This is a profile image of Santiago Comella-Dorda

Santiago Comella-Dorda

PartnerBoston

Works with clients to define, develop, and implement digital solutions to succeed in an ever-accelerating world. Helps large organizations to become more agile, empower teams, create nimble structures and accelerate innovation.

As software is eating the world, Santiago has specialized on applying agile to large enterprises that are struggling to innovate and compete with digital natives. He has helped multiple institution create empowered teams, embrace the latest engineering practices, make their process more agile and streamline their organizational designs. He has ample experiences dealing with the complexities of transforming large institutions with siloed organizations, bureaucratic process and legacy technologies.

Santiago has in-depth experience in the high-tech sector as well as with financial institutions, where his recent engagements include:

  • Led Agile roll-out at a large SaaS and services vendor. Transformation resulted on over 25% throughput gain, client is becoming a recognized digital innovator guiding a vendor's cost-efficiency transformation for a saving of $300 million
  • Designed the agile operating model for top 5 insurer. The transformation yielded a significant reduction in time to market and reduction of managerial and support overhead by over 40%
  • Transformed a large infrastructure operations teams (>1000FTEs) to an agile Way of Working and an engineering driven culture. Transformation delivered $30M of savings, and 80%+ acceleration of infrastructure services (provisioning of environments, capacity increases, etc
  • Designed and launched Agile transformation and digitalization effort at top 5 bank in the Americas

Before joining the Firm, Santiago was a computer scientist with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Before the SEI, Santiago designed, developed and delivered geographical information systems and was a second Lieutenant in the Spanish Air Force.

Santiago has obtained a Bachelor and Engineering Degree in Computer Science from Centro Politécnico Superior in Spain, and an MBA from Stanford University. Santiago is an Arjay Miller scholar and a La Caixa fellow and a certified Scrum master.

Published work

Stairway to digital excellence,” McKinsey & Company, August 2023

The rewired enterprise: How five companies built to outcompete,” McKinsey & Company, July 2023

Beyond the anecdote: True drivers of digital-delivery performance,” McKinsey & Company, March 2023

Agile funding: An investment management approach to funding outcomes,” McKinsey & Company, October 2022

Moving beyond agile to become a software innovator,” McKinsey & Company, September 2021

Building a cloud-ready operating model for agility and resiliency,” McKinsey & Company, March 2021

Agility to action: Operationalizing a value-driven agile blueprint,” McKinsey & Company, June 2020

Agile, reliable, secure, compliant IT: Fulfilling the promise of DevSecOps,” McKinsey & Company, May 2020

Revisiting agile teams after an abrupt shift to remote,” McKinsey & Company, April 2020

The drawbacks of agility,” McKinsey & Company, May 2018

How IT can drive agile development,” McKinsey & Company, November 2016

From box to cloud: An approach for software development executives” (PDF–671 KB), McKinsey & Company, January 2015

Quest for excellence: Driving a step change in medical products operations (Request copy), McKinsey & Company, 2014

A process for COTS software product evaluation,” Carnegie Mellon University, 2004

Education

Stanford University
MBA

Universidad de Zaragoza
MSc, computer science