What is ‘agile’?
Agile is often described as a methodology, but it starts with a mindset. At its core, agile is about value delivery, collaboration and the ability to adapt continuously in a changing environment.
The method emerged in the early 2000s, originally favored by software development teams using official frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban. Scrum is a structured framework with clearly defined roles, built on time-boxed cycles and regular reviews. Kanban, meanwhile, is more flexible and visual, focused on helping teams work in a continuous flow.
In practice, agile breaks down projects into small increments, and translates into clear roles and responsibilities, shorter delivery cycles, strong prioritization, and regular feedback loops. These elements enable teams across business and support functions to deliver value to stakeholders more frequently and stay aligned with business priorities, while empowering them to adjust quickly when conditions change.
There is no single “right way” to implement agile. Many teams already apply its principles (collaboration, iterative delivery, and feedback) without formally labelling them as such. What matters most is moving away from siloed execution and top-down decision-making toward more open, collaborative, and adaptive ways of working.
Embedding agile in our strategy
Our agile journey began within IT teams experimenting with frameworks such as Scrum. This delivered quick and tangible results: faster cycles, improved quality, stronger collaboration, and fewer silos. These early successes created strong momentum, encouraging other teams to explore how agile could support their own objectives and helping drive broader adoption across the organization.
As we scaled, one key insight emerged: agile is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Each function operates with different levels of maturity and complexity, requiring tailored solutions. To ensure lasting impact, we anchored agile within our Shape & Scale strategy as a critical enabler of the “empower our people” pillar. This ensured that leadership support was clear, and this fostered employee buy-in.
The creation of the Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) was a major milestone. The ACE acts as a central hub to support teams with a pragmatic, hands-on approach combining training, coaching, facilitation, and change management. In parallel, we strengthened our HR backbone to align with agile roles and ways of working. Together, these elements form our Agile Backbone, embedding agility as a sustainable, organization-wide capability.
How we apply agile at Allianz Trade
To make agile part of how teams work every day, we deliberately lowered the barriers to adoption. We took a deliberate, step-by-step approach, introducing the concept and structure, recommending a few starter practices, and showing teams that many were already working in agile ways without realizing it. At Allianz Trade, agile is not a fixed model, but a flexible four-level framework that enables teams to assess their maturity and adopt the approach that best fits their needs. Teams can start with light, non-disruptive practices, such as shared backlogs, stand-ups, and retrospectives, to enhance transparency and collaboration, and progressively evolve towards more advanced setups, up to fully scaled models with end-to-end ownership and strong cross-functional alignment at enterprise level.
We continuously monitor our progress and efficiency to ensure high-quality delivery, combining agile evolution with the right change management support. This approach allows each team to adopt a model aligned with its context, maturity, and objectives, and ensures agile remains practical, accessible, and impactful.
The benefits we see in practice
Across Allianz Trade, agile is coming to life in different ways, adapted by teams to their realities, yet consistently delivering stronger performance and engagement.
Today, 25% of our teams operate in a fully agile setup, and nearly half of our employees have already been exposed to agile ways of working. This creates a strong foundation for further scaling. To support this journey, we offer an agile maturity assessment, allowing teams to evaluate their practices and identify areas for growth within their team or transversally.
In more complex environments such as e-commerce and Multinationals (MNC), teams have embraced highly collaborative, end-to-end models. MNC’s organization, in particular, has implemented a mature agile setup across its operations, enabling faster execution and delivering up to 20% improvements in collaboration and engagement. E-commerce operates through interconnected squads that work seamlessly from commercial activities through to delivery, aligning regularly on priorities and supported by empowered decision-making.
Across the organization, teams adopt selected agile practices such as retrospectives to increase transparency, strengthen alignment, and manage complexity. Operations and IT reinforces this by ensuring these regular reflection moments, helping turn experience into learning and embedding a culture of continuous improvement.
One of our key learnings is simple: agile works best when it is experienced, not imposed. When forced, it can feel disruptive or scary, but when teams are encouraged to experiment and adapt, it becomes natural, engaging, and far more impactful.
Our future with agile
Looking ahead, our agile journey is accelerating. Agile is evolving from a set of practices into a deeply embedded way of working, shaping how we prioritize and make decisions. We will continue to scale across the organization while embracing hybrid models where needed, with a stronger focus on outcomes and measurable value.
At the same time we are leveraging innovations such as Generative AI to help teams navigate change, generate faster insights, and reduce administrative effort, allowing them to focus on collaboration, decision-making and value creation.
Agile isn’t a fixed recipe - it’s a mindset. And when powered by the right discipline, flexibility, and support, it becomes a powerful driver for performance, engagement, and innovation.
