Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision.
Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization.
Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change.
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision.
Understand how your key stakeholders will impact the longevity of your CoE.
Determine your CoE structure and staff.
Top-down alignment with strategic aims of the organization.
A set of high-level use cases to form the CoE’s service offerings around.
Visualization of key stakeholders, with their current and desired power and involvement documented.
1.1 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.
1.2 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) and business objectives.
1.3 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.
Prioritized business objectives
Business-aligned use cases to form CoE’s service offerings
Stakeholder map of key influencers
Document the functional expectations of the Agile teams.
Refine your business-aligned use cases with your collected data to achieve both business and functional alignment.
Create a capability map that visualizes and prioritizes your key service offerings.
Understanding of some of the identified concerns, pain points, and potential opportunities from your stakeholders.
Refined use cases that define the service offerings the CoE provides to its customers.
Prioritization for the creation of service offerings with a capability map.
2.1 Classified pains and opportunities.
2.2 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.
2.3 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.
Classified pains and opportunities
Refined use cases based on pains and opportunities identified during ACE requirements gathering
ACE Capability Map
Align service offerings with an Agile adoption model so that teams have a structured way to build their skills.
Standardize the way your organization will interact with the Center of Excellence to ensure consistency in best practices.
Mechanisms put in place for continual improvement and personal development for your Agile teams.
Interaction with the CoE is standardized via engagement plans to ensure consistency in best practices and predictability for resourcing purposes.
3.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.
3.2 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.
Adoption-aligned service offerings
Role-based engagement plans
Develop a set of metrics for the CoE to monitor business-aligned outcomes with.
The foundations of continuous improvement are established with a robust set of Agile metrics.
4.1 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.
4.2 Define target ACE performance metrics.
4.3 Define Agile adoption metrics.
4.4 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile team.
4.5 Create a communication plan for change.
Business objective-aligned metrics
CoE performance metrics
Agile adoption metrics
Assessment of organizational design
CoE communication plan
"Inconsistent processes and practices used across Agile teams is frequently cited as a challenge to adopting and scaling Agile within organizations. (VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report [N=1,319]) Creating an Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) is a popular way to try to impose structure and improve performance. However, simply establishing an ACE does not guarantee you will be successful with Agile. When setting up an ACE you must: Define ACE services based on identified stakeholder needs. Staff the ACE with respected, “hands on” people, who deliver identifiable value to your Agile teams. Continuously evolve ACE service offerings to maximize stakeholder satisfaction and value delivered."
Alex Ciraco, Research Director, Applications Practice Info-Tech Research Group
Implement Agile Practices That Work
Begin your Agile transformation with a comprehensive readiness assessment and a pilot project to adopt Agile development practices and behaviors that fit.
YOU ARE HERE
Spread Best Practices with an Agile Center of Excellence
Form an ACE to support Agile development at all levels of the organization with thought leadership, strategic development support & process innovation.
Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile
Extend the benefits of your Agile pilot project into your organization by strategically scaling Agile initiatives that will meet stakeholders’ needs.
Transition to Product Delivery Introduce product-centric delivery practices to drive greater benefits and better delivery outcomes.
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives
Remodel the stages of your lifecycle to standardize your definition of a successful product.
Build a Strong Foundation for Quality
Instill quality assurance practices and principles in each stage of your software development lifecycle.
Implement DevOps Practices That Work
Fix, deploy, and support applications quicker though development and operations collaboration.
NOTE: Organizational change is hard and prone to failure. Determine your organization’s level of readiness for Agile transformation (and recommended actions) by completing Info-Tech’s Agile Transformation Readiness Tool.
An ACE amplifies good practices that have been successfully employed within your organization, effectively allowing you to extend the benefits obtained from your Agile pilot(s) to a wider audience.
From the viewpoint of the business, members of the ACE provide expertise and insights to the entire organization in order to facilitate Agile transformation and ensure standard application of Agile good practices.
From the viewpoint of your Agile teams, it provides a community of individuals that share experiences and lessons learned, propagate new ideas, and raise questions or concerns so that delivering business value is always top of mind.
Some organizations prefer Communities of Practice (CoP) to Centers of Excellence (CoE). CoPs are different from CoEs:
“A CoP is an affiliation of people who share a common practice and who have a desire to further the practice itself … and of course to share knowledge, refine best practices, and introduce standards. CoPs are defined by their domain of interest, but the membership is a social structure comprised of volunteer practitioners”
– Wenger, E., R. A. McDermott, et al. (2002) Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge, Harvard Business Press.
“CoPs differ from a CoE mainly in that they tend to have no geographical boundaries, they hold no hierarchical power within a firm, and they definitely can never have structure determined by the company. However, one of the most obvious and telling differences lies in the stated motive of members – CoPs exist because they have active practitioner members who are passionate about a specific practice, and the goals of a CoP are to refine and improve their chosen domain of practice – and the members provide discretionary effort that is not paid for by the employer”
– Matthew Loxton (June 1, 2011) CoP vs CoE – What’s the difference, and Why Should You Care?, Wordpress.com
List based on reported impediments from VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report (N=1,319)
Provide services designed to inject evolving good practices into workflows and remove impediments or roadblocks from your Agile team’s ability to deliver value.
Maintain alignment with corporate objectives without impeding business agility in the long term. The ACE functions as an interface layer so that changing expectations can be adapted without negatively impacting Agile teams.
Avoid the risk of innovation and subject-matter expertise being lost or siloed by facilitating knowledge transfer and fostering a continuous learning environment.
Set baselines, monitor metrics, and run retrospectives to help govern process improvements and ensure that Agile teams are delivering expected benefits.
Instill Agile thinking and behavior into the organization. The ACE must encourage innovation and be an effective agent for change.
Being Prescriptive
Doing Agile
Being Agile
“(‘Doing Agile’ is) just some rituals but without significant change to support the real Agile approach as end-to-end, business integration, value focus, and team empowerment.” - Arie van Bennekum
Simply establishing a Center of Excellence for any discipline does not guarantee its success:
The 2019 State of DevOps Report found that organizations which had established DevOps CoEs underperformed compared to organizations which adopted other approaches for driving DevOps transformation. (Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 [N=~1,000])
Still, Agile Centers of Excellence can and do successfully drive Agile adoption in organizations. So what sets the successful examples apart from the others? Here’s what some have to say:
“The ACE must be staffed with qualified people with delivery experience! … [It is] effectively a consulting practice, that can evolve and continuously improve its services … These services are collectively about ‘enablement’ as an output, more than pure training … and above all, the ability to empirically measure the progress” – Paul Blaney, TD Bank
“When leaders haven’t themselves understood and adopted Agile approaches, they may try to scale up Agile the way they have attacked other change initiatives: through top-down plans and directives. The track record is better when they behave like an Agile team. That means viewing various parts of the organization as their customers.” – HBR, “Agile at Scale”
“the Agile CoE… is truly meant to be measured by the success of all the other groups, not their own…[it] is meant to be serving the teams and helping them improve, not by telling them what to do, but rather by listening, understanding and helping them adapt.” - Bart Gerardi, PMI
“The CoE must also avoid becoming static, as it’s crucial the team can adjust as quickly as business and customer needs change, and evolve the technology as necessary to remain competitive.” – Forbes, “RPA CoE (what you need to know)”
"The best CoEs are formed from thought leaders and change agents within the CoE domain. They are the process and team innovators who will influence your CoE roadmap and success. Select individuals who feel passionate about Agile." – Hans Eckman, InfoTech
Simply establishing an Agile Center of Excellence does not guarantee its success. When setting up your ACE, optimize its impact on the organization by doing the following 3 things:
Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.
Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.
Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.
Use Info-Tech’s Practice Adoption Journey model to establish your ACE. Building social capital (stakeholders’ trust in your ability to deliver positive outcomes) incrementally is vital to ensure that everyone is aligned to new mindsets and culture as your Agile practices scale.
Begin to document your development workflow or value chain, implement a tracking system for KPIs, and start gathering metrics and reporting them transparently to the appropriate stakeholders.
Use collected metrics and retrospectives to stabilize team performance by reducing areas of variability in your workflow and increasing the consistency at which targets are met.
Use information to support changes and adopt appropriate practices to make incremental improvements to the existing environment.
Drive behavioral and cultural changes that will empower teams to be accountable for their own success and learning.
Use your built-up trust and support practice innovation, driving the definition and adoption of new practices.
Business justification to continue to fund a Center of Excellence can be a challenge, especially with traditional thinking and rigid stakeholders. Hit the ground running and show value to your key influencers through business alignment and metrics that will ensure that the ACE is worth continuous investment.
The pace of change in customer expectations, competitive landscapes, and business strategy is continuously increasing. It is critical to develop a method to facilitate ongoing alignment to shifting business and development expectations seamlessly and ensure that your Agile teams are able to deliver expected business value.
Monitor your metrics to ensure desired benefits are being realized. The ACE is responsible for ensuring that expected Agile benefits are achievable and on track. Monitor against your defined baselines to create transparency and accountability for desired outcomes.
Run retrospectives to drive improvements and fixes into Agile projects and processes. Metrics falling short of expectations must be diagnosed and their root causes found, and fixes need to be communicated and injected back into the larger organization.
Define metrics and set targets that align with the goals of the ACE. These metrics represent the ACEs expected value to the organization and must be measured against on a regular basis to demonstrate value to your key stakeholders.
Culture clash between Agile teams and larger organization
Agile leverages empowered teams, meritocracy, and broad collaboration for success, but typical organizations are siloed and hierarchical with top down decision making. There needs to be a plan to enable a smooth transition from the current state towards the Agile target state.
Persistence of tribal knowledge
Agile relies on easy and open knowledge sharing, but organizational knowledge can sit in siloes. Employees may also try to protect their expertise for job security. It is important to foster knowledge sharing to ensure that critical know-how is accessible and doesn’t leave the organization with the individual.
Rigid management structures
Rigidity in how managers operate (performance reviews, human resource management, etc.) can result in cultural rejection of Agile. People need to be assessed on how they enable their teams rather than as individual contributors. This can help ensure that they are given sufficient opportunities to succeed. More support and less strict governance is key.
Breakdown due to distributed teams
When face-to-face interactions are challenging, ensure that you invest in the right communication technologies and remove cultural and process impediments to facilitate organization-wide collaboration. Alternative approaches like using documentation or email will not provide the same experience and value as a face-to-face conversation.
Industry - Government
Source - Cathy Novak, Agile Government Leadership
“The Agile CoE in the State of Maine is completely focused on the discipline of the methodology. Every person who works with Agile, or wants to work with Agile, belongs to the CoE. Every member of the CoE tells the same story, approaches the methodology the same way, and uses the same tools. The CoE also functions as an Agile research lab, experimenting with different standards and tools.
The usual tools of project management – mission, goals, roles, and a high-level definition of done – can be found in Maine’s Agile CoE. For story mapping, teams use sticky notes on a large wall or whiteboard. Demonstrating progress this way provides for positive team dynamics and a psychological bang. The State of Maine uses a project management framework that serves as its single source of truth. Everyone knows what’s going on at all times and understands the purpose of what they are doing. The Agile team is continually looking for components that can be reused across other agencies and programs.”
“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”
“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”
“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”
“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”
1. Strategically align the Center of Excellence | 2. Standardize the CoEs service offerings | 3. Operate the Center of Excellence | |
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Best-Practice Toolkit | 1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE. 1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE. |
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams. 2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan. 2.3 Define metrics to measure success. |
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE. 3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives. 3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE. |
Guided Implementations |
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Onsite Workshop | Module 1: Strategically align the ACE | Module 2: Standardize the offerings of the ACE | Module 3: Prepare for organizational change |
Phase 1 Outcome: Create strategic alignment between the CoE and organizational goals. | Phase 2 Outcome: Build engagement plans and key performance indicators based on a standardized Agile adoption plan. |
Phase 3 Outcome: Operate the CoEs monitoring function, identify improvements, and manage the change needed to continuously improve. |
Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
Workshop Module 1 | Workshop Module 2 | Workshop Module 3 | Workshop Module 4 | |
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Activities | Determine vision of CoE 1.1 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives. 1.2 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives. 1.3 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders. |
Define service offerings of CoE 2.1 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities. 2.2 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services. 2.3 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map. |
Define engagement plans 3.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model. 3.2 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption. |
Define metrics and plan communications 4.1 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives. 4.2 Define target ACE performance metrics. 4.3 Define Agile adoption metrics. 4.4 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile team. 4.5 Create a communication plan for change. |
Deliverables |
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The first step to creating a high-functioning ACE is to create alignment and consensus amongst your key stakeholders regarding its purpose. Engage in a set of activities to drill down into the organization’s goals and objectives in order to create a set of high-level use cases that will evolve into the service offerings of the ACE.
Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.
Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.
Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.
Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.
Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 1
Start with an analyst kick off call:
Then complete these activities…
1.1.1 Optional: Baseline your ACE maturity.
1.1.2 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.
1.1.3 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives.
1.1.4 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.
1.1.5 Select a centralized or decentralized model for your ACE.
1.1.6 Staff your ACE strategically.
Start with an analyst kick off call:
Then complete these activities…
1.2.1 Form the Center of Excellence.
1.2.2 Gather and document your existing Agile practices for the CoE.
1.2.3 Interview stakeholders to align ACE requirements with functional expectations.
1.2.4 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities.
1.2.5 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.
1.2.6 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.
Phase 1 Results & Insights:
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
1.1.1 Optional: Baseline your ACE maturity.
1.1.2 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.
1.1.3 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives.
1.1.4 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.
1.1.5 Select a centralized or decentralized model for your ACE.
1.1.6 Staff your ACE strategically.
If you already have established an ACE, use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to baseline its current maturity level (this will act as a baseline for comparison after you complete this Blueprint). Assessing your ACEs maturity lets you know where you currently are, and where to look for improvements.
