Are you truly practicing agile and have a mechanism to measure performance?

As business organizations transform towards digital enterprise, Software delivery with Agile methodology is widely being adopted. Agile is a mindset change based on the principles outlined in the Agile Manifesto. Agile adoption also means changes to the organization culture & structure.

When it comes to the extent of agility at the Enterprise level, Jim Highsmith raises an important question – “How agile or responsive do we need to be?” and emphasizes the organizations to analyze in depth prior finalizing the level of agility. It is especially vital to focus on the selection of the agile software development framework based on the business needs and goals. Jim also highlights that the level of agility an organization strategizes should be clearly connected with the business strategy and benefits.

• Operational level : Improving the delivery of software projects (No wider organizational changes)
• Portfolio level – Advancing agile practices within software development (Not embraced at the leadership & outside IT)
• Strategic level – Achieving responsiveness throughout the organization (Within IT, other functional/business areas and spreading into management/leadership positions)

Despite the level or stage of adopting agile, the changes are difficult for the members across the organization and present numerous challenges. As the agile movement steps into the third decade, the success is way beyond doing agile; it now takes meticulous planning and decisive actions to solve the challenges and achieve efficiency throughout the agile transformation.

Are you truly being agile?

Once the Agile transformation kicks off, building self-organizing and highly collaborative teams is vital to succeed the journey.

Agile teams operate differently in their own agile ways of working and it becomes complex to measure the true agility. Over a period, there is a high prospect of teams deflecting from agile practices and falling back to the same old ways within the shades of agile.

Merely following Scrum ceremonies or Kanban cadences is not adequate for practicing agile. Customer obsessed culture, design thinking, feedback loops and behavior-driven development are some best practices to build the agile culture and scaleup as high performing teams.

Now measuring the success and performance of the agile teams is imperative for the organization to realize if the teams are truly being agile practitioners. While Agile software principles spell “Working software” as the primary measure of progress, commonly the business benefit outcome is associated with a set of metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Let us look at some of the KPIs traditionally used by the Agile stakeholders.

Though these KPIs capture the performance of the agile teams over the time-boxed iterations, it does not add clarity around the true agility of the teams.

How do you measure the performance and progress of an Agile journey?

At enterprise scale, it is a pragmatic challenge for the executive leaders to track the individual team’s performance and practices. With a greater number of Squads/Tribes joining the Agile transformation journey, the challenge grows further to puzzle out which of the teams are practicing Agile and the team’s performance.

The generic Agile KPIs alone does not suffice to solve this challenge and forging a new range of solution with a distinctive approach is required.

Besides the Agile KPIs, multiple tools leveraged in the agile software delivery covers a wide range of data which are insulated within those specific tools (Agile Planning/Management, Test Management, code repository, CI-CD etc.,). Integrating these silos to collect the data points and generating insights around a range of Agile performance measures is a valuable solution.

Value Stream Management platform, Kaiburr decodes the challenge and delivers the much-needed Agile performance measures with superior details.

With just 15 minutes of configuration, Kaiburr produces real time actionable insights on end-to-end software delivery with 350+ KPIs, 600+ best practices and AI/ML models. Kaiburr integrates with all the tools used by the enterprise Agile teams to collect the metadata and generates digital insights with a sophisticated next generation business rules engine.

Some of the Agile delivery specific sample rules covered in Kaiburr platform and their business values are below,

It is crucial to publish the right data to the right audience as the members across different levels of the organization require different viewpoints to answer the questions related to their role. In addition to the granular view of each user story and associated rule status details, Kaiburr provides tailored views at different levels of the enterprise audience.

The depth of digital insights from Kaiburr platform not only helps to identify the teams not truly practicing Agile, but also helps to measure the holistic performance of Agile teams and act on the problem areas to address the issues at each team, portfolio, busines unit and organization level, and course correct the Agile transformation journey for incredible business outcomes.

Interested in learning more about the Kaiburr platform? Reach us at contact@kaiburr.com.