The ambition

The bank was moving 14,000 people across 900 teams to a product operating model. Few organisations attempt a change at that scale. The strategy was clear.
What leaders lacked was a way to see whether the work was actually following it.

The Global CIO, who owned the technology portfolio, wanted three questions answered without weeks of data gathering and PowerPoint:

• What is really happening across the business right now?
• Which work in flight is not aligned to strategy?
• Where are the dependencies across portfolios and lines of business?

The costs not being able to answer these questions were high. Strategic portfolios ranged from £0.3B to £0.75B in spend. Every 10% of effort drifting away from strategy could cost a single portfolio £30M–£75M.

The obstacles

Fragmented systems, untrusted data. Portfolios lived in spreadsheets, delivery in Jira and Azure DevOps, intake in Jira Service Management, and OKRs across Jira, Excel and PowerPoint. Nothing connected. A single business review could take a team of 10 people four weeks of full-time effort to assemble. Because the data was keyed and copied so often, few trusted it, and decisions defaulted to opinion.

Leaders who wouldn't open Jira. Senior portfolio leaders saw anything branded Jira as a delivery tool for teams, not a leadership tool. A strategy-to-execution platform that executives won't open can't do its job, however well it's built.

Coaches without data. A central transformation team coached from outside the delivery teams. With no shared data, coaches couldn't meet teams where they were, and were often seen as a disruption. Many Managing Directors had lived through a new transformation every two to three years and treated this one as another box to tick.

21 product lines, 1 stretched organisation. Each product line was ready to move at a different speed, and much of the change ran side-of-desk alongside day-to-day delivery. Other consultancies had quoted 12 months for an implementation of this kind, long enough for momentum and sponsorship to fade before any value showed.

What did XLR8 do differently?

1. Took the insight to where leaders already worked
   XLR8 started with the end in mind: what did the CIO need to see at the start and end of each week? Rather than push executives into a tool they had already dismissed, XLR8 used Jira Align Enterprise Insights to surface strategy-to-execution data connected with other strategic enterprise data sources (Finance, Employee, Customer) inside the BI platforms leaders already trusted.
2. Avoided unnecessary tooling
   ‍The BI solution from XLR8 enabled the bank to avoid a planned £3M Tasktop proof of concept that was meant to give visibility of product, flow, finance, people and customer outcomes.
3. Standardised where it mattered
   XLR8 designed one hierarchy, from line of business to product line, product area, product and team, so strategy could be viewed through people, work, time and outcomes in a common taxonomy. Jira data models were standardised to ensure data quality at the strategic layer.
4. Delivered value incrementally
   ‍Rather than a big-bang rollout, product lines were onboarded in parallel, sized to each quarter's capacity, with the highest-value product lines first so impact showed early. Each onboarding took one to three months, so impact showed early.
5. Agility leadership with trusted data
   ‍XLR8 trained 30 Agility Leads to use Jira and Jira Align data to show teams their value and spot where the operating model could improve. For the first time, coaches arrived with evidence rather than theory, and became trusted advisers.
6. Built the bank's internal capability at scale
   ‍XLR8 also built the internal team that now owns the platform, including administrators, solution architects and transformation roles, plus a global governance model and service intake for change requests. The transformation team even ran its own transformation in Jira Align gaining realtime visibility into the transformation success.
7. End-to-end solution expertise
   ‍XLR8 combined strategy and operating model expertise with deep, whole-platform Atlassian knowledge, and its specialists were as effective engaging with executives and management as with delivery teams. That range let them solve problems end to end, without handoffs, and is what made connecting Jira Align to the bank’s BI and enterprise data possible.

Throughout, XLR8 acted as lead partner alongside the Big Four, keeping one voice into the client and every consultancy aligned to the same outcomes.

The turning point

The moment it clicked was a leadership session. For the first time, CRM, HR, finance, strategy, and delivery work appeared in one connected view, and every leader in the room saw something different in it:

• HR directors saw how strategy was affecting their people.
• Finance saw what investment was achieving, and where to adjust.
• Sales and marketing saw strategy's impact on customers.
• Transformation saw the operating model working, or not, end to end.
• The CIO saw better-quality information shaping strategy, and how the flow of work and its dependencies were affecting the business.

Managing Directors that were initially skeptical became solution promotors when they could watch work progressing inside an initiative and see how it all connected. Detractors became promoters, advocating for the platform in rooms XLR8 wasn't in.

On-demand decision advantage

Planned investment and actual effort, side by side. One product line planned to put 60% of its effort into strategic change. Live data showed only 30% of work was aligned to strategy, with 70% going to business as usual and unplanned work. On a portfolio worth £300M–£750M, a gap like that is worth tens of millions. With the cause visible, the leader cleared blockers, cut unplanned work and moved effort back towards strategy.

Bottlenecks found and fixed. Real-time dependency visibility exposed a single team that almost every other team relied on to deliver. That gave leaders decision advantage in the moment. They could add capacity or redistribute work across other teams, resolving the constraint at its source instead of chasing delays everywhere else.

Across the programme

• All 900 teams, 21 product lines and 4 lines of business live in Jira Align.
• Business reviews moved from quarterly, to monthly, to on demand.
• A review pack that once took 10 people four weeks now comes from live data.
• A £3M proof of concept avoided by building the same view on existing BI and data lakes.
• Each product line delivering value within one to three months, up to 12x faster than the 12 months quoted by other consultancies.
• The bank owns and runs the platform itself, with internal administrators, architects, governance and a trained network of 30 Agility Leads.
• The engagement was extended to more product lines and into Jira Align's portfolio and strategy capabilities.