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE
Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool.
Stakeholder | Role | Why they are essential players |
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CIO/ Head of IT | Program sponsor: Champion and set the tone for the Agile program. Critical in gaining and maintaining buy-in and momentum for the spread of Agile service offerings. | The head of IT has insight and influence to drive buy-in from executive stakeholders and ensure the long-term viability of the ACE. |
Applications Director | Program executor: Responsible for the formation of the CoE and will ensure the viability of the initial CoE objectives, use cases, and service offerings. | Having a coordinator who is responsible for collating performance data, tracking results, and building data-driven action plans is essential to ensuring continuous success. |
Agile Subject-Matter Experts | Program contributor: Provide information on the viability of Agile practices and help build capabilities on existing best practices. | Agile’s success relies on adoption. Leverage the insights of people who have implemented and evangelized Agile within your organization to build on top of a working foundation. |
Functional Group Experts | Program contributor: Provide information on the functional group’s typical processes and how Agile can achieve expected benefits. | Agile’s primary function is to drive value to the business – it needs to align with the expected capabilities of existing functional groups in order to enhance them for the better. |
Business justification to continue to fund a Center of Excellence can be a challenge, especially with traditional thinking and rigid stakeholders. Hit the ground running and show value to your key influencers through business alignment and metrics that will ensure that the ACE is worth continuous investment.
The pace of change in customer expectations, competitive landscapes, and business strategy is continuously increasing. It is critical to develop a method to facilitate ongoing alignment to shifting business and development expectations seamlessly and ensure that your Agile teams are able to deliver expected business value.
1.1.2 2 Hours
While there is tremendous pressure to align IT functions and the business due to the accelerating pace of change and technology innovation, you need to be aware that there are limitations in achieving this goal. Keep these challenges at the top of mind as you bring together your stakeholders to position the service offerings of your ACE. It is beneficial to make your stakeholders self-aware of these biases as well, so they come to the table with an open mind and are willing to find common ground.
There are a plethora of moving pieces within an organization and total alignment is not a plausible outcome.
The aim of a group should not be to achieve total alignment, but rather reframe and consider ways to ensure that stakeholders are content with the ways they interact and that misalignment does not occur due to transparency or communication issues.
While it may seem like the business is one unified body, the reality is that the business can include individuals or groups (CEO, CFO, IT, etc.) with conflicting priorities. While there are shared business goals, these entities may all have competing visions of how to achieve them. Alignment means compromise and agreement more than it means accommodating all competing views.
There is a political component to alignment, and sometimes individual aspirations can impede collective gain.
While the business side may be concerned with cost, those on the IT side of things can be concerned with taking on career-defining projects to bolster their own credentials. This conflict can lead to serious breakdowns in alignment.
Industry Food Services
Source Scott Ambler and Associates, Case Study
Being in an industry with high competition, Panera Bread needed to improve its ability to quickly deliver desired features to end customers and adapt to changing business demands from high internal growth.
Panera Bread engaged in an Agile transformation through a mixture of Agile coaching and workshops, absorbing best practices from these engagements to drive Agile delivery frameworks across the enterprise.
Adopting Agile delivery practices resulted in increased frequency of solution delivery, improving the relationship between IT and the business. Business satisfaction increased both with the development process and the outcomes from delivery.
The transparency that was needed to achieve alignment to rapidly changing business needs resulted in improved communication and broad-scale reduced risk for the organization.
"Agile delivery changed perception entirely by building a level of transparency and accountability into not just our software development projects, but also in our everyday working relationships with our business stakeholders. The credibility gains this has provided our IT team has been immeasurable and immediate."
– Mike Nettles, VP IT Process and Architecture, Panera Bread
Input arrows represent functional group needs, feedback from Agile teams, and collaboration with other CoEs and CoPs
Output arrows represent the services the CoE delivers and the benefits realized across the organization.
Governance & Metrics involves enabling success through the management of the ACEs resources and services, and ensuring that organizational structures evolve in concert with Agile growth and maturity. Your focus should be on governing, measuring, implementing, and empowering improvements.
Effective governance will function to ensure the long-term effectiveness and viability of your ACE. Changes and improvements will happen continuously and you need a way to decide which to adopt as best practices.
"Organizations have lengthy policies and procedures (e.g. code deployment, systems design, how requirements are gathered in a traditional setting) that need to be addressed when starting to implement an Agile Center of Excellence. Legacy ideas that end up having legacy policy are the ones that are going to create bottlenecks, waste resources, and disrupt your progress." – Doug Birgfeld, Senior Partner, Agile Wave
Services refers to the ability to deliver resourcing, guidance, and assistance across all Agile teams. By creating a set of shared services, you enable broad access to specialized resources, knowledge, and insights that will effectively scale to more teams and departments as Agile matures in your organization.
A Services model:
Technology refers to a broad range of supporting tools to enable employees to complete their day-to-day tasks and effectively report on their outcomes. The key to technological support is to strike the right balance between flexibility and control based on your organization's internal and external constraints (policy, equipment, people, regulatory, etc.).
"We sometimes forget the obvious truth that technology provides no value of its own; it is the application of technology to business opportunities that produces return on investment." – Robert McDowell, Author, In Search of Business Value
Staff is all about empowerment. The ACE should support and facilitate the sharing of ideas and knowledge sharing. Create processes and spaces where people are encouraged to come together, learn from, and share with each other. This setting will bring up new ideas to enhance productivity and efficiency in day-to-day activities while maintaining alignment with business objectives.
"An Agile CoE is legitimized by its ability to create a space where people can come together, share, and learn from one another. By empowering teams to grow by themselves and then re-connect with each other you allow the creativity of your employees to flow back into the CoE." – Anonymous, Founder, Agile consultancy group
A use case tells a story about how a system will be used to achieve a goal from the perspective of a user of that system. The people or other systems that interact with the use case are called “actors.” Use cases describe what a system must be able to do, not how it will do it.
Use cases are used to guide design by allowing you to highlight the intended function of a service provided by the Center of Excellence while maintaining a business focus. Jumping too quickly to a solution without fully understanding user and business needs leads to the loss of stakeholder buy-in and the Centers of Excellence rejection by teams.
Hypothesized ACE user needs →Use Case←Business objective
1.1.3 2 Hours
AGILE CENTER OF EXCELLENCE FUNCTIONS: | |||||||
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Guiding | Learning | Tooling | Supporting | Governing | Monitoring | ||
BUSINESS OBJECTIVES | Reduce time-to-market of product releases | ||||||
Reduce product delivery costs | |||||||
Effectively integrate teams from a merger |
1.1.3 2 Hours
Your goal should be to keep these as high level and generally applicable as possible as they provide an initial framework to further develop your service offerings. Begin to talk about the ways in which the ACE can support the realization of your business objectives and what those interactions may look like to customers of the ACE.
Avoid the rifts in stakeholder representation by ensuring you involve the relevant parties. Without representation and buy-in from all interested parties, your ACE may omit and fail to meet long-term organizational goals.
