1 Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of ExcellenceFacilitate ongoing alignment between Agile teams and the business with a set of targeted service offerings.

2 ANALYST PERSPECTIVE As your Agile environment scales and team capabilities grow, the compatibility of existing management and governance structures will challenge your organization’s ability to cultivate the benefits of a wider Agile rollout. Leadership must evolve away from command and control towards more collaborative approaches based on mutual trust. Agile demands a democratic approach – everyone should have a voice, and the power to change existing norms should lie in the collective hands of your Agile constituents, as long as they operate within the accepted boundaries of the organization. A properly constructed Center of Excellence provides the flexible governance required to enable your Agile democracy. Daniel Black, Consulting Analyst, Applications Practice Info-Tech Research Group

3 Our understanding of the problemA CIO who is looking for a way to optimize their Agile environment to ensure ongoing alignment with business objectives. An applications director who is looking for mechanisms to inject continuous improvement into organization-wide Agile practices. 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. Project managers who are tasked with managing Agile projects. Application development managers who are struggling with challenges from consistency, transparency, and collaboration across their teams. Provide service offerings to their team members that will help them personally develop and gain desired skills. Provide oversight and transparency into Agile projects and outcomes through ongoing monitoring.

4 Executive summary Your organization is looking to create consistency across all Agile teams to drive greater business results and alignment. You are seeking to organically grow Agile capabilities within the organization through a set of support structures and facilitated through shared learning and capabilities. Social capital can be an enabler, but also a barrier. People can only manage a finite number of relationships – ensure that the connections the CoE facilitates are purposeful. Don’t over-govern. Empowerment is critical to enable improvements – set boundaries and let teams work inside them with autonomy. Legitimize through listening. A CoE will not be leveraged unless it aligns with the needs of its users. Invest the time to align with the functional expectations of your Agile teams. Organizational constraints, culture clash, and lack of continuous top-down support leave service offerings as optional rather than key components of Agile growth and maturity. Changes to create consistency across Agile processes and teams fail to account for the expectations of users and stakeholders, leaving them detached from projects and creating resistance. Align the service offerings of your Agile Center of Excellence with both corporate objectives and the functional expectations of its customers to ensure broad support and utility of the invested resources. Understand some of the cultural and processual challenges you will face when forming a Center of Excellence, and address them using Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model. Track the progress of the Center of Excellence and Agile teams. Use this data to find root causes for issues, and ideate and implement solutions to challenges as they arise over time. Effectively prepare changes to your Agile environment to drive business-valued results. Communicate changes to the interested stakeholders to ensure long-term viability of the Center of Excellence.

5 Wait – doesn’t a Center of Excellence conflict with Agile?Adding an additional layer of governance may seem antithetical to agility. In reality it functions to create an expertise matrix over your Agile environment to drive consistency and purpose to organizational best practices, learning, and innovation. There are places where you need to sacrifice agility to become more agile in others. Governance within the Agile Center of Excellence model provides the necessary level of structure to drive coordination and collaboration across your Agile teams so that there can be a consistent approach to delivering business value. Without this layer, you run the risk of localized decisions generating downstream or upstream bottlenecks. This risk will drive a wedge among your Agile teams and with stakeholders, and affect team productivity. A CoE Drives Organizational Agility As Agile grows into the enterprise, you will need to have solidified top- down support to guide the future vision of your Agile environment and the personal development of the members of your Agile teams. Without this layer of governance, teams can deviate away from business objectives and culture, and process and tooling innovations may not scale to other teams.

6 What is an Agile Center of Excellence?An ACE provides the following: An Agile Center of Excellence (ACE) builds on best practices successfully employed within your Agile environment, effectively allowing you to extend the benefits of Agile from your pilots at the team and functional group level to a wider audience within your organization. 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 applications of Agile best practices. From the viewpoint of Agile teams, it provides a community of individuals to share lessons learned and experiences, propagate new ideas, and raise questions or concerns so that delivering business value is always top of mind. 1 A mechanism to gather thought leadership 2 A mechanism to share innovations and ideas 3 Strategic alignment 4 Purposeful best practices to maximize the accessibility and reach of your Agile investment. to facilitate knowledge transfer and ensure broadly applicable innovations do not go to waste. to ensure that Agile practices are driving value towards business objectives. to ensure that the service offerings provided align with expectations of both your Agile practitioners and stakeholders.

