Shifting from Project to Product Helps Huntington National Bank Achieve Record Double-digit Revenue Growth

Huntington National Bank (“Huntington Bank”) wanted to adapt to evolving industry standards and consumer preferences to stay relevant in a competitive market. Understanding that the traditional “on-time, on-budget” project execution mentality would no longer fuel the innovation needed to achieve growth, leadership decided Huntington Bank needed to fundamentally change its projectbased model.

Huntington National Bank embarked on an Agile transformation journey to evolve how its business solutions were delivered, funded, prioritized, and governed. Shifting to a product-and-value stream-centric model powered by Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution, Huntington Bank learned how to measure the true value of its efforts and investments and enable alignment of all activities to enterprise goals.

Founded in 1866, Huntington National Bank is a $177 billion asset regional bank holding company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Operating more than 1,000 branches in 11 states, Huntington National Bank and its affiliates provide consumers, small and middle-market businesses, corporations, municipalities, and other organizations with a comprehensive suite of banking, payments, wealth management, and risk management products and services.

Huntington Bank operates in a highly competitive industry where it vies with other banks, savings and loans, credit unions, financial services companies, mortgage bankers, equipment and automobile finance companies, insurance companies, investment advisors, brokerage firms, and a new slew of FinTech entrants − many of which have fewer regulatory constraints, greater capital, and lower cost structures. Fueled by the competitive landscape, the continuous innovation and widespread adoption of new technologies − including online services, mobile applications, and advanced ATM functionality − has also changed how individuals and businesses conduct their financial affairs.

Failure to address these competitive pressures and adapt to evolving industry standards and customer preferences would leave Huntington Bank needing to drastically revise down its aggressive growth goals − an unacceptable proposition in the eyes of executive leadership. “Success is about delivering business outcomes,” says Charlie Kennedy, VP, Agile Delivery Leader for Huntington Bank. “The bank, and our CEO, in particular, has a very strong growth focus. He wants to continue to grow our geographic footprint, which would drive more revenue, more profit. Then, on the other side of things, offer more and better products to our customers. That will also drive growth.”

Standing between Huntington Bank and its vision for future growth was a legacy project-based model that no longer served the needs of the modern organization. “Think about that model,” continues Charlie, “There’s annual funding in planning cycles, business cases get built, and those business cases − usually a laundry list of capabilities perceived as something our customers want − gets approved. That usually starts, say, mid-year and kicks in the following year. And then, by the time we spin up teams and deliver that set of capabilities, it’s probably another year. So going from idea to new capability in the hands of our customer was typically a two-year cycle. That’s just not competitive.”

Charlie adds, “to enable growth, whether it’s organically through new products and growing our geographic footprint, or through acquisition, we have got to have the right model in place. We’ve got to get faster and more efficient in our ability to deliver new capabilities. We need to be more responsive to our customers. We need to innovate. And the old way of doing work in a project-based waterfall model is just not getting us there.”

Understanding that the usual “on-time, on-budget” project execution mentality would no longer fuel the innovation and growth that Huntington Bank wanted to achieve, leadership decided they needed to fundamentally change their approach. After successfully experimenting with a more Agile, value stream-based model within a few select teams, Huntington Bank’s senior executives formed an organization called the Value Management Office (VMO). The VMO was created to drive Huntington Bank’s Agile transformation at scale and evolve how its business solutions were delivered, funded, prioritized, and managed.

“We wanted to pivot to a model that was built around value streams and products that are persistent,” adds Charlie. “Instead of building business cases around a set of capabilities that somebody perceives as a value to our customers, we want to build business cases within value streams that articulate the business outcomes that we need to achieve. And then let our teams go figure out what we have to build to achieve those outcomes. The focus shifts from delivering a set of stuff to achieving a set of outcomes and doing it faster.”

Charlie knew that shifting to a value-stream mindset would allow Huntington Bank to deliver faster and more frequently, but “we needed the right software to help us manage work in this value-stream model -- a solution that would allow us to manage work at multiple levels; at a portfolio level, a value stream level, and a team level.”

Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution is purpose-built to help scale lean and Agile practices across an organization and was selected by Charlie to enable Huntington Bank to visually track and manage a continuous flow of work and accelerate the speed of delivery. With the help of Planview’s consulting services, the VMO at Huntington Bank was able to design a three-tier hierarchy of boards that would help establish an organizational alignment that Charlie says, “brings both the business view and the technology view of the work together.”

“Going forward,” Charlie states, “the intent is to align funding, work, and teams to persistent value streams; to deliver capabilities within those value streams to our customers faster and more frequently; to enable faster feedback from our customers – and to be more responsive.”

Shifting to a product- and value stream-centric model, Huntington Bank was able to leverage Planview® to drive efficiency by aligning business activities to enterprise goals. “Planview is our solution for planning, prioritizing, and managing work across the entire lifecycle. It gives us visibility of work end-to-end from an idea, to being approved, going into backlog, prioritized, and then executed at the value stream level.”

Huntington Bank delivered record growth two years into its Agile transformation, closing the year with $6 billion in total revenue, up 32% from the last year prior to the shift − according to the company’s annual reports. While many things contributed to Huntington Bank’s breakout growth, it highlights explicitly in its report the execution of strategic initiatives − including launching several digitally powered innovations to better support customers − and driving efficiencies across the organization.

Long gone are the days of multiple-year cycles to get ideas to market. “Today we deliver via monthly releases,” affirms Charlie. “We had to get faster and more efficient in delivering new capabilities to allow us to be more competitive in the marketplace,” he continues. “Planview gave us that capability. It’s the primary way we’re managing all of our work in this new model.”

Huntington Bank enters its new era of Agile with a bullish outlook. Seeing substantial momentum across its businesses gives leadership confidence in its ability to continue to grow while expanding the breadth and depth of the transformation. “It’s a work in progress. We haven’t achieved nirvana yet. But as you’re able to deliver more incrementally, and faster, it builds confidence. Especially on the business side,” says Charlie.

“Our intent is to get to more of a release-when-ready posture that will allow us to decouple the delivery of new code from when our business turns it on and allows our customers to consume it,” adds Charlie. “Now that we have Planview, we are starting to get data that gives us the ability to identify where the bottlenecks are, and then to drive improvement in those areas.”

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