Success Takes Work: Making Agile Change Stick Even as financial services company executives recognize the need to adopt agile approaches, generating benefits like those described above won’t be easy. Three challenges routinely emerge: winning over key business stakeholders, organizing geographically dispersed teams, and embracing an agile culture across the enterprise. However, each challenge can be overcome. Collaboration with business stakeholders. While bringing business and IT people together in agile teams is vital to their success, at some banks decision-makers see both the company’s problems and solutions as belonging to IT. Even when technology is central to addressing an issue, however, agile efforts will fail without participation from business functions. Success with agile requires cross-functional collaboration and direct participation. Teams should include a role for a business-side participant who serves as team leader or product owner. Team meetings should be frequent, with regular presentations, and product demonstrations to business leaders. Teams must also convince business leaders they must devote time to the effort. Distributed teams. When a group of software developers created 60 the Agile Manifesto in 2001, they emphasized the value of face-to- face conversation.61 In today’s business environment—with teams often spread across the globe—that’s not always possible. Managing this challenge demands emphasizing the close communication required among all team members. Teams can still collaborate over long distances when they skillfully distribute work tasks. They can even hasten progress. This still requires regular meetings and leveraging collaboration tools. It also involves the extensive use of what’s referred to as ‘information radiators’: large charts, physical or digital, to track team member tasks and to communicate and sustain team momentum. This information must be available to all team members, whether or not they work in the same room. 60 Agile Manifesto, History: The Agile Manifesto, accessed March 13, 2018, http://agilemanifesto.org/history.html 61 Agile Manifesto, Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto, accessed March 13, 2018, http://agilemanifesto.org/ principles.html