, and that allowed us to deepen and professionalise agile practice within the BBC.

This allowed us to lead on best practice, bed-in Kanban and trial Scrumban methodologies to find the most appropriate working practice, and successfully shift ways of working to iterative agile software engineering approach. We went from linear-led project management, to a non-linear cross-functional methodology.

This success led to securing operational budget, insourcing development capability after 1 year, and scaling up 6x over the next 3 years.