Founded in 1992 as Tbilisi Business Centre, TBC Bank is the leading financial institution in Georgia. It offers a range of financial products and services for personal and business customers.
TBC Bank’s mission is to “make people’s lives easier.” With that in mind, the bank aims to improve time-to-market for digital products, providing an extraordinary banking experience to its customers and to employees working at physical branches.
The goals for TBC Bank are to expand internationally, transform into a more digital business, and secure its status as one of the leading employers in Georgia.
Reducing organizational complexity to enable a journey of growth
To achieve its goal, TBC Bank initiated an agile transformation some years ago. It adopted new structures and modern ways of working in accordance with agile principles.
However, daily operations remained complex with a lot of dependencies between teams and a growing burden of technical debt. The expected benefits in speed and customer satisfaction were slow to materialize. The positive momentum of change was gradually getting lost.
TBC Bank partnered with Thoughtworks to adapt its transformation approach in a customized and human-centric way. Its specific context and company culture needed to be taken into consideration in order to fulfill the strategic goals of the bank.
Having Thoughtworks as strategic partner and advisor during the transformation process gave us assurance that we understood and interpreted agile principles correctly to manage organizational change carefully.
Thoughtworks worked with the business and technology leadership and their teams, to uncover the root causes of what was blocking progress, to align all on what good looks like, and to mobilize for the needed adaptations.
This resulted in changes at three levels:
- The approach to deriving goals and targets from strategy, cascading into execution, and subsequently managing the portfolio of initiatives
- The alignment of teams to products and services, and a more effective setup of roles and responsibilities
- A change in the ways of working, advancing skills and reducing tech debt
The effort was designed to make the organization more effective and value oriented, to create transparency and accountability, and to increase employee satisfaction.
The results
TBC Bank experienced a renewed enthusiasm for its transformation journey. Agile principles became better understood and endorsed.
The redefined cascade from strategy to execution resulted in more transparency and better alignment on resource allocations and accountabilities.
The future operating model was piloted with a very competitive strategic product that was late to the market. Time to market for that product was reduced to about 40% of what was originally expected. Meanwhile team satisfaction grew, while dependencies and the strain in the remaining organization diminished.
The bank reoriented its approach to reduce tech debt, strengthened its internal technology leadership and accelerated the capability uplift for teams.
Both TBC Bank and Thoughtworks look forward to continuing their collaboration to further scale the changes and advance TBC Bank’s strength as a digital business.
Thoughtworks helped us to manage the transformation so that we achieved the desired time to market and quality for the most strategic areas of our business, while the coaching and knowledge we got from our collaboration allowed us to independently scale up the transformation for other areas when needed.
