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.
RETIRED CONTENT
Please note that the content on this page is retired. This content is not maintained and may contain information or links that are out of date.As Agile scales and environments get more complex, there is an inherent risk that: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.
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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.
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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