7 What does an ACE do? What is an Agile Center of Excellence?A team of people who promote open collaboration and shared learning, and evangelize organizational Agile best practices in order to ensure alignment with business objectives and delivery of value to the end customer. Five Main Functions of your Agile Center of Excellence: Supporting Guiding Learning Monitoring Governing Enable your Agile teams to access subject-matter expertise by facilitating knowledge transfer and documenting best practices. Provide standards, methodologies, and knowledge for teams to leverage in order to effectively meet organizational business objectives. Provide training and development and enable engagement based on identified interaction points and adoption strategies to enable organizational growth. Demonstrate the value the CoE is providing through effective metric setting and ongoing monitoring of Agile’s effectiveness. Create operational boundaries for Agile teams, and monitor their progress and ability to meet business objectives within these boundaries.

8 Why would you need an ACE?An ACE drives consistency and transparency without sacrificing the ability to innovate. Support Agile Teams Provide services designed to inject evolving best practices into workflows and remove impediments or roadblocks from your Agile team’s ability to complete tasks. Maintain Business Alignment Maintain alignment with corporate objectives without impeding business agility in the long term. The ACE functions as an interface layer so changing expectations can be adapted to without impacting the day-to-day of Agile teams negatively. Facilitate Learning Events Avoid the risk of innovations or subject-matter expertise being lost or siloed by ensuring the appropriate learning environment and mechanisms are in place to facilitate knowledge transfer. Govern Improvements Set baselines, monitor metrics, and run retrospectives to help govern process improvements and ensure that Agile teams are delivering upon expected benefits. The bottom line: An ACE needs to align every person, process, and tool towards a common purpose. What is the purpose of adapting to a set of new processes without understanding why or how they provide value? If there is understanding of common purpose and what the business is trying to achieve, Agile will thrive. – Anonymous Founder, Agile Consultancy Group

9 Use the ACE to address the issues the industry is facingTackle the following barriers to Agile adoption with a business-aligned ACE. List based on reported impediments from VersionOne’s 10th Annual State of Agile Report (N=3,880) 1 4 Inability to change organizational culture Not enough personnel with the necessary Agile experience The ACE provides transparency into the value of Agile to build the necessary consensus amongst senior business leaders that shifting the organizational culture will lead to tangible benefits. 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. 2 5 General organizational resistance to change Concerns about the loss of management control 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. Periodic communications demonstrate the realized benefits that come with allowing teams to solve their own problems and be accountable for their outcomes. 3 6 Pre-existing rigid or waterfall frameworks Confidence in ability to scale Agile methodologies Standardized engagement plans to onboard and develop teams’ Agile skills will help build the knowledge necessary to transition away from the waterfall methodology. Shared services will provide the necessary mechanism to scale resources appropriately to see your Agile environment thrive as it grows.

10 Overcome the potential challenges of Agile scalingCheck for warning signs that indicate problems pertaining to your Agile environment and determine how an ACE can eliminate obscurity and help overcome process redundancies and inefficiencies. Warning Signs Key Benefits Budget and time overruns during development. Lack of governance around change requests. Inadequate application support. Inconsistent sourcing and procurement process. Low user adoption and satisfaction. Process redundancies and duplication. Lack of standardized training. Costly third-party support. Lack of proficient skills and expertise. Failure to meet business requirements. Lack of metrics and reporting capability. Not meeting user needs. Governance related to upgrades and change requests. Standardized Agile practices across teams. Continuous user training and personal development. Defined support structures. Scalability to grow Agile within the organization. Repeatable and transferrable methodology across the company. Time and monetary savings. Eliminate confusion around ownership of systems, processes, and information. Continuous performance tracking. Organized assignment of limited resources. Knowledge retention and management.

