FEBRUARY 13, 2024 |
As an Agile Coach, Nica’s focused on advancing Enterprise Agility here at First West, supporting the squads, pods, and our entire organization to adopt an agile mindset.
“I tell people I grew up in agile, it’s been a focus in my career from very early on. I see agile as the way forward in all organizations, not just here at First West.”
Saying ‘yes’ to the unexpected led to an exciting new chapter
Nica thought she was destined to become a professor, but when business became more intriguing than academia, she was excited to jump in. Her love of being involved in strategy conversations and enabling better collaboration led to her introduction of the agile method of work. As she started to learn more about agile, she realized how well her skills aligned. She dove into 30 books in over six months to understand what agile was all about. This, along with deep client engagement gave her fully rounded exposure to the ideas and reality behind agile.
Collectively, Nica’s knowledge, early career experiences, and years working as a sought-after independent consultant set her up for her role at First West. She was drawn to the opportunity to be part of “Enterprise Agility” at the credit union.
“I realized First West already had a fundamental understanding that to really realize success through agile, it needs to be adopted enterprise wide. I thought, ‘Yes, I want to be a part of that.’”
There’s a lot of diversity in what Nica does as an Agile Coach. From coaching conversations with squads and pods to instilling an agile mindset and ensuring the principles and practices are being implemented. Her focus lately is helping everyone understand how they fit into the bigger agile picture. This means building understanding confidence around core agile concepts and how agile impacts how the way we work together may be different than traditional work structures.
“The Principles can guide all of us. Take, for example, ‘Trust people and teams to do their jobs.’ Maybe you were didn’t have much autonomy in a previous role. Here, that’s not our approach. You may be given a vision for what needs to be done, but how the work gets done requires your expertise and collaboration, as well as ongoing input from end-users.”
First West’s agile journey officially began in 2018, and we’ve laid the foundation. Now, we’re we’re looking at how agile influences strategy at a whole new level. We’re putting even more emphasis on the fundamental aspect of finding out what really matters to end-users, which is often members or member-facing employee teams.
“What we’re doing is broadening feedback by asking: what concerns our members on a day-to-day basis? We have the unique advantage of knowing more intimately what they want next, and this is one of the reasons we are now leading at a national level and beyond. For example, there’s a lot more talk these days about AI, it will be interesting to learn if this is really what’s important to members. Listening to members and learning about what they want changed to improve their daily experiences, that’s the next most important thing to me.”
If you’d like to work for an organization that embraces agile thinking, see what opportunities are available today.