Outsourced Agile delivery
– end-to-end experience improvement programme
A large Irish financial services organisation embarked on a major experience improvement initiative spanning retail, business, corporate and group functions. It was the organisation's first use of enterprise Agile approaches at this scale, and required close coordination with senior internal stakeholders and multiple external consultancies working across different areas of focus.
What we did
We provided fully outsourced Agile squads covering UX design, UX writing, UX research and technical delivery. At peak, we had 16 contractors operating across four squads. Each squad was embedded within the organisation and managed by internal stakeholders in terms of work deliverables, while we retained full responsibility for employment, performance management, contract negotiations and extensions.
The programme ran for over 18 months, with each squad delivering continuous improvement outputs at the end of multiple four-to-eight-week sprints. We collaborated closely with senior stakeholders across the organisation and worked alongside other consultancies throughout.
Outcome
The engagement demonstrated a model for outsourced squad delivery where specialist design and experience talent is externally managed but fully integrated into internal ways of working. Our UX writing team was recognised with a prestigious internal award for team excellence – a measure of how deeply embedded they became. The model combines the flexibility of contractor resourcing with the accountability of a managed service, and the capability transfers naturally as specialist practitioners work alongside internal teams.