A Case Study of Agile in Marketing Communications at BT

In 2020, the customer base marketing division of BT Consumer realised they needed to transform the world of marketing communications at BT and to become completely data driven and personalised across their entire base. They had to move away from historic practices of communicating with customers and potential customers, to be much closer to understanding needs and behaviours. They understood very quickly that in order to achieve this, they had to transform the division to become an Agile organisation, therefore focussing their teams on providing continuous value and be responsive to change at pace.

Agile practice was not a new concept to BT. They have adapted it across various pockets of the business over the past few years. But changing a 180-year-old organisation with a large town sized employee base would always take considerable time, energy, commitment and will. And in fairness, the world isn’t going to hang around waiting.


Their Initial Approach

With over 300 employees and another 200 or so contractors in base marketing, making the change was not going to be easy. The senior leadership team spent time drawing out the existing structure of the division and set out plans to transform into two main areas; Journey and Capability. The teams in Journey would be very much customer facing, homing in on the journeys that customers take in the buying process, providing personalised communications to its base, and split by product and customer type. Capability teams would provide the support and capability for the Journey teams to be able to become much more personalised and effective in its communications.

They put every member of staff on a 3-day Agile training course over the period of about 4 weeks. Once trained the teams would be formed and up and running. There were two major challenges, however:
1. The workload demands and expectations did not reduce sufficiently enough to allow the teams to change their ways of working, their culture, and also settle into a working arrangement in a brand-new structure. What was possible beforehand, now became far more of a challenge.
2. The Scrum Master role, tasked with focussing on helping the team to become high performing, was given as an add on set of responsibilities to an existing role within the team, and therefore the new SMs really struggled in the beginning in being able to build their level of competency, they simply had too much to do.

Each of these 2 major impediments caused a slow progression of the adoption of Agile change in the early months. They lost some people, and the benefits of Agile implementation were not truly being felt.

But as all good leadership teams do, they persevered. Determined to get it right, understanding that the bumps in the road were simply growing pains, or perhaps change pains. That the vision of transforming marketing communications would be realised eventually, and that it would be revolutionary.

Both myself and the team of coaches were spread across multiple teams and were able to help support in some aspect, we focussed our efforts on building the capability of some teams, to help others. We raised and escalated systemic issues, with guidance and recommendations to senior leadership.

In order for us to truly support the change, we had to zone in on one specific area of BVP and help construct a model that could be scaled across the whole division.

Intervention and New Strategy – The Customer Decisioning Alliance

About a year into the transformation, I had a long call with Leana Keilkowicz. Head of Decisioning, Planning and Operations at BT. I’d spoken with Leana on a few occasions and each time she would highlight the challenges she was facing as a senior leader in the programme. Since the big change, her entire team had become so spread across the entire division, there were more silos than there were before, the team structure just wasn’t working for them, plus everyone seemed to be constantly in meetings. It appeared to me that both Leana and her team were struggling with adapting and needed some support.

Decisioning is the largest area of Marketing Communications, it boasts about 1/5th of all employees and contractors in BVP. They provide capability for not just Journey teams to help with creating personalised decisions, but also commercial trading teams and contact centres in identifying the best offers for their customers. To put it bluntly, Decisioning is a big deal, and pivotal to the overall success of Marketing Communications.

I asked Leana to bring together her leadership team in Decisioning and let’s try and dig into some of these problems to try and establish the scale of the issue here. We got together about a week later with a whiteboard and mapped out some of the key issues – only about 4 were able to make it, but enough to work with. I facilitated them through a process of root cause analysis. It was the first time that the team had really taken the time to rise above the parapet in over a year.

After a few calls we decided to get everyone in the leadership team together and flesh out a plan and strategy to not only restructure but restart, reset, renew.

That single day in London set the scene for a complete transformation of Decisioning, Planning and Operations. We even came up with a new name; The Customer Decisioning Alliance. Or “CDA” for short.
There was a considerable desire to make this work. I usually find there is some resistance or negativity in the room, perhaps a sense of fear or doubt or maybe that they have already given up. But with this group, it was different, and I have to say remained the same pretty much throughout. Something that I noticed, and it was very subtle. Everyone was on the same page, everyone was pulling in the same direction. And it was powerful. A ‘can-do” attitude. A sense that now is the time, let’s do this.

The three key areas identified as essential (though limited) for BVP during the transformation mentioned earlier; coaching support, workload reduction and control, and dedicated roles, became the key areas we would focus on ensuring as a commitment to making this a success.

The re-structuring of the teams meant that existing development teams, some that were in excess of 20 people, were split into manageable sizes of no more than 9. Making sure there was a dedicated Scrum Master and Product Owner for each. We managed to get buy-in, acceptance and commitment from Senior Leadership, as well as stakeholders that the workload would heavily decrease down to 50% delivery for a period of 3 months. This would give each team and leadership a real opportunity to learn, settle and develop Agile knowledge and expertise. And each team grouping was given a coach to support their development.

We brought the Alliance together for an offsite kick off day. Over 100 people came. It was an opportunity to communicate the new structure and the plan, but also a chance for everyone to have their say and be heard in how things could be shaped. A chance for people to get to know one another. A chance for people to air their grievances. A chance to draw a line on the problems of yesterday and look for a new beginning starting tomorrow. The messaging was clear from Leana, “we don’t have all the answers, but bear with us, work with us, and we will get there together”.

For me, it was a strong message. And I could see the difference in the faces of everyone in the place. I could also see the change in Leana. She had also transformed. A weight had lifted from her. She was buoyant, energised, and most of all she really believed in what we were trying to do. And this too was evident on every nodding, smiling face in the room.

Following that day we entered a brief transition period, allowing for the old work to be completed and the teams to form. Every single member of the Customer Decisioning Alliance, including the leadership team, were put on an Agile training course refresher. Scrum Masters and Product Owners were given dedicated training and then embarked on a 12-week mentorship programme to help develop their competency levels.

We set up a Team of Teams. This group would help support each of the teams within the Alliance, with leadership representation from Product, Technical and Operations – The Three Amigos. Scrum Masters from each of the teams would get together with the Three Amigos regularly to escalate any impediments and align on the work across the Alliance. We needed to change the culture from hiding the bad news, to not only surfacing it, but taking ownership of the problem across CDA.

Before we properly kicked off the new structure, we got together again for an offsite day for everyone. This time we focussed on planning for the next quarter. The difference in attitude, focus and energy was striking. Maybe it was that change really was starting from the top, and despite some reservations from some on the ground, they soon got into a more positive mindset because they were following their leaders, and it was ok.

Success Measures

The Customer Decisioning Alliance are operating much more effectively and efficiently now. The teams on the ground are empowered to make decisions, to push back even. The leadership team are in full control of everything and the cultural shift, where problems are surfaced and there is a mechanism to deal with them is fully evident. They will have setbacks, as is normal. But they are now in a much stronger position to drive real personalised value to their customers.

The framework that helped them to transform can now be scaled across the rest of Base Value and Personalisation, and beyond.