Agile finance - Special feature
Agility in
the financial
world
with
Guillaume Bertin, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley
Christian Dubé, First Director at PSP Investments
O
ver the past fifteen years or so, Agility has proven itself
and has been adopted by the biggest businesses working in
various fields. The Agile Know-How team sat down with
Guillaume Bertin of Morgan Stanley and Christian Dubé of
PSP Investments to discuss their experiences with Agility in the
world of finance.
Agile Know-How: How did you come to use Agility?
Guillaume Bertin
As I mentioned in my post on the Agile Know-How blog, I fell
on Agility by chance. One of my teams introduced me to it in
2012, and I pushed it forward thereafter to develop our own
practices. Back then I was working on creating a development
centre for a multinational company working in the financial
field. It was important for us to be different. We wished to be
recognized by the whole organization as a centre of expertise,
and not only as a low-cost centre.
Christian Dubé
In 2012, we set ourselves the goal of significantly improving the
focus on requests and the number of deliveries. At that time,
we wanted to increase our ability to deliver with regard to the
new expectations and the different changes happening in the
22
agileknowhow.com
financial world. The management team members met and we
asked ourselves: what should we do to change the way we do
things? Our answer was to introduce Agility.
AKH: What were your expectations regarding Agility?
GB In the beginning, I did not have any expectations. I was in
discovery mode. As my teams used it, they reaped benefits and
I discovered its virtues. My expectations are the results of my
experience. Agility is often seen as the answer to a new para-
digm, that is to say, the ability to embrace a world in perpetual
movement and with an uncertain future. In our field, we are in
the midst of a digital transformation. Agility echoes this trans-
formation in an increasingly demanding environment.
CD What we were looking for at first was better predictability
for the clients: being able to better predict when their requests
could be fulfilled. We were also aiming at increasing the velo-
city of what we could deliver and wanted to improve inter-
actions by increasing multidisciplinarity. Previously, people’s
roles were more specialized, which meant that it was often
difficult to duplicate expertise to minimize operational risk.
One of the important elements of Agile implementation was