Suncorp is a banking and insurance company that has its headquarters in Brisbane, Australia . The company employs more than 16 000 people and has over 7 million customers and an AUD8 billion asset base. 

Suncorp started its transition across the company to the Agile approach to project management in 2007, with the arrival of a new Chief Information Officer, Jeff Smith. 
With over 4000 people employed in the ICT department alone, Agile became "the way we work around here" where previously a heavyweight Waterfall, approach had been used. In support of its Agile implementation, Suncorp invested in an Agile: 
o change program to change-manage the introduction of Agile into and across the business o  education program to develop the skills required (enabled via The Agile Academy, an external training organisation specialising in the Agile approach) 
o coaching and mentoring programs to build on existing skills and to leverage benefits from experienced practitioners (Cozens 2009). 
An example of the Agile approach being applied within Suncorp appears in Case Study: Standardised Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (Presence of IT n.d.). The project was to standardise enterprise bargaining agreements using Agile and set out to merge eight agreements into one single agreement, subsequently translating the single agreement into the PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (v9) system. Some of the recognised benefits of taking an Agile approach to this project included: 
1. flexibility-reducing the risk of delays caused by changes in business requirements 
2. management of unknowns-components with uncertain requirements can be developed last to allow maximum time for clarification 
3. facilitating the incremental testing of changes 
4. more efficient use of resources-streams can operate in parallel (Presence of IT n.d.). 

The team used key aspects of Agile during implementation, including: 

o incorporating the customer as part of the Agile product team 
o including the business subject matter expert (SME) as part of the team, ensuring that any changing requirements were met in a timely and practical fashion. The SME was able to influence what features were added, changed or removed based on priority and value. The SME gained insight into project complexities and was able to inform business decisions 
o writing requirements as acceptance tests before coding commenced 
o ensuring acceptance criteria were agreed with the SME, and a representative of each team role, at the time of elaboration. This ensured that business, development, testing, processing and communication perspectives were raised and addressed to find the best-fit solution 
o automated testing where possible 
o writing independent testing and verification scripts alongside the code-line development to support traditional testing methods. This was critical in building a repeatable suite that could be used for the iterative nature of the Agile methodology 
o negotiating schedules rather than assigning them 
o iteration planning to give the business a chance to determine the work to be completed in the next iteration and allowed for course correction. The entire team participated in the sessions, and was encouraged to identify risks, dependencies, and bottlenecks. The team then committed to the work identified (Presence of IT n.d.). 
The great success of Agile within Suncorp is evident not only from a customer's perspective in the innovative products and services that have been brought to market, but also in the many positive press articles reported in trade and professional magazines across Australia. 

Q1. Suncorp is a large organization with over 16,000 employees. How did Agile scale across different departments and teams, and what considerations were taken for the scalability of Agile practices?