By ensuring every group receives representation, your service offerings will speak for the broad organization and in turn meet the needs of the organization as a whole.
Organization
1.1.4 1 Hour
1.1.4 1 Hour
An ACE can be organized differently depending on your organization’s specific needs and culture.
The SAFe Model:©
“For smaller enterprises, a single centralized [ACE] can balance speed with economies of scale. However, in larger enterprises—typically those with more than 500 – 1,000 practitioners—it’s useful to consider employing either a decentralized model or a hub-and-spoke model.”
© Scaled Agile, Inc.
The Spotify Model:
Spotify avoids using an ACE and instead spreads agile practices using Squads, Tribes, Chapters, Guilds, etc.
It can be a challenging model to adopt because it is constantly changing, and must be fundamentally supported by your organization’s culture. (Linders, Ben. “Don't Copy the Spotify Model.” InfoQ.com. 6 Oct. 2016.)
Detailed analysis of The Spotify Model is out of scope for this Blueprint.
1.1.5 30 minutes
Centralized ACE | Decentralized ACE | ||||
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Pros | Cons | Pros | Cons | ||
Centralize Vs De-centralize Considerations | Prioritized Business Objectives |
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ACE Use Cases |
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Organization Size |
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Organization Structure |
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Organization Culture |
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SELECTED MODEL: Centralized ACE
1.1.6 1 Hour
Candidate: Jane Doe | ||
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Rating Criteria | Criteria Weighting | Candidate's Score (1-5) |
Candidate has strong theoretical knowledge of Agile. | 8% | 4 |
Candidate has strong hands on experience with Agile. | 18% | 5 |
Candidate has strong hands on experience with Agile. | 10% | 4 |
Candidate is highly respected by the Agile teams. | 18% | 5 |
Candidate is seen as a thought leader in the organization. | 18% | 5 |
Candidate is seen as a change agent in the organization. | 18% | 5 |
Candidate has strong desire to be member of ACE staff. | 10% | 3 |
Total Weighted Score | 4.6 |
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
1.2.1 Form the Center of Excellence.
1.2.2 Gather and document your existing Agile practices for the CoE.
1.2.3 Interview stakeholders to align ACE requirements with functional expectations.
1.2.4 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities.
1.2.5 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.
1.2.6 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.
By operating within a group of your key players, you can legitimize your Center of Excellence by propagating the needs and interests of those who interface and evangelize the CoE within the larger organization.
The group of key stakeholders will extend the business alignment you achieved earlier by refining your service offerings to meet the needs of the ACEs customers. Multiple representations at the table will generate a wide arrangement of valuable insights and perspectives.
While holistic representation is necessary, ensure that the list is not too comprehensive and will not lead to progress roadblocks. The goal is to ensure that all factors relevant to the organization are represented; too many conflicting opinions may create an obstruction moving forward.
ACE
Choose the ACE funding model which is most aligned to your current system based on the scenarios provided below. Both models will offer the necessary support to ensure the success of your Agile program going forward.
Funding Model | Funding Scenario I | Funding Scenario II |
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Funded by the CIO | Funded by the CIO office and a stated item within the general IT budget. | Charged back to supported functional groups with all costs allocated to each functional group’s budget. |
Funded by the PMO | Charged back to supported functional groups with all costs allocated to each functional group’s budget. | Charged back to supported functional groups with all costs allocated to each functional group’s budget. |
Your funding model may add additional key influencers into the mix. After you choose your funding model, ensure that you review your stakeholder map and add anyone who will have a direct impact in the viability and stability of your ACE.
An Agile Center of Excellence is unique in the way you must govern the actions of its customers. Enable “flexible governance” to ensure that Agile teams have the ability to locally optimize and innovate while still operating within expected boundaries.
ACE Governing Body
↑ Agile Team → ACE ← Agile Team ↑
The governing body can be the existing executive or standing committees, or a newly formed committee involving your key ACE influencers and stakeholders.
Flexible governance means that your ACE set boundaries based on your cultural, regulatory, and compliance requirements, and your governance group monitors your Agile teams’ adherence to these boundaries.
There is no right answer to how your Center of Excellence should be resourced. Consider your existing organizational structure and culture, the quality of relationships between functional groups, and the typical budgetary factors that would weigh on choosing between a virtual and dedicated CoE structure.
COE | Advantages | Disadvantages |
---|---|---|
Virtual |
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Dedicated |
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1.2.1 1 Hour
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
The synergy between Agile and CoE relies on its ability to build on existing best practices. Agile cannot grow without a solid foundation. ACE gives you the way to disseminate these practices and facilitate knowledge transfer from a centralized sharing environment. As part of defining your service offerings, engage with stakeholders across the organization to evaluate what is already documented so that it can be accommodated in the ACE.
Info-Tech Insight
When considering existing practices, it is important to evaluate the level of adherence to these practices. If they have been efficiently utilized, injecting them into ACE becomes an obvious decision. If they have been underutilized, however, it is important to understand why this occurred and discuss how you can drive higher adherence.
The success of your Center of Excellence relies on the ability to build sound best practices within your organization’s context. Use your previous lessons learned and growing pains as shared knowledge of past Agile implementations within the ACE.
Draw on the experiences of your initial pilot where you learned how to adapt the Agile manifesto and practices to your specific context. These lessons will help onboard new teams to Agile since they will likely experience some of the same challenges.
Documents for review include:
Draw on previous scaling Agile experiences to help understand how to interface, facilitate, and orchestrate cross-functional teams and stakeholders for large and complex projects. These lessons will help your ACE teams develop collaboration and problem-solving techniques involving roles with different priorities and lines of thinking.
Documents for review include:
1.2.2 Variable time commitment based on current documentation state
Name | Type | Adherence Level | CoE Best Fit | Source | |
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1 | Tailored Scrum process | Process | High | Shared Services | Internal Wiki |
2 | |||||
3 |
1.2.3 30-60 Minutes per interview
Interview Stakeholders (from both Agile teams and functional areas) on their needs from the ACE. Ensure you capture both pain points and opportunities. Capture these as either Common Agile needs or Functional needs. Document using the tables below:
Common Agile Needs | |
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Common Agile Needs |
|
Functional Needs | Ent Arch Needs |
---|---|
|
PMO Needs
Operations Needs
1.2.4 Half day
Governance | Shared Services | Technology | People | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Pain Points | ||||
Opportunities |
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
1.2.5 1 Hour
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
1.2.6 1 Hour
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
Policy Management (Medium Potential)
Change Management (High Potential)
Risk Management (High Potential)
Stakeholder Management (High Potential)
Metrics/Feedback Monitoring (High Potential)
Engagement Planning (High Potential)
Knowledge Management (High Potential)
Subject-Matter Expertise (High Potential)
Agile Team Evaluation (High Potential)
Operations Support (High Potential)
Onboarding (Medium Potential)
Coaching (High Potential)
Learning Facilitation (High Potential)
Internal Certification Program (Low Potential)
Communications Training (Medium Potential)
Vendor Management (Medium Potential)
Application Support (Low Potential)
Tooling Standards (High Potential)
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
Our analyst team will help you organize and prioritize your business objectives for the year in order to ensure that the service offerings the ACE offers are delivering consistent business value.
