Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

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

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

"Inconsistent processes and practices used across Agile teams is frequently cited as a challenge to adopting and scaling Agile within organizations. (VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report [N=1,319]) Creating an Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) is a popular way to try to impose structure and improve performance. However, simply establishing an ACE does not guarantee you will be successful with Agile. When setting up an ACE you must: Define ACE services based on identified stakeholder needs. Staff the ACE with respected, “hands on” people, who deliver identifiable value to your Agile teams. Continuously evolve ACE service offerings to maximize stakeholder satisfaction and value delivered."

Alex Ciraco, Research Director, Applications Practice Info-Tech Research Group

Our understanding of the problem

This Research Is Designed For:

• A CIO who is looking for a way to optimize their Agile capabilities and ensure ongoing alignment with business objectives.
• An applications director who is looking for mechanisms to inject continuous improvement into organization-wide Agile practices.

This Research Will Help You:

• Align your Agile support structure with business objectives and the functional expectations of its users.
• Standardize the ways in which Agile teams develop and learn to create consistency in purpose and execution.
• Track and communicate successes to ensure the long-term viability of an Agile Center of Excellence (ACE).

This Research Will Also Assist

• Project managers who are tasked with managing Agile projects.
• Application development managers who are struggling with establishing consistency, transparency, and collaboration across their teams.

This Research Will Help Them:

• Provide service offerings to their team members that will help them personally and collectively to develop desired skills.
• Provide oversight and transparency into Agile projects and outcomes through ongoing monitoring.

Executive summary

Situation

• Your organization has had some success with Agile, but needs to drive consistency across Agile teams for better business results and alignment.
• You are seeking to organically grow Agile capabilities within the organization through a set of support services and facilitated through shared learning and capabilities.

Complication

• Organizational constraints, culture clash, and lack of continuous top-down support are hampering your Agile growth and maturity.
• Attempts to create consistency across Agile teams and processes fail to account for the expectations of users and stakeholders, leaving them detached from projects and creating resistance.

Resolution

• Align the service offerings of your ACE with both corporate objectives and the functional expectations of its stakeholders to ensure broad support and utilization of the invested resources.
• Understand some of the culture and process challenges you will face when forming an ACE, and address them using Info-Tech’s Agile adoption journey model.
• Track the progress of the ACE and your Agile teams. Use this data to find root causes for issues, and ideate to implement solutions for challenges as they arise over time.
• Effectively define and propagate improvements to your Agile teams in order to drive business-valued results.
• Communicate progress to interested stakeholders to ensure long-term viability of the Center of Excellence (CoE).

Info-Tech Insight

1. Define ACE services based on stakeholder needs.Don’t assume you know what your stakeholders need without talking to them.
2. Staff the ACE strategically. Choose those who are thought leaders and proven change agents.
3. Continuously improve based on metrics and feedback.Constantly monitor how your ACE is performing and adjust to feedback.

Info-Tech’s Agile Journey related Blueprints

1. Stabilize

Implement Agile Practices That Work

Begin your Agile transformation with a comprehensive readiness assessment and a pilot project to adopt Agile development practices and behaviors that fit.

2. Sustain

YOU ARE HERE

Spread Best Practices with an Agile Center of Excellence

Form an ACE to support Agile development at all levels of the organization with thought leadership, strategic development support & process innovation.

3. Scale

Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile

Extend the benefits of your Agile pilot project into your organization by strategically scaling Agile initiatives that will meet stakeholders’ needs.

4. Satisfy

Transition to Product Delivery Introduce product-centric delivery practices to drive greater benefits and better delivery outcomes.

1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE

1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE

2.1 Define an adoption plan for Agile teams

2.2 Create an ACE engagement plan

2.3 Define metrics to measure success

3.1 Optimize the success of your ACE

3.2 Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives

3.3 Conduct ongoing retrospectives

Supporting Capabilities and Practices

Modernize Your SDLC

Remodel the stages of your lifecycle to standardize your definition of a successful product.

Build a Strong Foundation for Quality

Instill quality assurance practices and principles in each stage of your software development lifecycle.

Implement DevOps Practices That Work

Fix, deploy, and support applications quicker though development and operations collaboration.

What is an Agile Center of Excellence?

NOTE: Organizational change is hard and prone to failure. Determine your organization’s level of readiness for Agile transformation (and recommended actions) by completing Info-Tech’s Agile Transformation Readiness Tool.

An ACE amplifies good practices that have been successfully employed within your organization, effectively allowing you to extend the benefits obtained from your Agile pilot(s) to a wider audience.

From the viewpoint of the business, members of the ACE provide expertise and insights to the entire organization in order to facilitate Agile transformation and ensure standard application of Agile good practices.