11 Beware the common risks of implementing your ACECulture clash between ACE and larger organization Agile compels empowered teams, meritocracy, and broad collaboration for success, while typical organizational structures are siloed and hierarchical and decisions are delegated from the top down. There needs to be a plan to enable a smooth transition from the current state towards the Agile target state. Persistence of tribal knowledge Even though the ACE functions to facilitate knowledge transfer, it is sometimes hard to discover where siloed knowledge exists. Employees may also try to protect their expertise for job security. It is important to proceduralize and document the critical components of your Agile environment to ensure that critical know-how is accessible and does not leave the organization with the individual. Rigid management structures Rigidity in how managers operate (performance reviews, human resource management, etc.) can result in a cultural rejection of Agile. Instead of holding people accountable for expected performance, they need to become enablers of high performance and support their teams. This can help ensure that they are given sufficient opportunities to succeed. More support and less strict governance is key. Breakdowns from distributed environments With low levels of face-to-face communication, ensure that you invest in the right communication channels and remove cultural and process impediments to facilitate organization-wide collaboration. It is easy to turn to alternatives such as documents or to accommodate distributed team members, but they do not provide the same experience and value as a face-to-face conversation.

12 Info-Tech’s Agile ProgramSupporting Development Capabilities and Practices Make Development Teams Leaner and Improve Time-to-Release in Five Steps Drive down your delivery time by removing your development inefficiencies and bottlenecks while maintaining high quality. Use DevOps to Respond Faster to End Customers Fix, deploy, and support applications quicker though development and operations collaboration. Extend QA Practices into the Full Lifecycle Instill quality assurance practices and principles in each stage of your software development lifecycle. Core AGILE Practices Level 1: 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. Level 3: Spread Best Practices with an Agile Center of Excellence Level 2: Enable Organization-Wide Collaboration by Scaling Agile Form an Agile Center of Excellence to support Agile development at all levels of the organization with thought leadership and strategic development support and process innovation. Extend the benefits from your Agile pilot project further into your organization by strategically orienting scaling Agile initiatives that will meet stakeholders’ development needs. 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 Determine the vision of your ACE Define the service offerings of your ACE Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams Create an ACE engagement plan Define metrics to measure success Optimize the success of your ACE Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE

13 Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of ExcellenceThis blueprint will walk you through the steps needed to build the foundations for operational excellence within an Agile Center of Excellence. 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. Phase 3 Standardize the CoE’s 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 CoE’s utility and whether or not the expected value is being translated to tangible results. Phase 2 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 1 Strategically Align the CoE

14 Spread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – blueprint layoutPhase 1: Strategically Align the CoE Phase 2: Standardize the CoE’s Service Offerings Phase 3: Operate the CoE Step 1.1: Determine the vision of your ACE Step 2.1: Define an adoption plan for your Agile teams Step 3.1: Optimize the success of your ACE Inputs Business objectives Outputs Business-aligned use cases Stakeholder map Inputs Agile adoption model Agile adoption attributes Outputs Adoption-aligned service offerings Inputs Surveys, interviews, historical data Outputs Baseline assessment of ACE Step 3.2: Plan change to enhance your Agile initiatives Step 2.2: Create and ACE engagement plan Inputs Metrics trends Current change mgmt. process Outputs Solutions to identified issues Change communication plan Inputs Adoption-aligned service offerings Outputs Role engagement plans Step 1.2: Define the service offerings of your ACE Inputs Data collection from survey, interviews, etc. Business-aligned use cases Outputs ACE funding model ACE resourcing model Refined service offerings ACE capability map Step 3.3: Conduct ongoing retrospectives of your ACE Step 2.3: Define metrics to measure success Inputs Metrics trends, outcomes Outputs Communications deck for each key stakeholder Inputs Service offerings, existing metrics, etc. Outputs ACE performance metrics Agile adoption metrics Agile team level metrics Business objective-aligned metrics END DELIVERABLE: ACE Communications Deck

15 Align your ACE with your corporate strategyThis research set will assist you with aligning your ACE’s functions to the objectives of the business in order to justify the resource investments and funding in your Agile program. Business Objectives ACE Functions Alignment 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.

16 Use Info-Tech’s CoE operating model to define the service offerings of your ACEUnderstand where your inputs and outputs lie to create an accessible set of service offerings for your Agile teams. Shared Services Governance People Technology ACE Input arrows represent the components that come into play in the CoE refining process. These include challenges in the way things are currently done. For instance, lack of governance relating to outdated change management policies, poor collaborative environment, or lack of knowledge transfer facilitation. Output arrows represent the value the CoE delivers and the benefits realized across the organization. CoE initiatives are classified under four defining elements: people, governance, shared services, and technology.

