Organizational agility requires more than “scaling.” It requires deliberately finding the balance between exploring new, innovative ideas and exploiting proven ones. Agile software techniques can enable individual teams to find this balance, but few established patterns exist for harnessing it at an organizational level.

One successful model is the Trimble Software Framework (TSF), introduced by Trimble Navigation in the early 2010s. Borrowing from Agile, Lean, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), and other proven methods, the TSF provided effective feedback to Trimble’s diverse collection of software teams on the effectiveness of their approaches. Where the TSF differed from other models was in its respect for variability.

The other authors of the TSF and I recognized that by promoting continuous improvement without dictating the path it should take, software teams would be free to experiment with new methods and explore new patterns. This increased overall organizational agility as teams tailored known good practices to their specific contexts and developed new ones. The TSF became a feedback loop that enabled software teams throughout the organization to learn from one another and constantly improve. Come hear how this was done, what we learned along the way, and how we used variability to permit a more effective balance of exploration and exploitation.

Story point is an arbitrary relative measure used by Scrum/agile teams to define the effort required to implement a story or feature. This is a metric to measure the cost related to the implementation of story points. This metric is called Story Point Cost. It should allow to track development costs and also make the Scrum team aware about the budget issues of their project and for product owners to easier compare cost to gained value.

For years, development and technology teams used the agile mindset and its many practices to meet the needs of their customers, delivering greater value by emphasizing collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement. Inevitably, these powerful concepts are spreading to new domains as companies seek every competitive advantage in their own pursuits. From Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies to PMOs and HR departments, the potential of greater agility to support business objectives is convincing leaders to rethink their approaches, for the benefit of their people and their organizations.

In July 2017, Excella Consulting partnered with Silverline Communications to provide a case study for what many of Excella’s coaches were saying for years: that the benefits of greater agility should not limited to software or IT, but rather can be realized by any business or discipline that involves knowledge work in dynamic environments. Silverline, a small but growing marketing company in McLean, VA, was the perfect testbed. They were enthusiastic, engaged, and willing to make the commitments necessary to shift their mindset and evolve into an agile marketing firm.

This talk will bring together representatives from Excella and Silverline to discuss the different elements of the partnership and how the effort progressed over the many months, from the initial agile and Kanban training, to active coaching and working through the impediments, to eventually reaching a point where the coach stepped back and the Silverline team began to take the initiative into their own hands. We’ll also cover some of the key benefits realized (including winning an industry award for most innovative marketing company!), and following the presentation we’ll be happy to answer questions on how you can take similar steps in your own agile journeys.

Do you find you need to explain you business quickly? Or that you need to understand various internal choices or external environment impacts on what you do or how you may need to adjust?

A business canvas can be really useful for answering these questions. In this talk, I'll describe how I used a business canvas to represent the business model for the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Pesticide Programs. By doing some logical analysis on current industry trends, I'll discuss how a colleague and I were able to develop a likely forecast of events (that proved true) that decreased the amount of registration fees we would collect. This change had a direct impact on the organization in terms of funds needed for people, systems, and analytical research.

Learn how a business canvas can help you!

Have you wondered what helps make contracts deliver better results? It's not specifying Agile approaches, but thinking of the development life-cycle, its impacts, and asking for demonstrable understanding of Agile approaches.

This short talk will discuss how a contract vehicle was established at the Environmental Protection Agency to improve contractor accountability and more importantly improve system reliability. It will include a short discussion of what next steps for following contracts should be included.