Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

Facilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

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Your Challenge

Your organization is looking to create consistency across all Agile teams to drive greater business results and alignment.
You are seeking to organically grow Agile capabilities within the organization through a set of support structures and facilitated through shared learning and capabilities.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Social capital can be an enabler, but also a barrier. People can only manage a finite number of relationships; ensure that the connections the Center of Excellence (CoE) facilitates are purposeful.
Don’t over-govern. Empowerment is critical to enable improvements; set boundaries and let teams work inside them with autonomy.
Legitimize through listening. A CoE will not be leveraged unless it aligns with the needs of its users. Invest the time to align with the functional expectations of your Agile teams.

Impact and Result

Create a set of service offerings aligned with both corporate objectives and the functional expectations of its customers to ensure broad support and utility of the invested resources.
Understand some of the cultural and processual challenges you will face when forming a Center of Excellence, and address them using Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model.
Track the progress of the Center of Excellence and Agile teams. Use this data to determine the root cause of issues, and ideate and implement solutions to challenges as they arise.
Effectively prepare changes to your Agile environment to drive business-valued results.
Communicate changes to identified stakeholders to ensure long-term viability of the Center of Excellence.

Contributors

John Munro, President, Scrum Masters Inc.
Doug Birgfield, Senior Partner, Agile Wave

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Get to Action

Start here – read the Executive Brief

Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build an Agile Center of Excellence, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.

Strategically align the Center of Excellence

Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision.
- Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – Phase 1: Strategically Align the Center of Excellence
Standardize the Center of Excellence’s service offerings

Build an engagement plan based on a standardized adoption model to ensure your CoE service offerings are accessible and consistent across the organization.
- Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – Phase 2: Standardize the Center of Excellence’s Service Offerings
Operate the Center of Excellence

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.

Guided Implementation

This guided implementation is an eight call advisory process.

Guided Implementation #1 - Strategically align the Center of Excellence

Call #1: Align your ACE with the business.
Call #2: Align your ACE with its users.

Guided Implementation #2 - Standardize the Center of Excellence’s service offerings

Call #1: Dissect the key attributes of Agile adoption.
Call #2: Form engagement plans for your Agile teams.
Call #3: Discuss effective ACE metrics.

Guided Implementation #3 - Operate the Center of Excellence

Call #1: Conduct a baseline assessment of your Agile environment.
Call #2: Interface ACE with your change management function.
Call #3: Build a communications deck for key stakeholders.

Schedule Your First Call

Onsite Workshop

The Purpose

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.

Key Benefits Achieved

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.

Activities:		Outputs:
1.1	Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.	Agile business objectives
1.2	Form use cases for the points of alignment between your Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) and business objectives.	Business-aligned use cases to form CoE’s service offerings
1.3	Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.	Stakeholder map of key influencers

The Purpose

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.

Key Benefits Achieved

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.

Activities:		Outputs:
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.	Service offerings refined based on pains and opportunities identified during ACE requirements gathering
2.3	Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.	ACE Capability Map

The Purpose

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.

Key Benefits Achieved

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.

Activities:		Outputs:
3.1	Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.	Adoption-aligned service offerings
3.2	Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.	Role-specific engagement plans

The Purpose

Develop a set of metrics for the CoE to monitor business-aligned outcomes with.

Key Benefits Achieved

The foundations of continuous improvement are established with a robust set of Agile metrics.

Activities:		Outputs:
4.1	Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.	Business objective-aligned metrics
4.2	Define target ACE performance metrics.	ACE performance metrics
4.3	Define Agile adoption metrics.	Agile adoption metrics
4.4	Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile team.
4.5	Create a communication plan for change.	ACE communication plan