Our analyst team will help you turn your prioritized business objectives into a set of high-level use cases that will provide the foundation for defining user-aligned services.
Our analysts will walk you through an exercise of mapping and prioritizing your Centers of Excellence stakeholders based on impact and power within so you can ensure appropriate presentation of interests within the organization.
Our analyst team will help you solidify the direction of your Center of Excellence by overlaying your identified needs, pain points, and potential opportunities in a matrix guided by Info-Tech’s CoE operating model.
Our analyst team will help you further refine your business-aligned use cases with the functional expectations from your Agile teams and stakeholders, ensuring the ACEs long-term utility.
Our analysts will walk you through creating your Agile Centers of Excellence capability map and help you to prioritize which service offerings are critical to the success of your Agile teams in meeting their objectives.
Now that you have aligned the CoE to the business and functional expectations, you need to ensure its service offerings are consistently accessible. To effectively ensure accessibility and delegation of shared services in an efficient way, the CoE needs to have a consistent framework to deliver its services.
Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.
Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.
Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.
Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.
Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.
Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): 2
Start with an analyst kick off call:
Then complete these activities…
2.1.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.
Start with an analyst kick off call:
Then complete these activities…
2.2.1 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.
Finalize phase deliverable:
Then complete these activities…
2.3.1 Collect existing team-level metrics.
2.3.2 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.
2.3.3 Define target ACE performance metrics.
2.3.4 Define Agile adoption metrics.
2.3.5 Consolidate metrics for stakeholder impact.
2.3.6 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Benefits Tracking Tool to monitor, evaluate, refine, and ensure continued business value.
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
2.1.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.
Culture clash between ACE and larger organization
It is important to carefully consider the compatibility between the current organizational culture and Agile moving forward. Agile compels empowered teams, meritocracy, and broad collaboration for success; while typical organizational structures are siloed and hierarchical and decisions are delegated from the top down.
This is not to say that the culture of the ACE has to match the larger organizational culture; part of the overarching aim of the ACE is to evolve the current organizational culture for the better. The point is to ensure you enable a smooth transition with sufficient management support and a team of Agile champions.
The changing role of middle management
Very similar to the culture clash challenge, cultural rigidity in how middle managers operate (performance review, human resource management, etc.) can cause cultural rejection. They need to become enablers for high performance and give their teams the sufficient tools, skills, and opportunities to succeed and excel.
Based on a global survey of Agile practitioners (N=1,319)*:
52% Organizational culture at odds with agile values
44% Inadequate management support and sponsorship
48% General organization resistance to change
*Respondents were able to make multiple selections
(13th Annual State of Agile Report, VersionOne, 2019)
The reality of cultural incompatibility between Agile and traditional organization structures necessitates a structured adoption plan. Systematically build competency so teams can consistently achieve project success and solidify trust in your teams’ ability to meet business needs with Agile.
By incrementally gaining the trust of management as you build up your Agile capabilities, you enable a smooth cultural transition to an environment where teams are empowered, adapt quickly to changing needs, and are trusted to innovate and make successes out of their failures.
Optimized value delivery occurs when there is a direct relationship between competency and trust. There will be unrealized value when competency or trust outweigh the other. That value loss increases as either dimension of adoption continues to grow faster than the other.
Agile adoption at its core, is about building social capital. Your level of trust with key influencers increases as you continuously enhance your capabilities, enabling the necessary cultural changes away from traditional organizational structures.
Begin to document your development workflow or value chain, implement a tracking system for KPIs, and start gathering metrics and reporting them transparently to the appropriate stakeholders.
Use collected metrics and retrospectives to stabilize team performance by reducing areas of variability in your workflow and increasing the consistency at which targets are met.
Use information to support changes and adopt appropriate practices to make incremental improvements to the existing environment.
Drive behavioral and cultural changes that will empower teams to be accountable for their own success and learning.
Use your built-up trust and support practice innovation, driving the definition and adoption of new practices.
Team Organization
Considers the degree to which teams are able to self-organize based on internal organizational structures (hierarchy vs. meritocracy) and inter-team capabilities.
Team Coordination
Considers the degree to which teams can coordinate, both within and across functions.
Business Alignment
Considers the degree to which teams can understand and/or map to business objectives.
Coaching
Considers what kind of coaching/training is offered and how accessible the training is.
Empowerment
Considers the degree to which teams are able and capable to address project, process, and technical challenges without significant burden from process controls and bureaucracy.
Failure Tolerance
Considers the degree to which stakeholders are risk tolerant and if teams are capable of turning failures into learning outcomes.
These key attributes function as qualities or characteristics that, when improved, will successively increase the degree to which the business trusts your Agile teams’ ability to meet their objectives.
Systematically improving these attributes as you graduate levels of the adoption model allows the business to acclimatize to the increased capability the Agile team is offering, and the risk of culture clash with the larger organization decreases.
Start to consider at what level of adoption each of your service offerings become useful. This will allow you to standardize the way your Agile teams interact with the CoE.
2.1.1 1.5 Hours
The same service offering could be offered at different levels of adoption. In these cases, you will need to re-visit the use case and differentiate how the service (if at all) will be delivered at different levels of adoption.
2.1.1 1.5 Hours
Service Offerings | |
---|---|
Level 5: Innovate | |
Level 4: Empower | |
Level 3: Collaborate | Coaching -- Communications Training |
Level 2: Iterate | Tooling Standards |
Level 1: Conceptualize |
Learning Facilitation
Draw on the service offerings identified in activity 1.2.4
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
2.2.1 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.
A Center of Excellence aligned with your service offerings is only valuable if your CoEs customers can effectively access those services. At this stage, you have invested in ensuring that your CoE aligns to your business objectives and that your service offerings align to its customers. Now you need to ensure that these services are accessible in the day-to-day operation of your Agile teams.
Use backwards induction from your delivery method to the service offering. This is an effective method to determine the optimal engagement action for the CoE, as it considers the end customer as the driver for best action for every possible situation.
Info-Tech Insight
Your engagement process should be largely informed by your ACE users. Teams have constraints as well as in-the-trenches concerns and issues. If your service offerings don’t account for these, it can lead to rejection of the culture you are trying to inspire.
A primary function of your ACE is to transfer knowledge to Agile teams to increase their capability to achieve desired outcomes.
While this can take the form of coaching, training sessions, libraries, and wikis, a critical component of ACE is creating interactions where individuals from Agile teams can come together and share their knowledge.
Ideas come from different experiences. By creating communities of practice (CoP) around topics that the ACE is tasked with supporting (e.g. Agile business analysts), you foster social learning and decrease the likelihood that change will result in some sort of cultural rejection.
Consider whether creating CoPs would be beneficial in your organization’s context.
