This is an experience report of the journey to adopt agile and lean principles and practices across Barclays Group (120,000 people, 40 countries, 327 years old, in the most regulated industry).

We will be 2.5 years into the firm-wide journey, we have more lessons that we have learnt.

In line with the themes of high trust vs. low trust, manual vs. automation, fragile vs. resilient, this experience report will focus on the yin and yang of Speed and Control, as this is a hard challenge in a highly regulated industry with thousands of Control professionals who are incentivised to avoid issues, not deliver at pace.

On the surface there can appear to be a conflict between speed and control. Certainly, the traditional approach to control inhibits speed.

As we enter our third year of firm-wide change in how we do what we do, we are starting to tackle the harder challenges. We are implementing at scale a radical change in how we comply to a huge amount of standards and regulation in the most regulated industry, having experimented with it in 2016.