From the viewpoint of your Agile teams, it provides a community of individuals that share experiences and lessons learned, propagate new ideas, and raise questions or concerns so that delivering business value is always top of mind.

An ACE provides the following:

1. A mechanism to gather thought leadership to maximize the accessibility and reach of your Agile investment.
2. A mechanism to share innovations and ideas to facilitate knowledge transfer and ensure broadly applicable innovations do not go to waste.
3. Strategic alignment to ensure that Agile practices are driving value towards business objectives.
4. Purposeful good practices to ensure that the service offerings provided align with expectations of both your Agile practitioners and stakeholders.

SIDEBAR: What is a Community of Practice? (And how does it differ from a CoE?)

Some organizations prefer Communities of Practice (CoP) to Centers of Excellence (CoE). CoPs are different from CoEs:

“A CoP is an affiliation of people who share a common practice and who have a desire to further the practice itself … and of course to share knowledge, refine best practices, and introduce standards. CoPs are defined by their domain of interest, but the membership is a social structure comprised of volunteer practitioners”

– Wenger, E., R. A. McDermott, et al. (2002) Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge, Harvard Business Press.

“CoPs differ from a CoE mainly in that they tend to have no geographical boundaries, they hold no hierarchical power within a firm, and they definitely can never have structure determined by the company. However, one of the most obvious and telling differences lies in the stated motive of members – CoPs exist because they have active practitioner members who are passionate about a specific practice, and the goals of a CoP are to refine and improve their chosen domain of practice – and the members provide discretionary effort that is not paid for by the employer”

– Matthew Loxton (June 1, 2011) CoP vs CoE – What’s the difference, and Why Should You Care?, Wordpress.com

What to know about CoPs:

1. Less formal than a CoE
   • Loosely organized by volunteer practitioners who are interested in advancing the practice.
2. Not the Authoritative Voice
   • Stakeholders engage the CoP voluntarily, and are not bound by them.
3. Not funded by Organization
   • CoP members are typically volunteers who provide support in addition to their daily responsibilities.
4. Not covered in this Blueprint
   • In depth analysis on CoPs is outside the scope of this Blueprint.

What does an ACE do? Six main functions derived from Info-Tech’s CLAIM+G Framework

1. Learning
• Provide training and development and enable engagement based on identified interaction points to foster organizational growth.
2. Tooling
• Promote the use of standardized tooling to improve efficiency and consistency throughout the organization.
3. Supporting
• Enable your Agile teams to access subject-matter expertise by facilitating knowledge transfer and documenting good practices.
4. Governing
• Create operational boundaries for Agile teams, and monitor their progress and ability to meet business objectives within these boundaries.
5. Monitoring
• Demonstrate the value the CoE is providing through effective metric setting and ongoing monitoring of Agile’s effectiveness.
6. Guiding
   • Provide guidance, methodology, and knowledge for teams to leverage to effectively meet organizational business objectives.

Many organizations encounter challenges to scaling Agile

Tackle the following barriers to Agile adoption with a business-aligned ACE.

List based on reported impediments from VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report (N=1,319)

1. Organizational culture at odds with Agile values
• The ACE identifies and measures the value of Agile to build support from senior business leaders for shifting the organizational culture and achieving tangible business benefits.
2. General organizational resistance to change
• Resistance comes from a lack of trust. Optimized value delivery from Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model will build the necessary social capital to drive cultural change.
3. Inadequate management support and sponsorship
• Establishing an ACE will require senior management support and sponsorship. Its formation sends a strong signal to the organizational leadership that Agile is here to stay.
4. Lack of skills/experience with Agile methods
• The ACE provides a vehicle to absorb external training into an internal development program so that Agile capabilities can be grown organically within the organization.
5. Inconsistent processes and practices across teams
• The ACE provides support to individual Agile teams and will guide them to adopt consistent processes and practices which have a proven track record in the organization.
6. Insufficient training and education
   • The ACE will assist teams with obtaining the Agile skills training they need to be effective in the organization, and support a culture of continuous learning.

Overcome your Agile scaling challenges with a business aligned ACE

An ACE drives consistency and transparency without sacrificing the ability to innovate. It can build on the success of your Agile pilot(s) by encouraging practices known to work in your organization.

Support Agile Teams

Provide services designed to inject evolving good practices into workflows and remove impediments or roadblocks from your Agile team’s ability to deliver value.

Maintain Business Alignment

Maintain alignment with corporate objectives without impeding business agility in the long term. The ACE functions as an interface layer so that changing expectations can be adapted without negatively impacting Agile teams.

