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.
Onsite Workshop
As Agile scales and environments get more complex, there is an inherent risk that:
- Agile teams may adopt their own processes and tools without considering the effect on other teams or their alignment with business objectives.
- Tribal knowledge will proliferate, with no way to protect the organization against knowledge leaving with the individuals.
- Successful practices achieved by pilot teams will be lost.
- The organization will lean toward rigid management and governance structures, hindering teams’ abilities to innovate and continuously improve.
Establishing an Agile center of excellence will:
- Create effective mechanisms to not only spread best practices, but to absorb innovations from Agile teams back into the organization when deemed appropriate by the Center of Excellence (CoE).
- Create an interface point between your business and your Agile teams, effectively managing alignment challenges as they arise to minimize impact on productivity.
- Provide transparency to your business stakeholders, allowing them to build trust as they see what Agile is capable of.
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.
- Determine your CoE structure and staff.
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. |
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| 1.2 | Form use cases for the points of alignment between your Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) and business objectives. |
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| 1.3 | Prioritize your ACE stakeholders. |
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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: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Classified pains and opportunities. |
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| 2.2 | Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services. |
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| 2.3 | Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map. |
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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: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model. |
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| 3.2 | Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption. |
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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: | |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives. |
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| 4.2 | Define target ACE performance metrics. |
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| 4.3 | Define Agile adoption metrics. |
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| 4.4 | Assess the interaction and communication points of your Agile team. |
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| 4.5 | Create a communication plan for change. |
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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 road map in place to complete your project successfully.
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