As a leading digital services provider, Vodafone needed to adapt rapidly to rising customer expectations and evolving market demands. While agile methods were common in parts of the tech organisation, business teams were still operating through traditional structures, leading to slow delivery cycles, low engagement, and limited visibility of work. To meet the pace of change, Vodafone committed to piloting modern ways of working across several business critical portfolios.

The Challenge

Vodafone had the technology and market position but business units were the bottleneck. Mobile Prepay, Postpay, and Broadband teams worked in silos with handoffs that killed speed and transparency. Customer problems took months to solve while competitors moved in weeks. Leadership could see tech teams delivering fast but business units were stuck in cycle times that belonged to a different era. The risk was not just losing market share in telecommunications, but becoming irrelevant while burning out teams who knew there was a better way.

Our Approach

We designed and led an agile pilot across three business critical portfolios, building cross functional squads from the ground up and implementing cadences, backlog management, and planning rhythms. We coached leaders and teams through the shift, adapting practices sprint by sprint based on real feedback. We tackled the hard friction points: dependencies with non-agile teams, leadership role confusion, and the cultural shift from command and control to team enablement.

The Shift

Vodafone’s business teams moved from siloed functions to cross functional squads with real customer focus. Planning became transparent, prioritisation became data driven, and delivery cycles compressed from months to weeks. Leadership learned to enable rather than control, creating space for teams to solve customer problems autonomously. Critically, this was not a theoretical agile transformation. It was a delivery system built specifically for Vodafone’s customer obsessed ambitions and the complex stakeholder environment of a major telco.

Measurable Impact

Delivery cycles accelerated dramatically, moving from planning to execution in weeks not months. Team engagement increased significantly with stronger collaboration, clarity, and momentum. Customer focus improved as squads were empowered to solve real problems faster. Most importantly, Vodafone gained the capability and confidence to scale these ways of working beyond the pilot, establishing a foundation for enterprise wide transformation that didn’t require consultants permanently embedded in the business.