Five business units, five incompatible delivery models, one federated portfolio. PI Planning in sync across mortgage, retail, wealth, treasury, and capital markets inside 18 months.
The client was a Fortune 100 financial services firm whose five operating business units had each evolved their own delivery model. Mortgage, retail banking, wealth management, treasury, and capital markets each ran their own PMO conventions, operated on separate Jira instances, and pulled funding through unaligned annual cycles. The Chief Information Officer had no way to compare investment performance across BUs because none of the data structures were normalized.
The break came during a series of M&A integrations. Acquired platforms needed cross-BU coordination to land in the existing footprint, and no two BUs could agree on a delivery cadence to receive the work. Programs that should have closed inside two quarters were drifting into year two with no clear owner. The executive team had tried internal task forces and had hired two prior Big Four firms to align the portfolio. Neither effort survived the political layer between the BU CIOs.
The fragmented governance model showed up first in compliance findings. Change governance varied so widely between BUs that SOX and Reg W audits flagged inconsistencies in three consecutive cycles. The remediation work consumed risk-team capacity that should have been spent on the next regulatory horizon. Internal counsel was briefing the audit committee monthly on the exposure.
The financial bleeding was just as severe. Three separate procurement contracts existed with the same enterprise vendor because no two BUs could align on a master agreement. The M&A integration backlog grew $300M in arrears over three years, with deferred synergy capture compounding quarter over quarter. The transformation lead had a clear mandate and no operating model capable of delivering on it.
Summit launched all five Agile Release Trains concurrently, with each BU retaining its own program leadership while reporting into a single Lean Portfolio Management governance layer. This was the unlock the prior firms had missed. Rather than picking one BU's model and forcing the others to migrate, we built a federation that respected BU autonomy at the program level and unified only what mattered at the portfolio level: funding cadence, dependency view, and executive reporting.
Our embedded Release Train Engineers sat inside each BU for the first two Program Increments. They worked the room. PI Planning was where the federation became real, because once each BU saw the others' commitments and the cross-BU dependencies in a single map, the conversation moved from negotiation to coordination. By month 12, our RTEs had withdrawn to advisory roles and the client's own RTEs were running the cadence.
The federation principle extended to tooling. We consolidated to a single Jira Align instance for portfolio rollup while leaving each BU's program-level Jira projects intact. No forced data migration, full executive visibility. That tradeoff is what kept the BU CIOs aligned through the transition.
The federated model gave executive leadership real-time portfolio visibility across all five business units for the first time. Investment decisions that had previously taken six months of cross-BU negotiation began closing in under four weeks. The compliance benefit was equally hard to ignore: two consecutive audit cycles closed with zero findings on change governance, and the audit committee briefings shifted from exposure reporting to forward-looking risk posture.
Mortgage BU through the first Program Increment. Demonstrated the cadence to the executive sponsor group.
Retail, wealth, treasury, and capital markets ARTs each through their first PI. Federation tooling live.
Client RTEs running the cadence. Summit footprint reduced to advisory on the federation governance layer.
All five Agile Release Trains running PI Planning in synchronized cadence with cross-BU dependency mapping.
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