Can you tell us about your role?

As CIO, I’m responsible for establishing, coordinating and evaluating information technology strategies for the products and services we provide our clients and patients. I am further responsible for ensuring that we derive business value from our technology investments. Adopting an Agile mindset means that the technology, processes and people we put in place deliver results that are in line with our clients’ business goals.

How has Agile changed the way you approach your work?
In a digital economy, it’s important to move towards an Agile mindset. Today, Express Scripts Canada delivers innovative solutions with speed and craftsmanship - while at the same time delivering better client and patient experiences. Agile guides what we’ll do next to achieve a certain business outcome and how we’ll do it. It’s about changing the way we work, leveraging our expertise, and learning through frequent feedback. It’s about breaking big ideas down into smaller ones – what we call minimum viable products – and working closely with the people who are actually going to use the solution we’re creating. This will give us the greatest value in the shortest amount of time. Agile both speeds up implementation and allows us to pivot and be responsive to feedback, quickly improving upon what we’ve delivered. The result is our clients and patients can start to realize value much sooner.

What benefits have you seen from moving to Agile?

An Agile approach reduces the risks normally associated with a more traditional one-time delivery where companies make very large upfront investments in time and money, but only understand if they met the needs of their clients at a date far in the future. Alongside Agile, we’ve invested in technology to automate processes which allows us to deliver smaller batches of features, functions and working software. This protects our clients, patients and teams from some of the complexities and risks associated with delivering a product quickly to the marketplace. Agile has become a unifying force within our organization and has created a culture of lifelong learning by allowing employees to challenge themselves, accept that they don’t have to know everything upfront and learn as they go.