HSBC: Running agile at the top: a Scrum Master for the CIO's executive team
The challenge
HSBC's CIO and ExCo had no shared mechanism to track and manage critical strategic initiatives. Visibility was poor, milestones slipped, blockers persisted without escalation, and confidence in the function's ability to deliver had eroded across 150+ teams and a $102M budget.
What we did
Operating effectively as a Scrum Master for the executive team, James designed a lightweight governance model around a live Kanban of all work, planned initiatives, and dependencies. He introduced daily executive stand-ups, removed obstacles directly, and established a review and planning cadence that created a common language across technology, operations, and transformation.
// run against The Tenhaw Way, published in full and free to adopt without engaging us
The outcome
Executive alignment and decision speed improved sharply. Annual planning completed ahead of schedule for the first time in years, C-suite visibility increased, delivery cadence stabilised, and blockers that once took weeks were routinely cleared in days.
Limits, and what is withheld
Agentic transformation lives or dies in the executive room, and this is the operating discipline an Embedded Agentic Lead installs at the top: visible work, fast decisions, and accountability that holds. What does not transfer is the subject. No AI was involved, and the $102M and the 150+ teams are scope, not authority.
Why a buyer usually lands on this one
Written for the person arriving mid-programme with a question.
The room where AI programmes actually stall
Buyers looking for a head of AI or an AI programme director usually describe their problem as capability. In large regulated organisations it is more often cadence. The work exists and is being done, the executive layer cannot see it, and decisions that take an hour to make wait five weeks for the forum that makes them.
A live Kanban of every initiative, planned item and dependency, a daily executive stand-up, and a fixed review and planning rhythm are the mechanism by which a blocker that used to take weeks is cleared in days, which is the difference between an agentic programme that compounds and one described, a year later, as stuck in pilot.
Where a UK bank's supervisory expectations land on this
Model risk in UK banks is governed by SS1/23, the PRA's supervisory statement on model risk management principles, which took effect in 2024 and expects a named senior individual accountable for model risk, a model inventory, and validation proportionate to risk, with AI and machine learning explicitly in scope. The FCA and PRA operational resilience rules add a second axis: important business services, impact tolerances, and evidence the firm can stay within them under severe but plausible disruption.
Both are governance obligations before they are technical ones, and both fail in the same place, which is an executive layer that cannot see the work. This engagement was executive ways of working. It was not model risk and it was not resilience, and we make no claim to have delivered against either supervisory expectation. We name them because if you are standing up an agentic programme inside a UK bank, the inventory and the accountable owner fall due whether or not your programme has thought about them yet.
What this engagement does not claim
The same caveats the case studies hub carries, narrowed to this engagement so nothing here is a surprise to your analyst.
- 01
Some of this was James, personally.
Where an engagement was held as an individual role rather than delivered by a Tenhaw team, the narrative says James, not we.
- 02
The $102M and the 150+ teams are scope, not authority.
Read these at the scope we held. The budgets were in scope of the roles held rather than governed by us. The executive function we supported was accountable for that budget. We were not.
- 03
Not an AI engagement.
Executive governance, cadence and blocker removal. No models, no agents.
Other engagements
Sector first, because that is the next question. All twelve are on the hub, grouped into the two we would call AI work and the ten we would not.
Roughly a year of stalled work, rebuilt as a working proof of concept in two weeks
12 months → 2 weeks, prior build effort rebuilt as a working proof of concept
An AI Voice Insights platform projected to save 1.5M hours a year
1.5M+, hours/year of admin removed (projected)
Designing the target operating model for 500 teams and a $450M portfolio
500, teams in scope
See how we did it
A real engagement walked through by the person who led it, then the same method applied to yours.
- The ways of working, published in full and free to adopt without hiring us.
- The target operating model James co-led at HSBC: designed and piloted for 500 teams, with global rollout due in 2026 and not yet rolled out.
- The AI build inside a live London specialty insurer: a working proof of concept, month by month, with the client anonymised to a market.
Everything the call covers about our work is already published on this site. What it adds is the person who did that work, and your own situation put through the same method.
The 30-minute discovery call starts with your problem. This one starts with our work.
Pick a time on cal.comWant the same thing, in your organisation?
A 30-minute call with James Rooney. We will tell you which parts of this we have done before and which we would be doing for the first time, and you will leave with a rough scope either way.
most start with a fixed-price AI Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks
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