17 Tailor your service offerings using Info-Tech’s Agile adoption modelStandardize your Agile teams’ path to success by categorizing the ACE’s service offerings based on Info-Tech’s Agile adoption model. Building social capital (trust from your stakeholders in the ability to deliver positive outcomes) incrementally is vital to ensure that everyone is aligned to new mindsets and culture as your Agile environment scales. TRUST & COMPETENCY INNOVATE Use your built-up trust and support to begin innovating, driving the creation of new best practices into the ACE. EMPOWER Drive behavioral and cultural changes that will empower teams to be accountable for their own successes given the appropriate resources. COLLABORATE Use information to drive changes and adopt appropriate Agile practices to make incremental improvements to the existing environment. 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. CONCEPTUALIZE 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.

18 Continuously improve the ACE to ensure long-term viabilityImprovement 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 Iterate Define 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. Define metrics and set targets that align with the goals of the ACE. These metrics represent the ACE’s expected value to the organization, and must be measured against on a regular basis to demonstrate value to your key stakeholders. 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.

19 The State of Maine used an ACE to foster positive cultural changeCASE STUDY Industry Source Government Cathy Novak, Agile Government Leadership The State of Maine’s Agile Center of Excellence Results: “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.” 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.

20 Use these icons to help direct you as you navigate this researchUse these icons to help guide you through each step of the blueprint and direct you to content related to the recommended activities. This icon denotes a slide where a supporting Info-Tech tool or template will help you perform the activity or step associated with the slide. Refer to the supporting tool or template to get the best results and proceed to the next step of the project. This icon denotes a slide with an associated activity. The activity can be performed either as part of your project or with the support of Info-Tech team members, who will come onsite to facilitate a workshop for your organization.

21 Guided ImplementationInfo-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs Guided Implementation “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.” DIY Toolkit “Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.” Workshop “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.” Consulting “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.” Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

22 Best-Practice Toolkit Guided ImplementationsSpread Best Practices With an Agile Center of Excellence – project overview 1. Strategically align the Center of Excellence 2. Standardize the CoE’s service offerings 3. Operate the Center of Excellence Best-Practice Toolkit 1.1 Determine the vision of your ACE. 1.2 Define the service offerings of your ACE. 2.1 Define an adoption plan for your 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 of your ACE. Guided Implementations Align your ACE with the business. Align your ACE with its users. Dissect the key attributes of Agile adoption. Form engagement plans for your Agile teams. Discuss effective ACE metrics. Conduct a baseline assessment of your Agile environment. Interface ACE with your change management function. Build a communications deck for key stakeholders. Onsite Workshop Module 1: Strategically align the ACE Module 2: Standardize the offerings of the ACE Module 3: Prepare for organizational change Phase 1 Outcome: Create strategic alignment between the CoE and organizational goals. Phase 2 Outcome: Build engagement plans and key performance indicators based on a standardized Agile adoption plan. Phase 3 Outcome: Operate the CoE’s monitoring function, identify improvements, and manage the change needed to continuously improve.

23 Workshop overview Contact your account representative or for more information. Workshop Module 1 Workshop Module 2 Workshop Module 3 Workshop Module 4 Activities Determine vision of CoE 1.1 Identify and prioritize organizational business objectives. 1.2 Form use cases for the points of alignment between your ACE and business objectives. 1.3 Prioritize your ACE stakeholders. Define service offerings of CoE 2.1 Form a solution matrix to organize your pain points and opportunities. 2.2 Refine your use cases to identify your ACE functions and services. 2.3 Visualize your ACE functions and service offerings with a capability map. Define engagement plans 3.1 Further categorize your use cases within the Agile adoption model. 3.2 Create an engagement plan for each level of adoption. Define metrics and plan communications 4.1 Define metrics that align with your Agile business objectives. 4.2 Define target ACE performance metrics. 4.3 Define Agile adoption metrics. Deliverables Agile business objectives Business-aligned use cases to form CoE’s service offerings Stakeholder map of key influencers Service offerings refined based on pains and opportunities identified during ACE requirements gathering ACE capability map Adoption-aligned service offerings Role-specific engagement plans Business objective-aligned metrics ACE performance metrics Agile adoption metrics