Facilitate Learning Events

Avoid the risk of innovation and subject-matter expertise being lost or siloed by facilitating knowledge transfer and fostering a continuous learning environment.

Govern Improvements

Set baselines, monitor metrics, and run retrospectives to help govern process improvements and ensure that Agile teams are delivering expected benefits.

Shift Culture

Instill Agile thinking and behavior into the organization. The ACE must encourage innovation and be an effective agent for change.

Use your ACE to go from “doing” Agile to “being” Agile

Organizations that do Agile without embracing the changes in behavior will not reap the benefits.

Doing what was done before

• Processes and Tools
• Comprehensive Documentation
• Contract Negotiation
• Following a Plan

Being Prescriptive

Going through the motions

• Uses SCRUM and tools such as Jira
• Plans multiple sprints in detail
• Talks to stakeholders once in a release
• Works off a fixed scope BRD

Doing Agile

Living the principles

• Individuals and Interactions
• Working Software
• Customer Collaboration
• Responding to Change

Being Agile

“(‘Doing Agile’ is) just some rituals but without significant change to support the real Agile approach as end-to-end, business integration, value focus, and team empowerment.” - Arie van Bennekum

Establishing a CoE does not guarantee success

Simply establishing a Center of Excellence for any discipline does not guarantee its success:

The 2019 State of DevOps Report found that organizations which had established DevOps CoEs underperformed compared to organizations which adopted other approaches for driving DevOps transformation. (Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 [N=~1,000])

Still, Agile Centers of Excellence can and do successfully drive Agile adoption in organizations. So what sets the successful examples apart from the others? Here’s what some have to say:

“The ACE must be staffed with qualified people with delivery experience! … [It is] effectively a consulting practice, that can evolve and continuously improve its services … These services are collectively about ‘enablement’ as an output, more than pure training … and above all, the ability to empirically measure the progress” – Paul Blaney, TD Bank

“When leaders haven’t themselves understood and adopted Agile approaches, they may try to scale up Agile the way they have attacked other change initiatives: through top-down plans and directives. The track record is better when they behave like an Agile team. That means viewing various parts of the organization as their customers.” – HBR, “Agile at Scale”

“the Agile CoE… is truly meant to be measured by the success of all the other groups, not their own…[it] is meant to be serving the teams and helping them improve, not by telling them what to do, but rather by listening, understanding and helping them adapt.” - Bart Gerardi, PMI

“The CoE must also avoid becoming static, as it’s crucial the team can adjust as quickly as business and customer needs change, and evolve the technology as necessary to remain competitive.” – Forbes, “RPA CoE (what you need to know)”

"The best CoEs are formed from thought leaders and change agents within the CoE domain. They are the process and team innovators who will influence your CoE roadmap and success. Select individuals who feel passionate about Agile." – Hans Eckman, InfoTech

To be successful with your ACE, do the following…

Info-Tech Insight

Simply establishing an Agile Center of Excellence does not guarantee its success. When setting up your ACE, optimize its impact on the organization by doing the following 3 things:

1. Define ACE services based on stakeholder needs. Be sure to broadly survey your stakeholders and identify the ACE functions and services which will best meet their needs. ACE services must clearly deliver business value to the organization and the Agile teams it supports.
2. Staff the ACE strategically. Select ACE team members who have real world, hands-on delivery experience, and are well respected by the Agile teams they will serve. Where possible, select internal thought leaders in your organization who have the credibility needed to effect positive change.
3. Continuously improve ACE services based on metrics and feedback. The value your ACE brings to the organization must be clear and measurable, and do not assume that your functions and services will remain static. You must regularly monitor both your metrics and feedback from your Agile teams, and adjust ACE behavior to improve/maximize these over time.

Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence

This blueprint will walk you through the steps needed to build the foundations for operational excellence within an Agile Center of Excellence.

Phase 1 - Strategically Align the CoE

Create strategic alignment between the CoE and the organization’s goals, objectives, and vision. This alignment translates into the CoE mandate intended to enhance the way Agile will enable teams to meet business objectives.

Phase 2 - Standardize the CoEs 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. Create and consolidate key performance indicators to measure the CoEs utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results.

Phase 3 - Operate the CoE

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 so that teams can grow within the Agile adoption model and optimize value delivery both within your Agile environment and across functions.

Info-Tech’s Practice Adoption Journey

Use Info-Tech’s Practice Adoption Journey model to establish your ACE. Building social capital (stakeholders’ trust in your ability to deliver positive outcomes) incrementally is vital to ensure that everyone is aligned to new mindsets and culture as your Agile practices scale.

