The Director Who Heard It Last
A European retail bank is seven months into an enterprise agile programme with seven teams. The Operations Director - who owns 900 contact-centre staff and 40 branch operations managers who will actually use the new onboarding service - discovered a material change to the customer onboarding flow two days before a release, when a branch manager forwarded her the internal release note. She escalated to the CIO, copied the regulator-relationship team, and has now demanded formal sign-off on every sprint review. Investigation shows the stakeholder map was built at programme kickoff and never revisited; sprint reviews are held Tuesdays at 10:00, which clashes with her standing operations review; the product owner reports into the technology division and has never met her head of operations. Separately, the change alters how branch staff approve applications, which triggers a works council consultation requiring four weeks' notice - a step nobody identified and which has not been started. The release is still planned for Thursday.
1. Separate what is wrong in this situation into distinct problems and set out your actions for the next ten working days.
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There are two different failures here and conflating them will make both worse.
Failure 1 - compliance. The change alters how branch staff approve applications, so works council consultation applies with four weeks' notice. That is a legal obligation, not a communication gap. Action: this week, either descope the staff-affecting element from Thursday's release or delay the release; start the consultation immediately; brief the Operations Director on the facts before she discovers the second problem from someone else.
Failure 2 - engagement. The director's first contact with the change was a release note. That means she has been managed at "inform" level on a change she is accountable for operating. Structural causes: a stakeholder map frozen at kickoff, a review slot that structurally excludes her, and a product owner with no relationship to the people who run the process. Her escalation is proportionate.
Ten-day actions:
- Meet her in person, with the PO present, and lead with the compliance admission plus the fix - do not open with process theory.
- Rebuild the stakeholder map on power, interest and current attitude; classify who decides, who must be consulted, who is informed.
- Move or duplicate the review: run a 30-minute operational review at a time she sets, and keep the technical review where it is.
- Give the PO a standing weekly slot with her head of operations, and send the PO to shadow two branches and two contact-centre shifts before the next release.
- Invite operations into refinement so they see options while they are still options.
The trust damage is a symptom. The compliance breach is the actual emergency.
2. The Operations Director now demands formal sign-off on every sprint review. How do you respond, and what would you concede versus hold?
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Reasoning: her demand is a reasonable request for control channelled into the wrong mechanism. Item-by-item sign-off at every sprint review converts the review from a feedback event into an approval gate. That increases batch size, extends lead time, and - worse - makes her formally accountable for changes she cannot realistically inspect. But refusing outright confirms her suspicion that the programme does not want scrutiny.
Separate the two events in writing. A sprint review demonstrates an increment and collects feedback; a release decision is a gate with named decision rights. She is entitled to the second and does not need the first.
Concede, and mean it:
- Operational acceptance criteria written into the definition of ready - no story enters a sprint without them.
- An operations representative at weekly refinement, with authority to reject on operational grounds.
- A monthly operational readiness board that she chairs, with genuine go/no-go authority over releases affecting branch or contact-centre process.
- A published release calendar so she learns of changes weeks out, not days.
Hold:
- Per-item sign-off of everything demonstrated at every review.
- Retrospective approval of increments already built - that is a gate that looks like control but only delays feedback.
Document the decision rights as a short RACI and have it agreed by the CIO and her together, so the arrangement survives the next disagreement.