"Communities of practice are a practical way to frame the task of managing knowledge. They provide a concrete organizational infrastructure for realizing the dream of a learning organization." – Etienne Wenger, Digital Habitats: Stewarding technology for communities
Top-down support is critical to validate the CoE to its customers and ensure they feel compelled to engage with its services. Relevancy is a real concern for the long-term viability of a CoE and championing its use from a position of authority will legitimize its function and deter its fading from relevancy of day-to-day use for Agile teams.
Although you are aligning your engagement processes to the customers of your Agile Center of Excellence, you still need your key influencers to champion its lasting organizational relevancy. Don’t let your employees think the ACE is just a coordinating body or a committee that is convenient but non-essential – make sure they know that it drives their own personal growth and makes everyone better as a collective.
"Even if a CoE is positioned to meet a real organizational need, without some measure of top-down support, it faces an uphill battle to remain relevant and avoid becoming simply one more committee in the eyes of the wider organization. Support from the highest levels of the organization help fight the tendency of the larger organization to view the CoE as a committee with no teeth and tip the scales toward relevancy for the CoE." – Joe Shepley, VP and Practice Lead, Doculabs
Info-Tech Insight
Stimulate top-down support with internal certifications. This allows your employees to gain accreditation while at the same time encouraging top-down support and creating a compliance check for the continual delivery and acknowledgement of your evolving best practices.
For your employees to continuously improve, so must the Center of Excellence. Ensure the ACE has the appropriate mechanisms to absorb and disseminate best practices that emerge from knowledge transfer facilitation events.
While facilitating knowledge transfer is key, it is even more important that the Center of Excellence can take localized adaptations from Agile teams and standardize them as best practices when well received. If an individual were to leave without sharing their knowledge, the CoE and the larger organization will lose that knowledge and potential innovation opportunities.
To organically grow your ACE and be cost effective, you want your teams to continuously improve and to share that knowledge. As individual team members develop and climb the adoption model, they should participate as coaches and champions for less experienced groups so that their knowledge is reaching the widest audience possible.
Industry Digital Media
Source Henrik Kniberg & Anders Ivarsson, 2012
Spotify has continuously introduced innovative techniques to facilitate learning and ensure that that knowledge gets injected back into the organization. Some examples are the following:
"As an example of guild work, we recently had a ‘Web Guild Unconference,’ an open space event where all web developers at Spotify gathered up in Stockholm to discuss challenges and solutions within their field."
2.2.1 30 Minutes per role
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
2.2.1 30 Minutes per role
Role: Developer | |||||
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Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 | |
Service Offering |
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Engagement Process |
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|
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|
2.2.1 30 Minutes per role
Role: Tester | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 | |
Service Offering |
|
|
|
|
|
Engagement Process |
|
|
|
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|
2.2.1 30 Minutes per role
Role: Product Owner | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 | |
Service Offering |
|
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|
|
|
Engagement Process |
|
|
|
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1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
2.3.1 Define existing team-level metrics.
2.3.2 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.
2.3.3 Define target ACE performance metrics.
2.3.4 Define Agile adoption metrics.
2.3.5 Consolidate your metrics for stakeholder impact.
2.3.6 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Benefits Tracking Tool to monitor, evaluate, refine, and ensure continued business value.
Quantify measures that demonstrate the effectiveness of your ACE by establishing distinct metrics for each of your service offerings. This will ensure that you have full transparency over the outputs of your CoE and that your service offerings maintain relevance and are utilized.
Specific
Measureable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-bound
Follow the SMART framework when developing metrics for each service offering.
Adhering to this methodology is a key component of the lean management methodology. This framework will help you avoid establishing general metrics that aren’t relevant.
"It’s not about telling people what they are doing wrong. It’s about constantly steering everyone on the team in the direction of success, and never letting any individual compromise the progress of the team toward success." – Mary Poppendieck, qtd. in “Questioning Servant Leadership”
For important advice on how to avoid the many risks associated with metrics, refer to Info-Tech’s Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively.
There will be a degree of overlap between the metrics from your business objectives, service offerings, and existing Agile teams. This is a positive thing. If a metric can speak to multiple benefits it is that much more powerful in commuting successes to your key stakeholders.
Existing metrics
Business objective metrics
Service offering metrics
Agile adoption metrics
Finding points of overlap means that you have multiple stakeholders with a vested interest in the positive trend of a specific metric. These consolidated metrics will be fundamental for your CoE as they will help build consensus through communicating the success of the ACE in a common language for a diverse audience.
2.3.1 1 Hour
Team Objective | Expected Benefits | Metrics |
---|---|---|
Improve productivity |
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Increase team morale and motivation |
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Improve transparency with business decisions |
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2.3.2 1 Hour
Business Objectives | Expected Benefits | Metrics |
---|---|---|
Decrease time-to-market of product releases |
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Decrease time-to-market of product releases |
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2.3.3 1 Hour
Service Offering | Expected Benefits | Metrics |
---|---|---|
Knowledge management |
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Tooling standards |
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2.3.4 1 Hour
Adoption attributes | Expected Benefits | Metrics |
---|---|---|
Team organization |
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Team coordination |
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Business alignment |
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Coaching |
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Empowerment |
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Failure tolerance |
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2.3.5 30 Minutes
2.3.6 1 Hour
The CoE governance team can use this tool to take ownership of the project’s benefits, track progress, and act on any necessary changes to address gaps. In the long term, it can be used to identify whether the team is ahead, on track, or lagging in terms of benefits realization.
INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE
Download the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool.
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
↓
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
Our analyst team will help you categorize the Centers of Excellence service offerings within Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model to help standardize the way your organization engages with the Center of Excellence.
Our analyst team will help you structure engagement plans for each role within your Agile environment to provide a standardized pathway to personal development and consistency in practice.
Our analysts will walk you through defining a set of metrics that align with your Agile business objectives identified in Phase 1 of the blueprint so the CoEs monitoring function can ensure ongoing alignment during operation.
Our analysts will walk you through defining a set of metrics that monitors how successful the ACE has been at providing its services so that business and IT stakeholders can ensure the effectiveness of the ACE.
Our analyst team will help you through defining a set of metrics that aligns with your organization’s fit of the Agile adoption model in order to provide a mechanism to track the progress of Agile teams maturing in capability and organizational trust.
The final step is to engage in monitoring of your metrics program to identify areas for improvement. Using metrics as a driver for operating your ACE will allow you to identify and effectively manage needed change, as well as provide you with the data necessary to promote outcomes to your stakeholders to ensure the long-term viability of the ACE within your organization.
Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.
Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.
Operate the CoE to provide service offerings to Agile teams, identify improvements to optimize the function of your Agile teams, and effectively manage and communicate change so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.
Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.
Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.
Proposed Time to Completion (in weeks): Variable depending on communication plan
Start with an analyst kick off call:
Then complete these activities…
3.1.1 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Satisfaction Survey to help establish your baseline.
3.1.2 Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to measure the maturity level of your ACE.
3.1.3 Prioritize ACE actions by monitoring your metrics.
Start with an analyst kick off call:
Then complete these activities…
3.2.1 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile teams.
