Lean-Agile Transformation
Today’s VUCA world demands lean and agile processes also in the context of large organizations, complex product lines or regulatory compliance. We support you in all matters relating to the portfolio, product or quality management, requirements engineering and emergent design as well as change and transformation initiatives based on lean-agile leadership principles.
Lots of companies are struggling in their Digital and Agile Transformation. Often, progress is made in selected teams or smaller units, however a companywide leap towards a digital culture is not happening. PEDCO and Digital Architects Zurich (DAZ) believe this is due to a missing transparency and lack of clear maturity models of transformation journeys. The aim of the two expert companies is to provide their knowledge in the key transformation areas of Technology, Operating Model and Culture to ensure success of customer’s Agile and DevOps adoptions.
PEDCO, with its extensive experience in Agile and DevOps, and Digital Architects Zurich, leveraging their knowledge for CI/CD, AIOps and SRE, jointly developed the “Agile & DevOps Fitness Check”. This assessment methodology is using market best-practices and expert knowledge to identify challenges in companies’ digital and agile transformation journeys.
With such an independent assessment, based on market best practices for Agile & DevOps and conducted by Swiss leading Agile & DevOps/SRE experts, a structured development roadmap to address current shortcomings and reach desired target capabilities is established towards success.
Based on a Structured Capability Matrix for Transformation Maturity
The basis of the assessment and the capability levels are models and successful methodologies for improving collaboration, efficiency and quality like Lean, DevOps and SAFe. While these methodologies have many common values and principles, they also have some differences and specificities as they have different scopes and backgrounds.
PEDCO and Digital Architects Zurich extract the key capabilities and values of the relevant methodologies and introduce the “Agile & DevOps Transformation Targeted Capability Levels”. Looking at best practice standards, five maturity levels are defined with specific capabilities in three key areas:
- Technology, Tooling & Automation
- Operating Model and Processes / Roles & Workflows
- Mindset, Principles & Culture
The Best of All Worlds: LEADS Values
Based on studies and best practice experience PEDCO and DAZ extracted a set of key values from market methodologies to guide the transformation journey. We have summarised these values as “LEADS” as they incorporate items from Lean, Agile, DevOps, and SAFe methodology. This set of values forms the basis for the mindset and cultural change parts of the Fitness Check, however are also critical for successful adoption of the new technology.
The Agile & DevOps Fitness Check
With guided self-assessments, workshops, and analysis of existing artifacts and processes the current state of transformation is assessed according to the capability level model that was specifically developed for this Fitness Check.
Based on these findings, gaps, weaknesses, and opportunities are identified and validated against the “Agile & DevOps Transformation Capability Matrix”. Collaboratively, and taking into account the specific needs of the customers, the desired target state is documented. The subsequently developed transformation roadmap includes specific steps to ensure reaching the targeted capabilities.
Support to ensure a safe and successful transformation is ensured!
Read the fact sheet about this new and existing Agile & DevOps Fitness Check!
With our Fitness Check we check and evaluate your current SAFe implementation. In a first step we collect your special point of interests and analyse your landscape accordingly. The result is a detailed report that also includes any weaknesses or opportunities for improvement in your implementation.
Benefits
- Understand any deficiencies in your current implementation.
- Ensure that your implementation, including processes, roles, work products, tailoring, diversity and also the handling of process information as a whole, are assessed in a structured and independent manner.
- Have the assurance that your company is at the cutting edge of the SAFe implementation and that there is nothing more to be done.
To benefit from the full power of agile methods and a lean mindset those principles need to be scaled to higher levels or even the whole enterprise than just to the development team. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the most adopted agile scaling methodology globally. We enable you to achieve a successful transformation.
Benefits
- Launch your first Agile Release Train (ART) successfully within weeks.
- Create a lean-agile working environment that scales smoothly from teams over programs, products and external suppliers up to portfolios.
- Collaborate easily with non-agile teams or suppliers via a common well-aligned hybrid development model.
Understand the lean-agile principles in the context of product management. Avoid big upfront design and start to collaborate effectively with your development teams and stakeholders. Apply effective backlog management and splitting of backlog items to increase team and product delivery speed. We enable you to achieve a successful transformation.
Benefits
- Early delivery of a minimal viable product (MVP) to start user validation and feedback cycles.
- Effective application of epic, capability, feature and story splitting techniques to achieve a constant flow and capacity utilization based on WIP limits.
- Clients get more value delivered and feel closely engaged resulting in higher satisfaction.
In a VUCA world, product and project portfolio management has to be executed more flexible. Apply beyond budgeting principles and say goodbye to fix defined portfolio targets. Focus on value streams with the highest client value based on periodic feedback cycles from your running product and service initiatives. We enable you to achieve a successful mindset change.
Benefits
- Understand beyond budgeting principles and steer your portfolio with adaptive leadership practices.
- Apply refined portfolio metrics that let you better focus on delivered client value instead of cost targets.
- Execute successfully your tailor-made portfolio Kanban to smoothly coordinate and align large value streams and create architectural flow.
Quality assurance, assessments, process engineering and deployment including your governance system have to understand lean-agile principles and practices to serve your development organization efficiently while keeping compliant with internal and external regulatory requirements. The discipline and feedback cycles in an agile environment foster quality even better. We enable you to achieve a successful mindset change.
Benefits
- Map agile delivery practices to given reference frameworks and regulatory requirements and stay compliant.
- Understand emergent design techniques to better challenge and define a minimal description and documentation requirements in relation to the product lifecycle.
- Integrate your quality management system and metrics into the feedback cycles of your agile product development.
Keeping pace with client demand while keeping technical debt under control is a challenge for large-scale system development. In an agile setup, emergent design practices and intentional architecture combined with agreed capacity allocations for client, architecture and infrastructure features ensure to balance both sustainably. We enable you to achieve a successful transformation.
Benefits
- Transparent, understood, and well-aligned decisions regarding client value delivery, complexity reduction, and operational cost.
- Effective application of epic, capability, feature and story splitting techniques in requirements engineering to achieve a constant flow and capacity utilization based on WIP limits.
- Close and constant collaboration between agile teams, architects and product management.
Make your agile transformation healthiness visible and measure the performance and health of your teams and organization with AgilityHealth, a powerful agile measurement, and organizational growth platform. It offers several radars for assessing teams, programs, product lines, portfolios or individual health.
Benefits
- Understand your team’s & organization’s health by seeing both qualitative & quantitative metrics.
- Growth plans help individuals, teams, program, portfolios and enterprise leaders focus on the most important areas they want to improve in the next few months.
- View radars over time & see how the team’s health has evolved quarter by quarter or year by year.
