This case study documents the early stages of an organisation going Agile, and how that impacts the BA community. Euroclear still uses a waterfall approach for 80% of its application development, but is in the midst of a transformation towards Agile. It is a clear case of 'steering the oil tanker in a new direction’, facing all the complexities that come with a decentralised, partnered, off-shored model, in a heavily regulated industry (Financial Market Infrastructure). We’ll share the many lessons we’ve learned along the way, focusing on how we fitted BAs into Scrum, and an initiative that aims to reduce the project initiation lead time by 50%. Expect a very concrete and actionable list of challenges, potential pitfalls, tips & tricks, and how we at Euroclear deal with them. We’ll cover process, knowledge management, change management, document reviews, tooling, etc.

1. PUBLIC
Going Agile:
A Euroclear Case Study
Meritxell Chavigné Jorba
Peter Maeseele
24 May 2018

2. PUBLIC
European capital market security
Euroclear At a Glance
2
Eurobond holdings
Offshore Renminbi holdings
€ 28.6trillion
assets held in custody
for our clients
€ 733trillion
In turnover
12% year-on-year growth
215 million
Transactions processed
10%
year-on-year growth
All figures as of end December 2017
60%
>50%
40%

3. PUBLIC
Earning Our Reputation
3
AA+
Fitch
AA
Standard & Poor’s
• Support an open marketplace where scale and connectivity across
the spectrum of market participants are competitive strengths
• Committed to investing to support market stability, deliver shared
economies of scale and develop markets locally and globally.
• Serve the public good by ensuring the efficiency of markets and
actively enabling risk-reduction
• Encourage a high performing culture that respects our corporate
values through our diverse and dedicated work force worldwide
Key requirements:
• Regulatory compliance, leading to large ‘forced’ projects
• Security

4. PUBLIC
The Euroclear IT Environment
• Broad spectrum of legacy & distributed technology
► COBOL & PL1 for mainframe development
► Mostly C# for distributed development
• Development teams organised in multi-year Roadmaps
► Each Roadmap has a BA Team assigned (between 4 and 15 FTE)
► 120 BA in total
• Development and Testing partly in India
• Project Management is waterfall and PRINCE2 based
► Lots of planning and budgeting up-front, step-controlled process,
role-based responsibilities, focus on outputs (deliverables)
• Large and complex development projects & programmes
4

5. PUBLIC
5
struggle over roles & responsibilities
one-size-fits-all BRD
short handover period
standard review process
• EasyWay - a client user interface for communication and reporting.
• Main triggers for choosing Scrum:
► The promise of faster delivery (product has to evolve rapidly)
► More focus on UX (rapid customer feedback required)
► General interest in proof testing a new method (curiosity)

6. PUBLIC
6
struggle over roles & responsibilities
one-size-fits-all BRD
short handover period
standard review process
continuous handover
flexible roles
Still need for up-front analysis:
• Many stakeholders: Compliance & Ethics, Legal, Risk, Audit, DPO,
Security, Service Manager, etc.
• Interdependent legacy systems: features impact other teams
• Business rules that require specialised knowledge
• Development and testing teams in India do not have direct access
to stakeholders, lack business knowledge

7. PUBLIC
7
struggle over roles & responsibilities
one-size-fits-all BRD
short handover period
standard review process
continuous handover
flexible roles
knowledge transfer
1 sprint ahead
take responsibility
shared ownership
Need to provide ‘big-picture’ context:
• Analysis toolbox with reusable analysis patterns and checklists (e.g.
validation rules, SWIFT messages, BI reports, …)
• Project level CARDI log (constraints, assumptions, risks, dependencies,
issues)
• We even define glossary items as new Wiki pages, and expand them as we
evolve.

8. PUBLIC
8
struggle over roles & responsibilities
one-size-fits-all BRD
short handover period
standard review process
continuous handover
flexible roles
knowledge transfer
1 sprint ahead
take responsibility
shared ownership

9. PUBLIC
9
We still prefer a standard process
and focus on tools
Decisions are still gated by
hierarchy
The requirements level-of-detail
has not decreased, maybe on
the contrary.
The ’definition of done‘ is
contractually specified, in ever
increasing detail
Still much effort spent on up-front
analysis to avoid having to correct
later, we still think ‘failure’ rather than
‘learning’

10. PUBLIC
10
Multidisciplinary teams
Sitting and working together
Weekly sprints with common
objectives
Faster decision taking
Face-to-face validation
Continuous Improvement

11. PUBLIC
Scrum is a method, agility is a mindset
The core agile values scale up,
and can be adapted to any situation
Figure out what is useful for you, and discard the rest
Adopting new values is not an end,
but a starting point for continuous improvement,
the journey is never over
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