This article is based on a post originally published on The Enterprisers Project by a Vanguard CIO. It has been rewritten for a DevOps engineering audience.
The Agile Gap: Sprints Without Speed
Many organizations claim to practice agile. They run sprints, hold standups, and plan with story points. But a candid conversation with a friend who had just joined a “agile-adopting” organization raised a question that gets to the heart of the matter: are you actually delivering software faster, or are you just applying agile terminology to old habits?
His new employer was doing sprints and scrum ceremonies, yet deployed infrequently and had no plans to decompose their monolithic application or migrate to public cloud. That is a situation many engineering teams recognize—rituals without results. True agile is not a meeting cadence; it is the organizational capacity to continuously deliver working software.
The Startup Visit That Changed Vanguard’s Direction
The Vanguard leadership team traveled to meet several startups that were potential industry disruptors. Despite operating in different sectors, these companies shared one defining characteristic: they could move from idea to working software remarkably fast. That speed was not accidental—it was the product of deliberate architectural and cultural choices.
The visits prompted Vanguard to define an internal goal they called Business Value at Startup Speed (BV@SS). To communicate and structure the journey toward that goal, the team developed a pyramid framework modeled conceptually on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: you cannot reach the top without first satisfying the layers beneath.
The Three-Layer Pyramid: A Framework for True Agility
Layer 1 — Agile Infrastructure (The Foundation)
No matter how skilled your developers are, slow or rigid infrastructure creates a hard ceiling on delivery speed. Vanguard addressed this by adopting public cloud and automating manual provisioning processes. The outcome was self-service infrastructure: engineers could provision environments in minutes rather than the weeks that manual ticket-based processes had required.
Key practices at this layer typically include:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation
- Automated environment provisioning via CI/CD pipelines
- Self-service developer portals to eliminate ops bottlenecks
- Cloud-native services that scale on demand
Layer 2 — DevSecOps and Continuous Delivery
Once infrastructure is agile, the next layer focuses on how software is built, tested, and promoted to production. Vanguard restructured their application architecture and built a continuous delivery pipeline guided by DevSecOps principles—meaning security controls are embedded in the pipeline rather than bolted on at the end.
Their pipeline automated steps that had historically been manual and slow:
- Full functional regression test suites triggered automatically on every commit
- Automated security test cases integrated into the build process
- Automatic change-record creation to satisfy governance requirements
The result was a dramatic reduction in the time and human touchpoints between a code commit and a feature reaching end users—without sacrificing compliance or security.
Layer 3 — An Agile Business (The Top of the Pyramid)
The top of the pyramid is where IT and business strategy genuinely converge. Technology alone cannot deliver this layer; it requires cultural and organizational change. Vanguard adopted lean development practices to create blended business-and-IT teams empowered to run fast experiments and learn from real data.
One example is their Client Experience teams, which reached a cadence of deploying experiments as frequently as daily. This is only possible when both layers beneath it—agile infrastructure and a mature CD pipeline—are already in place.
A Real-World Example: Pushing the Button in a Leadership Meeting
One of the clearest illustrations of BV@SS in practice came during a quarterly leadership review. A blended team had been tasked with reducing the volume of client support calls generated by a specific page on the Institutional site. Within approximately one week, they had formed a hypothesis and built a testable experiment.
During the leadership meeting, the team invited the then-chairman to deploy the experiment live—right then and there. He was initially hesitant, understandably conditioned by years of experience with high-risk, high-effort monolithic deployments. After a brief explanation of the transformation the team had undergone, he agreed.
Within minutes, the experiment was live in production for a subset of users. Every IT control passed automatically in the background: regression tests, security scans, and change-record creation all ran without manual intervention. The subsequent data confirmed the experiment had succeeded—call volume from the page dropped, and the analysis surfaced additional areas for further improvement.
Practical Advice: Start at the Foundation
The most actionable takeaway from Vanguard’s experience is deceptively simple: do not attempt to build an agile business on top of a non-agile infrastructure and delivery pipeline. Agile ceremonies applied to a slow, manual delivery chain produce frustration, not speed.
Use the pyramid as a diagnostic tool:
- Audit your infrastructure agility. Can engineers self-provision environments? Is provisioning measured in minutes or weeks?
- Audit your delivery pipeline. Are testing, security scanning, and change management automated? What is your lead time from commit to production?
- Audit your business practices. Are business and IT co-located in blended teams? Can a hypothesis become a live experiment in under a week?
If the answer to Layer 1 or Layer 2 questions is “no,” focusing energy on Layer 3 agile business practices will yield limited returns. Fix the foundation first.
Key Takeaways
- Agile ceremonies (sprints, scrum) alone do not constitute true agile if software delivery remains slow and manual.
- Infrastructure agility—especially cloud adoption and automated provisioning—is the non-negotiable foundation.
- A DevSecOps continuous delivery pipeline removes the manual bottlenecks between code and production while preserving security and compliance controls.
- An agile business, where blended teams run rapid experiments, is only achievable once the lower layers are mature.
- Start with an honest assessment of your current foundation before investing in higher-order agile practices.