Agile Delivery Implementation: Building Squad-Based Delivery at Bettys & Taylors

The Client

Bettys & Taylors Group is one of Yorkshire’s most iconic family businesses. Founded in 1886, the group is home to Yorkshire Tea — Britain’s favourite tea brand — Taylors of Harrogate coffee and teas, and the beloved Bettys Café Tea Rooms. With annual revenues exceeding £300 million and a workforce of approximately 1,600 people, the group blends heritage craftsmanship with modern ambition.

Bettys & Taylors has long been recognised for its commitment to quality and its people. As the business continued to grow, the leadership team saw an opportunity to further strengthen how the organisation planned and delivered change — building on its existing strengths while adopting more modern, agile approaches to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market.

The Challenge

The food and beverage industry is experiencing a period of unprecedented change. Shifting consumer expectations, supply chain volatility, evolving regulatory landscapes, sustainability pressures, and the accelerating pace of digital innovation are all reshaping how businesses must operate. Organisations that can adapt quickly, learn continuously, and deliver incremental value are the ones best positioned to thrive.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also beginning to influence the sector — from demand forecasting and production optimisation to customer insight and process automation. While AI is not the sole driver of change, it is an increasingly important factor that forward-thinking organisations need to account for in how they plan and deliver work. Agile ways of working provide the responsiveness and learning culture needed to harness these emerging technologies effectively.

Against this backdrop, Bettys & Taylors Group recognised that strengthening its change delivery capability was a strategic priority. The existing approach to delivering change had served the business well, but there was a clear opportunity to increase the speed, transparency, and value of how improvements were planned and delivered across the organisation.

The leadership team was looking to evolve the operating model toward a lighter, more iterative approach — one that could deliver value more frequently, increase visibility of work in progress, and empower teams closer to the work to make decisions. The Finance Change and Taylors Operations teams were identified as ideal candidates for the pilot:

• Finance Change had a strong appetite for small, continuous improvements to everyday processes — making it a natural fit for an Agile approach focused on frequent, high-quality delivery.
• Taylors Operations, with its close connection to the Factory and Warehousing teams, offered an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how Agile delivery could bring faster, more pragmatic technology improvements directly to frontline colleagues.

Leadership’s ambition was to establish a repeatable model — one that could be proven in these two areas and then confidently scaled across the wider organisation.

The Approach

McKenna Agile Consultants designed a phased implementation tailored to Bettys & Taylors’ culture, maturity, and strategic goals. Being locally based in Harrogate, the team brought both deep Agile expertise and a genuine understanding of the organisation.

Phase 1: Introduction to Agile Training

Two one-day, in-person workshops were delivered for key stakeholders and identified squad team members. These sessions created a shared language and understanding around Agile principles, Scrum, and flow-based ways of working. By bringing the group together in a single cohort, the training established psychological safety, built alignment from day one, and ensured everyone started from the same foundation. The sessions were preceded by stakeholder interviews to ensure maximum relevance to the Bettys & Taylors context.

Phase 2: Bespoke Implementation Workshop & Roadmap

A hands-on design workshop where cross-functional leaders co-created the Agile operating model for Bettys & Taylors — defining roles, cadences, flow systems, and metrics. This produced a clear transformation roadmap with identified pilot areas and sequencing for rollout.

Phase 3: On-Going Agile Transformation Coaching

With the squads launched, embedded coaching became the engine of the transformation. The coaching focused on establishing strong team behaviours and guiding both squads through the natural stages of team development — forming, storming, norming, and performing. In the early sprints, this meant helping team members build trust, navigate new roles and responsibilities, and develop healthy ways of resolving disagreements and managing workload.

Throughout, the coaching emphasised core Agile principles: delivering working solutions over comprehensive documentation, responding to change over rigidly following a plan, valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools, and prioritising customer collaboration over contract negotiation. These principles were not taught as abstract theory but embedded through daily practice — in sprint planning, retrospectives, backlog refinement, and the everyday decisions teams made about how to approach their work.

The coaching also covered practical foundations: preparing and refining backlogs, facilitating sprint events, setting up Jira and Confluence, and providing regular leadership reviews to maintain alignment and momentum.

Leveraging AI in Delivery

As part of the coaching engagement, McKenna Agile Consultants introduced the squads to Jira’s in-house AI tool, Rovo, to help evolve how requirements were written and refined. The teams were coached on how to use Rovo to assist with drafting user stories, improving acceptance criteria, and identifying gaps in requirements before work entered a sprint.

