The challenge
The client's engineering organisation operates at scale across multiple markets, with strong growth in data, mobile money, and digital services. Leadership faced familiar enterprise pressures: overlapping priorities, too many meetings without follow-through, people spread across concurrent projects, and agile disciplines that existed on paper but broke down in practice. Engineering leaders had deep technical expertise but uneven exposure to strategic analysis, portfolio-level investment decisions, and change leadership at the executive level.
Session 1 — Strategic agility & agile readiness
The first workshop grounded leaders in what strategic agility actually means — sensing market change, aligning leadership action, and redeploying resources — not sprint mechanics alone. Content drew on established research (Doz & Kosonen, McKinsey agile organisation trademarks) and was tailored to a telecom/fintech context: VUCA markets, platform scale, and innovation sitting alongside core network and BAU delivery.
- Strategic agility definitions and the exploration–exploitation tension for large engineering functions
- McKinsey's five trademarks of agile organisations — North Star, rapid learning cycles, dynamic people model, enabling technology
- Agile manifesto and delivery practices reframed for engineering leaders, not practitioners
- Strategic Agility Readiness Survey — completed live across seven dimensions: leadership, culture, structure, sense & respond, technology, talent, and governance
- Test automation maturity self-assessment — a five-level model across strategy, coverage, CI/CD, skills, and governance, left as a tool for ongoing team diagnosis
- Change models compatible with agile delivery (Kotter, ADKAR, Lean Change, PDCA) mapped to engineering transformation
Session 2 — Balanced scorecard workshop
The second session translated group strategy into action using the balanced scorecard — four perspectives (financial, customer, internal process, learning & growth) connected through objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives. Workshop design followed McKeown, Paroutis et al., and Kotter: strategy as daily practice, not annual planning.
- Diagnosed current pain points — initiative overload, scope churn, weak meeting discipline, work disconnected from strategic impact
- Introduced the 3P framework — practitioners, practices, and praxis — to separate what leadership intends from what teams actually do
- Drafted scorecard metrics across financial, customer, internal, and learning perspectives (project ROI, NPS, meeting load, WIP, release cycle time, agile discipline)
- Designed a behavioural metrics dashboard — focus discipline, leadership accountability, sprint commitment — to make culture visible, not just numbers
- Built a 90-day commitment structure: top objectives, owners, targets, and first quarterly review
- Mapped a change roadmap — pilot in service delivery, rollout to squads and tribes, then institutionalise through quarterly governance
Feedback delivered
After the workshops, a written summary was delivered to client leadership. It covered strategic context, themes raised in group discussion, and areas for follow-up. Respondents explored a range of topics including:
- Organisational culture and structural flexibility in support of strategic agility
- How agile ways of working operate in practice across tribes, squads, and engineering leadership
- Alignment between group strategy and day-to-day delivery — systems, governance, and behaviours
- Balancing innovation and fintech initiatives with core platform and BAU delivery
- Measurement, accountability, and the path from workshop outputs to sustained change
The summary connected these discussion areas to practical next steps for leadership consideration, without prescribing a single remediation path.
Outcomes
Why it matters
Strategic training only works when it meets leaders where they are. For a major African telecom and fintech engineering group, that meant respecting live network operations, mobile money scale, and multi-market complexity — while still pushing for faster, more deliberate strategic response. The same discipline applies to AI adoption programmes today: frameworks and measurement first, then tooling, with leaders who can sponsor change that sticks.