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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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Contributors
- John Munro, President, Scrum Masters Inc.
- Doug Birgfield, Senior Partner, Agile Wave
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.
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.
1. Strategically align the Center of Excellence
Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision.
2. 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.
3. 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 Implementations
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.
Book Your Workshop
Onsite 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 onsite 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.
Module 1: Determine Vision of CoE
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
Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives.
- Agile business objectives
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
Prioritize your ACE stakeholders.
- Stakeholder map of key influencers
Module 2: Define Service Offerings of CoE
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
Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities.
Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services.
- Service offerings refined based on pains and opportunities identified during ACE requirements gathering
Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map.
- ACE Capability Map
Module 3: Define Engagement Plans
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
Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model.
- Adoption-aligned service offerings
Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption.
- Role-specific engagement plans
Module 4: Define Metrics and Plan Communications
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
Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives.
- Business objective-aligned metrics
Define target ACE performance metrics.
- ACE performance metrics
Define Agile adoption metrics.
- Agile adoption metrics
Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile team.
Create a communication plan for change.
- ACE communication plan
