The Task at Hand

Innovative and responsive modern delivery is the way of the future – enabling businesses to adapt and deliver more effectively in an increasingly competitive space. Getting there, however, is a journey, and whether a company is new to this process or several miles down the road there is common concern on how to measure adoption and effectiveness.  

Are teams adopting this delivery model? Are the expected lifts in effectiveness being achieved? How is team effectiveness helping to realize business value? Without insight into adoption and effectiveness, an enterprise is limited in its ability to course correct, bolster struggling efforts, or further foster business agility. 

While attempting to answer these questions, one of the core challenges is balancing the need for enterprise level reporting on the efficacy of an agile delivery model while still encouraging and empowering autonomous teams at the ground level.  Misguided or heavy-handed measures for enterprise reporting threaten to stifle teams and reduce their efficiency.  

The Solution

Crucial to solving this problem is creating clear and consistent traceability and alignment between the highest-level business objectives and key results (OKR’s) and the metrics used to evaluate performance at the team and individual levels. In developing enterprise reporting framework, an overlap strategy and approach for “value measurements” across modern delivery pilot teams provides the best answer. 

To build a complete picture of the effects on productivity, efficiency, business value, and organizational health, three levels of reporting are necessary: the Agile team level, the transformation office level, and the business unit level. 

Measures should be designed to enable insights at each of the three levels:

- Agile team: measure continuous improvement across several key categories. 
- Transformation office: measure modern delivery adoption across distinct teams and enable improvements. 
- Business unit: inform business leaders on strategic business priorities. 

In the case of large-scale transformation to modern delivery (e.g., adopting Agile at the enterprise level, changing the ways the enterprise worked, and maximizing automation using modern tools) the journey begins with a roadmap for the implementation of the envisioned reporting reaching maturity through iterations. While manual maturity assessments for some measures is necessary, clear sourcing of data paired with automated collection of a majority of the reported metrics eases the reporting burden and provides for repeatability and scalability. 

For near term insight, multifaceted reporting containing readily available, high priority metrics allows stakeholders to measure progress at the team, program, and business unit levels. For long term benefits, we propose a several-month strategy detailing approaches by which various stakeholders within in the organization would work together to establish a robust system of automated metrics collection and reporting.

Maintaining shape and providing for scalability must also be considered. To maintain shape the overlap strategy and approach for “Value Measurements” across the organization’s pilot teams must be refined. Tailored best practice recommendations, retrospective documentation, and maturity assessments for the collection and automation of applied metrics, must be created. A scaled implementation roadmap for long term reporting across a broader set of product teams within the organization provides the path for scalability. 

Conclusion

Through the combination of the right measures at the right levels with the use of automation, an enterprise can strike the proper balance of reporting needs while not stifling autonomous teams. Capco has been able to delivery transparency and insight into the levels of adoption and effectiveness of agile business delivery while empowering autonomous teams and has demonstrated this skill for both new-to-agile business units and seasoned groups seeking to advance further in their modern delivery journey.