Trust & Competency ↓

DEFINE

Begin to document your development workflow or value chain, implement a tracking system for KPIs, and start gathering metrics and reporting them transparently to the appropriate stakeholders.

ITERATE

Use collected metrics and retrospectives to stabilize team performance by reducing areas of variability in your workflow and increasing the consistency at which targets are met.

COLLABORATE

Use information to support changes and adopt appropriate practices to make incremental improvements to the existing environment.

EMPOWER

Drive behavioral and cultural changes that will empower teams to be accountable for their own success and learning.

INNOVATE

Use your built-up trust and support practice innovation, driving the definition and adoption of new practices.

Align your ACE with your organization’s strategy

This research set will assist you with aligning your ACEs services to the objectives of the business in order to justify the resources and funding required by your Agile program.

Business Objectives → Alignment ←ACE Functions

Business justification to continue to fund a Center of Excellence can be a challenge, especially with traditional thinking and rigid stakeholders. Hit the ground running and show value to your key influencers through business alignment and metrics that will ensure that the ACE is worth continuous investment.

Alignment leads to competitive advantage

The pace of change in customer expectations, competitive landscapes, and business strategy is continuously increasing. It is critical to develop a method to facilitate ongoing alignment to shifting business and development expectations seamlessly and ensure that your Agile teams are able to deliver expected business value.

Use Info-Tech’s CoE Operating Model to define the service offerings of your ACE

Understand where your inputs and outputs lie to create an accessible set of service offerings for your Agile teams.

Continuously improve the ACE to ensure long-term viability

Improvement involves the continuous evaluation of the performance of your teams, using well-defined metrics and reasonable benchmarks that are supplemented by analogies and root-cause analysis in retrospectives.

Monitor

Monitor your metrics to ensure desired benefits are being realized. The ACE is responsible for ensuring that expected Agile benefits are achievable and on track. Monitor against your defined baselines to create transparency and accountability for desired outcomes.

Iterate

Run retrospectives to drive improvements and fixes into Agile projects and processes. Metrics falling short of expectations must be diagnosed and their root causes found, and fixes need to be communicated and injected back into the larger organization.

Define

Define metrics and set targets that align with the goals of the ACE. These metrics represent the ACEs expected value to the organization and must be measured against on a regular basis to demonstrate value to your key stakeholders.

Beware the common risks of implementing your ACE

Culture clash between Agile teams and larger organization

Agile leverages empowered teams, meritocracy, and broad collaboration for success, but typical organizations are siloed and hierarchical with top down decision making. There needs to be a plan to enable a smooth transition from the current state towards the Agile target state.

Persistence of tribal knowledge

Agile relies on easy and open knowledge sharing, but organizational knowledge can sit in siloes. Employees may also try to protect their expertise for job security. It is important to foster knowledge sharing to ensure that critical know-how is accessible and doesn’t leave the organization with the individual.

Rigid management structures

Rigidity in how managers operate (performance reviews, human resource management, etc.) can result in cultural rejection of Agile. People need to be assessed on how they enable their teams rather than as individual contributors. This can help ensure that they are given sufficient opportunities to succeed. More support and less strict governance is key.

Breakdown due to distributed teams

When face-to-face interactions are challenging, ensure that you invest in the right communication technologies and remove cultural and process impediments to facilitate organization-wide collaboration. Alternative approaches like using documentation or email will not provide the same experience and value as a face-to-face conversation.

The State of Maine used an ACE to foster positive cultural change

CASE STUDY

Industry - Government

Source - Cathy Novak, Agile Government Leadership

The State of Maine’s Agile Center of Excellence

“The Agile CoE in the State of Maine is completely focused on the discipline of the methodology. Every person who works with Agile, or wants to work with Agile, belongs to the CoE. Every member of the CoE tells the same story, approaches the methodology the same way, and uses the same tools. The CoE also functions as an Agile research lab, experimenting with different standards and tools.

The usual tools of project management – mission, goals, roles, and a high-level definition of done – can be found in Maine’s Agile CoE. For story mapping, teams use sticky notes on a large wall or whiteboard. Demonstrating progress this way provides for positive team dynamics and a psychological bang. The State of Maine uses a project management framework that serves as its single source of truth. Everyone knows what’s going on at all times and understands the purpose of what they are doing. The Agile team is continually looking for components that can be reused across other agencies and programs.”

Results:

• Realized positive culture change, leading to more collaborative and supportive teams.
• Increased visibility of Agile benefits across functional groups.
• Standardized methodology across Agile teams and increased innovation and experimentation with new standards and tools.
• Improved traceability of projects.
• Increased visibility and ability to determine root causes of problems and right the course when outcomes are not meeting expectations.