Real Agility™ Program – Delivery Track

The Real Agility™ Program Delivery Track is a systematic agile team coaching program for helping teams delivering work product (e.g. projects, products, operations) to achieve a high level of agility. The program consists of twelve steps.

Benefits and Outcomes

Your team will achieve a higher level of performance as measured by lead time, quality and stakeholder happiness. You can expect non-agile teams adopting this program to achieve double the productivity as measured by value delivered per unit of time (e.g. expected revenue per Sprint). For semi-agile teams adopting the program the results depend on their current maturity level.

For example, a typical team in an IT environment which costs the business $1.0M/year and delivers $1.5M/year of business benefit would see that benefit increase to $3.0M/year for a change in gross margins from 50% to 200%.

This program is also designed well for pilot programs where an organization or department is first trying out agile methods. It reduces the risks associated with change and builds an Agile mindset among participants.

We recommend you do this program in concert with the Leadership Track or the Management Track in order to ensure sustainability of your results.

Delivery Track Requirements

These requirements must be in place for the program to be effective:

• Leaders support the team by removing obstacles to agility that are raised by the team in a timely manner.
• The team size is a minimum of 5 people and a maximum of 11. Larger teams must be divided and each receives support in a separate Delivery Track.
• The team members must be virtually co-located for the initial program steps during the facilitated sessions. Ideally, they will be virtually co-located for all the program steps, but exceptions can be made.
• The membership of the team must be stable over the course of the steps.

Agile Team Coaching Approach

Each step of the program has a similar structure built around ½ day workshops done either weekly or bi-weekly:

• Start with reflection on the work between the ½ day workshops.
• Learn new techniques, concepts, skills.
• Plan changes to the way the team works.
• Go back to work and apply the learning to the business/technology work that the team is doing.
• Leadership, individual and group coaching and facilitation occurs on demand between workshops.

Program Agenda

The twelve steps of the program are as follows:

1. Launch the team (virtual co-location): This step prepares the team for its journey together through the Delivery Track of the Real Agility Program. The Launch / Reset step deals with basic foundations for getting started. During the Launch / Reset step, the team is not doing any Delivery work. The Launch / Reset step typically should be kept extremely brief so that the team can begin / return to delivery work as soon as possible.
2. First iteration (virtual co-location): The Team plans and starts executing its first cycle of work using an appropriate Agile framework such as Scrum or Kanban. The consultant assists by facilitating the process and coaching team members to support this basic level of Agility.
3. Reflection, retrospectives and continuous improvement: The team continues to learn basic aspects of Agile processes and teamwork. The emphasis on refection helps teams with clearly evaluating their own work results and processes and starting to take ownership of their own improvement.
4. Learning and continuous improvement: The team makes a major advance by learning and practicing some tools for continuous improvement.  These tools focus on analysis and innovation.
5. Planning and continuous improvement: Stakeholders of teams need information about both short and long-term plans. The team now has enough history to begin to make effective short-term commitments and long term plans.
6. Effective action, collaboration, and innovation: Now the team has the basic process in place and can focus on making their action hyper-productive.  Teamwork, tools, environment, skills are all considered.
7. Agile processes and structures: With a boost in productivity, it now becomes possible to focus on advanced techniques with the structure and process of Agile that will help the team go further.
8. Agile meetings: The key rhythm of the Agile team process is the cycle (ie. Sprint) and the team meetings are its energizers. This step focuses on a deeper understanding and more sophisticated application of these meetings.
9. Removing obstacles: As a team gets faster, it starts discovering obstacles that are harder and harder to fix. This step focuses on effective techniques for removing obstacles.
10. Achieving business goals: This step focuses on the fist of three critical factors for sustaining a high performance team: their overall goal for the business.  The team truly takes ownership of a performance goal.
11. Building capacity for Real Agility: This step focuses on the second critical factor for sustaining a high-performance team: internal capacity building. The team takes full ownership of its own skill development.
12. Building a culture of Real Agility: This step focuses on the third and final critical factor for sustaining a high-performance team: the culture of the team itself and the environment that they work within.

The Real Agility Program Delivery Track allows each step’s workshop to occur every week or every two weeks. A longer cadence is not recommended. The workshop part of each step is generally ½ day, but the first two steps have longer workshops. The Real Agility Program Coach is available with the team enough to ensure that the team is applying the learning from each step into the real work environment, but not so long as to create dependence.  This means that the coach is usually working with the team two or three days per week.

The program encourages frequent assessment of the team’s progress and this can result in reports about the team. With proper leadership support, teams are guaranteed to successfully complete the steps of the program.