Integrating AI into the requirements process in this way offers significant benefits: it reduces the time spent on rework caused by unclear or incomplete requirements, helps less experienced team members produce higher-quality output more quickly, and creates a consistent standard across the squad. Crucially, it positions the team to build confidence with AI-assisted ways of working — a capability that will become increasingly valuable as AI tools continue to mature across the industry.

Squad Model

Two cross-functional squads were established as the pilot, each with a clear shared mission:

• Finance Change Squad — Focused on delivering small, high-quality improvements to Finance processes, enabling the team to realise continuous value through frequent, incremental change.
• Taylors Operations Squad — Focused on delivering practical technology improvements for the Factory and Warehousing teams, improving day-to-day operations through fast, pragmatic solutions.

The Results

Within the first 30 days, both squads were up and running with core Scrum structures in place. The foundations were solid — the constraint was no longer tools or process, but capacity and BAU protection, a positive sign that the model was working and the teams were ready to take on more.

• Agile foundations established: Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, risk guardrails, sprint cadences, and requirements intake rules — all agreed, documented, and in use across both squads.
• Tooling and visibility: Jira boards configured for both squads with active sprints, releases tracking, and Kanban views. Confluence spaces created with squad missions, values, and working agreements. Teams also introduced to Jira’s AI tool Rovo to support requirements evolution.
• Financial impact: One of the earliest wins for the Finance Change Squad was creating potential cost savings through ensuring accurate audit trails and reports. Within just two sprints of the squad going live, the team delivered a solution — demonstrating how a focused, Agile approach can unlock long-standing potential value quickly. It was a powerful proof point: small, dedicated squads with clear priorities can deliver meaningful business impact from day one. This highlights how fast, continuous improvements actively protect the bottom line from future exposure better than large, slow-moving projects.
• Growing Agile mindset: Across both squads, there is a visible shift in how teams approach their work. Team members are proactively slicing work into small, testable increments, raising risks around requirements clarity, and embracing the principle that small, frequent changes deliver more value than large, infrequent projects. The squads are building the habits and discipline that underpin long-term Agile maturity.
• Scalable model: Both squads are well-placed to demonstrate a repeatable Agile model that can be extended beyond Finance and Operations to the wider organisation.
• Team development: Both squads have progressed through the forming and storming stages of team development, with strong coaching support helping them navigate new roles, build trust, and establish productive working rhythms as they move toward norming and performing.

What Our Client Says

“McKenna Agile Consultants brought a level of pragmatism and expertise that was exactly what we needed. They didn’t just teach us Agile theory — they worked alongside our teams, understood our culture, and helped us build something that genuinely works for Bettys & Taylors. The squad model has already transformed how we deliver change.”

Kerrie Taylor, Group Change Lead, Bettys & Taylors Group

“What impressed me most was how quickly the teams embraced the new ways of working. The coaching from McKenna Agile Consultants gave our people the confidence to challenge the status quo and start delivering real value in short cycles. We’ve gone from talking about change to actually making it happen — sprint by sprint. The transparency we now have across both squads is something we’ve never had before.”

James Targett, Head of IT Solutions, Bettys & Taylors Group

What We Delivered

Service	Description
Agile Training	Two one-day Introduction to Agile workshops for identified squad team members and key stakeholders, tailored to the Bettys & Taylors context through pre-engagement stakeholder interviews.
Implementation Workshop	Bespoke half-day session to co-create the Agile operating model, defining squad structures, roles, cadences, and flow metrics.
Squad Launch & Coaching	Hands-on coaching for both the Finance Change and Taylors Operations squads, including backlog preparation, sprint facilitation, role-specific guidance, and coaching through the forming, storming, norming, and performing stages of team development.
Tooling Setup	Configuration of Jira boards (active sprints, releases, Kanban) and Confluence spaces with documented ways of working, squad missions, and working agreements. Introduction to Jira’s AI tool Rovo for requirements evolution.
Leadership Reviews	Monthly leadership reviews and Agile assessment radar charts to track squad maturity and inform strategic decisions.
Cross-Squad Planning	Quarterly planning cadence to align the squads on the next 90 days of change, demonstrate outcomes, and recalibrate priorities.

Looking Ahead

The pilot has proven the model. Both squads are operational, delivering value, and building the habits that underpin long-term Agile maturity. The next phase of the partnership focuses on extending the squad-based model beyond Finance and Operations — using the patterns, playbooks, and Jira/Confluence configurations established in the pilot to accelerate adoption across other parts of the group.

For Bettys & Taylors, this is the beginning of an Agile capability that complements 140 years of Yorkshire craftsmanship with a modern, iterative way of delivering change.

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