HSBC: Running agile at the top: a Scrum Master for the CIO's executive team

It works, and HSBC is the proof we point to. The CIO's executive team had no shared mechanism to track strategic initiatives across 150+ teams, so James ran the group the way a Scrum Master runs a squad: a live Kanban of all work and dependencies, daily executive stand-ups, and a review and planning cadence that gave technology, operations and transformation a common language. Decision speed improved sharply and annual planning finished ahead of schedule for the first time in years. The ceremonies scale up well; what changes is the size of the decisions moving across the board.

The same job as at team level, aimed at bigger blockers. At HSBC, James designed a lightweight governance model around a live Kanban showing all work, planned initiatives and dependencies. He ran the daily executive stand-ups. When something was in the way he went and removed it himself, and he set a review and planning cadence that gave technology, operations and transformation one language for progress. Judge the role by what stops sitting still. Blockers that had persisted for weeks were routinely cleared in days, and C-suite visibility across a $102M operating budget went from poor to live.

They have time for the alternative even less. Before the daily rhythm, HSBC's executive team was losing weeks to blockers that persisted without escalation and to milestones slipping quietly out of view. The stand-up ran against a live Kanban of initiatives and dependencies, and it turned that around. Blockers that once took weeks were routinely cleared in days and decision speed improved sharply. A daily meeting that exists to clear obstacles pays for itself the first time it saves an initiative a fortnight of drift. At HSBC the cadence stabilised delivery around it.

Not with more reporting. At HSBC, 150+ global teams and a $102M operating budget sat in scope with no shared mechanism to track strategic initiatives. The answer was one live Kanban holding all work, planned initiatives and dependencies, wrapped in a deliberately lightweight governance model. The executive rhythm then ran on that board every day. Nobody was reconciling status decks for it. C-suite visibility increased and delivery cadence stabilised. You want one source of truth that stays current because leadership works from it, and not a reporting layer that goes stale between steering committees.

It overruns because the cycle starts without knowing the current state. Initiatives are untracked, dependencies are invisible, blockers are unresolved, and so the first weeks go on reconstructing reality before anyone can decide anything. At HSBC the fix was structural. Once the executive team had a live Kanban of all work and dependencies, daily stand-ups and a standing review and planning cadence, annual planning completed ahead of schedule for the first time in years. Planning got faster because the inputs were visible and already agreed before the planning window opened.

Escalate them daily, in a room where the people who can remove them are present. At HSBC, blockers persisted for weeks because nothing surfaced them and nobody owned their removal. The model James installed put them on the executive team's live Kanban and raised them at a daily stand-up in front of the CIO's leadership group, with someone in the room whose job was to go and remove obstacles directly. Under that rhythm, blockers that once took weeks were routinely cleared in days. Most blockers are not hard problems. They are unowned ones.

Three months, in the engagement this page describes. That covered designing the lightweight governance model, standing up the live Kanban of initiatives and dependencies, embedding daily executive stand-ups and establishing the review and planning cadence, all inside a function of 150+ global teams and a $102M operating budget. The results landed in the same window. Decision speed improved sharply, blockers that had taken weeks were cleared in days, and annual planning finished ahead of schedule for the first time in years. Executive habits change faster than organisational ones, because the group is small and it meets every day.

By making the work visible and the rhythm reliable, then letting results do the persuading. At HSBC, confidence in the function's ability to deliver had eroded. Milestones slipped, blockers sat unescalated, and the CIO's executive team had no shared view of critical initiatives. James put every initiative and dependency on one live Kanban, ran daily executive stand-ups against it, and removed obstacles directly. Within three months alignment and decision speed had improved sharply and delivery cadence had stabilised. Confidence follows evidence. A leadership team that can watch delivery happening stops needing to be reassured about it.

Because you are buying the person as much as the company. James Rooney leads every Tenhaw engagement personally, so what he delivered inside HSBC's executive team in his own delivery and transformation career is direct evidence of what you get. This study is founder track record rather than work delivered under the Tenhaw banner, and James is named throughout it because the work was his. Engagements such as Anglo American, Yondr and Greggs were Tenhaw deliveries; HSBC was James inside the bank. We will walk through which is which on a call if the distinction matters to your procurement.

Everything except the technology. Agentic transformation lives or dies in the executive room, and this engagement installed what an Embedded Agentic Lead installs at the top of an agentic programme. Visible work on one live board, fast decisions at a daily cadence, and accountability that holds. So the evidence here is that James has run that operating discipline inside the executive team of a global bank, and that is the room where an AI programme's funding, priorities and blockers get decided.

It needs a rhythm it can be run on, and not just sign-off. A banking AI target operating model usually arrives well argued and then stalls in the executive layer, because that is where the money and the priorities really move. At HSBC, the CIO's executive team had no shared mechanism for tracking critical strategic initiatives across 150+ global teams and a $102M operating budget. Operating effectively as a Scrum Master for that team, James put every initiative and dependency on one live Kanban, ran daily executive stand-ups and removed obstacles directly. Decision speed improved sharply and blockers that once took weeks were cleared in days. Three months in, annual planning finished ahead of schedule for the first time in years.

Put the dependencies where both can see them, then give both the same cadence. At HSBC, the CIO's executive team had no shared mechanism for tracking critical strategic initiatives, so milestones slipped and blockers sat unescalated in the gaps between functions, owned by neither. James built the fix around one live Kanban of all work, planned initiatives and dependencies, daily executive stand-ups, and a review and planning cadence that created a common language across technology, operations and transformation. Decision speed improved sharply, delivery cadence stabilised, and blockers that once took weeks were routinely cleared in days. Functions rarely fall out over priorities. They fall out over dependencies nobody could see.

The overlap is real, and the difference is that one is a post and the other is a mechanism. A chief of staff is a permanent role built around a single leader. What James installed at HSBC was a small set of artefacts the executive team itself ran on: a live Kanban of all work, planned initiatives and dependencies, daily executive stand-ups, a review and planning cadence that gave technology, operations and transformation one language, and someone removing obstacles directly rather than logging them. Three months in, blockers that once took weeks were clearing in days and annual planning finished ahead of schedule for the first time in years. Install the rhythm first, then decide who holds it permanently.

Give it one job. The stand-up exists to move work that is stuck, and at HSBC it ran against a live Kanban holding all work, planned initiatives and dependencies, so nobody spent the meeting reporting a position everyone could already see. The governance model around it stayed deliberately lightweight, so it never became a second reporting layer. The other half is accountability. Obstacles were removed directly, so raising one led somewhere, and the group judged itself on movement instead of attendance. In that function, blockers that had persisted for weeks were routinely cleared in days, decision speed improved sharply and delivery cadence stabilised. A meeting that has changed nothing by Thursday is a status round, whatever it is called.