3.2.2 Determine the root cause of each metric falling short of expectations.
3.2.3 Brainstorm solutions to identified issues.
3.2.4 Review your metrics program.
3.2.5 Create a communication plan for change.
Finalize phase deliverable:
Then complete these activities…
3.3.1 Use the outputs from your metrics tracking tool to communicate progress.
3.3.2 Summarize adjustments in areas where the ACE fell short.
3.3.3 Review the effectiveness of your service offerings.
3.3.4 Evaluate your ACE Maturity.
3.3.5 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Communications Deck to deliver your outcomes to the key stakeholders.
Phase 3 Results & Insights:
Inject improvements into your Agile environment with operational excellence. Plan changes and communicate them effectively, monitor outcomes on a regular basis, and keep stakeholders in the loop to ensure that their interests are being looked after to ensure long-term viability of the CoE.
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
3.1.1 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Satisfaction Survey to help establish your baseline.
3.1.2 Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to measure the maturity level of your ACE.
3.1.3 Prioritize ACE actions by monitoring your metrics.
Establish your collection process to ensure that the CoE has the necessary resources to collect metrics and monitor progress, that there is alignment on what data sources are to be used when collecting data, and that you know which stakeholder is interested in the outcomes of that metric.
Establishing the baseline performance of the ACE allows you to have a reasonable understanding of the impact it is having on meeting business objectives. Use user satisfaction surveys, stakeholder interviews, and any current metrics to establish a concept of how you are performing now. Setting new metrics can be a difficult task so it is important to collect as much current data as possible. After the metrics have been established and monitored for a period of time, you can revisit the targets you have set to ensure they are realistic and usable.
Without a baseline, you cannot effectively:
Info-Tech Insight
Invest the needed time to baseline your activities. These data points are critical to diagnose successes and failures of the CoE moving forward, and you will need them to be able to refine your service offerings as business conditions or user expectations change. While it may seem like something you can breeze past, the investment is critical.
What to do:
Benefits:
Challenges:
What to do:
Benefits:
Challenges:
What to do:
Benefits:
Challenges:
3.1.1 Baseline satisfaction survey
Conduct a user satisfaction survey prior to setting your baseline for your ACE. This will include high-level questions addressing your overall Agile environment and questions addressing teams’ current satisfaction with their processes and technology.
INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE
Download the ACE Satisfaction Survey.
3.1.2 CoE maturity assessment
Assessing your ACEs maturity lets you know where they currently are and what to track to get them to the next step. This will help ensure your ACE is following good practices and has the appropriate mechanisms in place to serve your stakeholders.
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE
Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool.
3.1.3 Variable time commitment
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
3.2.1 Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile teams.
3.2.2 Determine the root cause of each metric falling short of expectations.
3.2.3 Brainstorm solutions to identified issues
3.2.4 Review your metrics program.
3.2.5 Create a communication plan for change.
As Agile spreads, be cognizant of your cultural tolerance to change and its ability to deliver on such change. Change will happen more frequently and continuously, and there may be conceptual (change tolerance) or capability (delivery tolerance) roadblocks along the way that will need to be addressed.
The Agile adoption model will help to graduate both the tolerance to change and tolerance to deliver over time. As your level of competency to deliver change increases, organizational tolerance to change, especially amongst management, will increase as well. Remember that optimized value delivery comes from this careful balance of aptitude and trust.
Tolerance to change refers to the conceptual capacity of your people to consume and adopt change. Change tolerance may become a barrier to success because teams might be too engrained with current structures and processes and find any changes too disruptive and uncomfortable.
Tolerance to deliver refers to the capability to deliver on expected change. While teams may be tolerant, they may not have the necessary capacity, skills, or resources to deliver the necessary changes successfully. The ACE can help solve this problem with training and coaching, or possibly by obtaining outside help where necessary.
As the ACE absorbs best practices and identifies areas for improvement, a change management process should be established to address the implementation and sustainability of change without introducing significant disruptions and costs.
To manage a continuously changing environment, your ACE will need to align and coordinate with organizational change management processes. This process should be capable of evaluating and incorporating multiple change initiatives continuously.
Desired changes will need to be validated, and localized adaptations will need to be disseminated to the larger organization, and current state policy and procedures will need to be amended as the adoption of Agile spreads and capabilities increase.
The goal here is to have the ACE governance group identify and interface with parties relevant to successfully implementing any specific change.
Strategy and Leadership: Optimize Change Management
Optimize your stakeholder management process to identify, prioritize, and effectively manage key stakeholders.
Changes to the services, structure, or engagement model of your ACE can be triggered from various sources in your organization. You will see that proposed changes may be requested with the best intentions; however, the potential impacts they may have to other areas of the organization can be significant. Consult all sources of ACE change requests to obtain a consensus that your change requests will not deteriorate the ACEs performance and use.
Note: Each source of ACE change requests may require a different change management process to evaluate and implement the change.
3.2.1 1.5 Hours
Agile Team n | ||
---|---|---|
Group | Type of Interaction | Potential challenges |
Operations |
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|
PMO |
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|
3.2.2 30 Minutes per metric
3.2.3 30 Minutes per metric
SOLUTION CATEGORY | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
People | Process | Technology | ||
ISSUES | Poor face-to-face communication | |||
Lack of best-practice documentation |
Strategically managing change is an essential component to ensure that the ACE achieves its desired function. If the change that comes with adopting Agile best practices is going to impact other functions and change their expected workflows, ensure they are well prepared and the benefits for said changes are clearly communicated to them.
Necessary change may be identified proactively (dependency assessments, system integrity, SME indicates need, etc.) or reactively (through retrospectives, discussions, completing root-cause analyses, etc.), but both types need to be handled the same way – through proper planning and communication with the affected parties.
Understand the points where other groups will be affected by the adoption of Agile practices and recognize the potential challenges they may face. Plan changes to accommodate interactions between these groups without roadblocks or impediments.
Structure a communication plan based on your identified challenges and proposed changes so that groups are well prepared to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate Agile workflows.
Consider the possible limitations that will exist from environmental complexities when measuring your Agile teams. Dependencies and legacy policies and procedures that pose a bottleneck to desired outcomes will need to be changed before teams can be measured justifiably. Take the time to ensure the metrics you crafted earlier are plausible in your current environment and there is not a need for transitional metrics.
Specific
Measureable
Achievable
Realistic
Time-bound
Info-Tech Insight
Use metrics as diagnostics, not as motivation. Teams will find ways to meet metrics they are measured by making sacrifices and taking unneeded risk to do so. To avoid dysfunction in your monitoring, use metrics as analytical tools to inform decision making, not as a yardstick for judgement.
3.2.4 Variable time commitment
Industry Government
Source Navin Vembar, Agile Government Leadership
The GSA is tasked with completed management of the Integrated Award Environment (IAE).
The IAE staff had to find a way to break down the problem of modernization into manageable chunks that would demonstrate progress, but also had to be sure to capture a wide variety of user needs with the ability to respond to those needs throughout development.
Had to work out the logistics of executing Agile change within the GSA, an agency that relies heavily on telework. In the case of modernization, they had a product owner in Florida while the development team was spread across the metro Washington, DC area.
