Creating Agile teams at Cornwall Council through behavioural change

CHALLENGE: A traditional, siloed corporate structure that was slow to change

After attending Agile on the Beach, Cornwall Council’s head of IT approached us to help introduce Agile and transform the way the department worked, with the view to rolling out the benefits across the council.  

With multiple stakeholders to convince and decades of ingrained processes to unpick, we got to work looking at how the department could change its behaviours to better support Agile working processes.  

SOLUTION: Agile working processes fully embraced in just six months

We started the project by delivering a presentation about Agile and the benefits it could offer Cornwall Council to key stakeholders – followed by a Q&A session to address any concerns.  

We then held planning sessions that allowed stakeholders to decide which projects to prioritise in the short term while trialling new ways of working to prove their viability, such as introducing boards to help the team track individual tasks and overall progress.  

RESULT: Project development reduced to just two weeks and significant cost savings 

In just six months, all of Cornwall Council’s IT team had adopted Agile working practices. And more recently, the team has publicly presented its work – in an Agile on the Beach talk titled “Turning the Tanker” – to demonstrate Agile’s possibilities in a large, traditional organisation.  

The biggest benefit for Cornwall Council is accelerated delivery times, allowing the team to complete many projects in just two weeks. And with far greater control over its budgets, the department now has the flexibility to adjust its project schedule almost in real-time, helping it make significant cost savings.  

The first proper test of the council’s new processes was when all staff were forced to work from home due to COVID-19 lockdowns. While enabling every employee to adopt remote working could have taken several months using traditional methods, Cornwall Council’s IT department took just two weeks to get everyone online.