Agile provided the ability to build incremental successes that allowed teams successful releases and built enthusiasm around the potential of adopting Agile practices offered.
Communication is key to avoid surprises and lost productivity created by the implementation of changes.
User groups and the business need to be given sufficient notice of an impending change. Be concise, be comprehensive, and ensure that the message is reaching the right audience so that no one is blindsided and unable to deliver what is needed. This will allow them to make appropriate plans to accept the change, minimizing the impact of the change on productivity.
Communicating change
(Cornelius & Associates, The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change)
3.2.5 1.5 Hours
Note: It is important to establish a feedback mechanism to ensure that the communication has been effective in communicating the change to the intended audiences. This can be incorporated into your ACE satisfaction surveys.
Audience | Messenger | Format | Timing | Message |
---|---|---|---|---|
Operations | Development team |
|
Build ready for release | |
Key stakeholders | CIO | Meeting |
|
Updates on outcomes from past two sprint cycles |
1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE
1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE
2.1 Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams
2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan
2.3 Define metrics to measure success
3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE
3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives
3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE
3.3.1 Use the outputs from your metrics tracking tool to communicate progress.
3.3.2 Summarize adjustments in areas where the ACE fell short.
3.3.3 Re-conduct satisfaction surveys and compare against your baseline.
3.3.4 Use Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool to baseline current practices
3.3.5 Use Info-Tech’s ACE Communications Deck to deliver your outcomes to the key stakeholders.
After functioning for a period of time, it is imperative to review the function of your ACE to ensure its continual alignment and see in what ways it can improve.
At the end of the year, take the time to deliberately review and discuss:
The overlying purpose of your ACE is to effectively align your Agile teams with corporate objectives. This means that there have to be communicable benefits that point to the effort and resources invested being valuable to the organization. Re-visit your prioritized stakeholder list and get ready to show them the impact the ACE has had on business outcomes.
Communication with stakeholders is the primary method of building and developing a lasting relationship. Correct messaging can build bridges and tear down barriers, as well as soften opposition and bolster support.
This section will help you to prepare an effective communication piece that summarizes the metrics stakeholders are interested in, as well as some success stories or benefits that are not communicable through metrics to provide extra context to ongoing successes of the ACE.
Strategy and Leadership: Manage Stakeholder Relations
Optimize your stakeholder management process to identify, prioritize, and effectively manage key stakeholders.
Those who fund the ACE have a large influence on the long-term success of your ACE. If you have not yet involved your stakeholders, you need to re-visit your organizational funding model for the ACE and ensure that your key stakeholders include the key decision makers for your funding. While they may have varying levels of interest and desires for granularity of data reporting, they need to at least be informed on a high level and kept as champions of the ACE so that there are no roadblocks to the long-term viability of this program.
Keep this in mind as the ACE begins to demonstrate success, as it is not uncommon to have additional members added to your funding model as your service scales, especially in the chargeback models.
As new key influencers are included, the ACEs governing group must ensure that collective interests may align and that more priorities don’t lead to derailment.
3.3.1 1 Hour
Use the ACE Benefits Tracking Tool to track the progress of your Agile environment to monitor whether or not the ACE is having a positive impact on the business’ ability to meet its objectives. The outputs will allow you to communicate incremental benefits that have been realized and point towards positive trends that will ensure the long-term buy-in of your key influencers.
For communication purposes, use this tool to:
Part of communicating the effectiveness of your ACE is to demonstrate that it is able to remedy projects and processes when they fall short of expectations and brainstorm solutions that effectively address these challenges. Take the opportunity to summarize where results were not as expected, and the ways in which the ACE used its influence or services to drive a positive outcome from a problem diagnosis. Stakeholders do not want a sugar-coated story – they want to see tangible results based on real scenarios.
Summarizing failures will demonstrate to key influencers that:
3.3.2 15 Minutes per metric
Name of metric that fell short | |
---|---|
Baseline measurement | 65% of users satisfied with ACE services. |
Goal measurement | 80% of users satisfied with ACE services. |
Actual measurement | 70% of users satisfied with ACE services. |
Results of root-cause analysis | Onboarding was not extensive enough; teams were unaware of some of the services offered, rendering them unsatisfied. |
Proposed solution | Revamp onboarding process to include capability map of service offered. |
Summary of success | TBD |
3.3.3 Re-conduct satisfaction surveys and compare against your baseline
This satisfaction survey will give you a template to follow to monitor the effectiveness of your ACEs defined service offerings. The goal is to understand what worked, and what did not, so you can add, retract, or modify service offerings where necessary.
INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE
Download the ACE Satisfaction Survey.
3.3.4 ACE Maturity Assessment
Assess your ACEs maturity by using Info-Tech’s CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool. Assessing your ACEs maturity lets you know where you currently are, and where to look for improvements. Note that your optimal Maturity Level will depend on organizational specifics (e.g. a small organization with a handful of Agile Teams can be less mature than a large organization with hundreds of Agile Teams).
Document results in the ACE Communications Deck.
INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE
Download the CoE Maturity Diagnostic Tool.
3.3.5 Structure communications to each of your key stakeholders
The ACE Communications Deck will give you a template to follow to effectively communicate with your stakeholders and ensure the long-term viability of your Agile Center of Excellence. Fill in the slides as instructed and provide each stakeholder with a targeted view of the successes of the ACE.
INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE
Download the ACE Communications Deck.
Paul has been an Agile practitioner since the manifesto emerged some 20 years ago, applying and refining his views through real life experience at several organizations from startups to large enterprises. He has recently completed the successful build out of the inaugural Agile Delivery Centre of Excellence at TD bank in Toronto.
John Munro is the President of Scrum Masters Inc., a software optimization professional services firm using Agile, Scrum, and Lean to help North American firms “up skill” their software delivery people and processes. Scrum Masters’ unique, highly collaborative “Master Mind” consulting model leverages Agile/Lean experts on a biweekly basis to solve clients’ technical and process challenges.
Doug has been a leader in building great teams, Agile project management, and business process innovation for over 20 years. As Senior Partner and Chief Evangelist at Agile Wave, his mission is to educate and to learn from all those who care about effective government delivery, nationally.
Implement Agile Practices That Work
Agile is a cultural shift. Don't just do Agile, be Agile.
Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile
Execute a disciplined approach to rolling out Agile methods in the organization.
Improve Application Development Throughput
Drive down your delivery time by eliminating development inefficiencies and bottlenecks while maintaining high quality.
Implement DevOps Practices That Work
Accelerate software deployment through Dev and Ops collaboration.
Maximize the Benefits from Enterprise Applications with a Center of Excellence
Optimize your organization’s enterprise application capabilities with a refined and scalable methodology.
Drive Efficiency and Agility with a Fit-for-Purpose Quality Management Program
Be proactive; it costs exponentially more to fix a problem the longer it goes unnoticed.
Optimize the Change Management Process
Right-size your change management process.
Improve Requirements Gathering
Back to basics: great products are built on great requirements.
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