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is one of the key success factors for companies. Time-to-market (TTM) is an essential metric of such a company’s ability. TTM essentially describes how well a firm understands the changing needs of the market and how quickly it can meet them. Shortening the TTM is a common goal of agile transformations of companies today.

In achieving such a goal, we often use:

• Mapping and optimizing the end-to-end solution development process
• Optimization of assignments (scope reduction)
• Consistent implementation of short development cycles
• Optimization of teams and their competencies to minimize dependencies
• Implementing a strategic approach to KPIs

At the same time, it is important to remember that predictable delivery must still deliver value to the end customer. The key to predictability is good refinement of backlog items. We also use a number of other tools to increase the predictability of the team’s delivery:

• Kanban board including explicitly defined policies and work in progress limits
• Cumulative Flow charts
• Limiting the size of a unit of work
• Explicit planning for technical debt resolution
• Adoption of a “test first” approach

and structure to support agile values and principles. This process often requires changes at all levels of the organization. Without top management’s perception of such change as strategic and active support, the process is very difficult.

For example, we often face the following problems:

• Lack of communication between teams, leaders and management
• Non-existent or uncommunicated vision and goals for change
• Poor understanding of agile principles by management
• Perception of agile transformation as implementing a different way of delivering projects
• Distrust of management towards teams, their ability to “do their best for the company”, their ability to self-organize
• Perception and management of agile transformation as a project

that need to be resolved ASAP. Stakeholders ask about the status of critical bug fixes and wonder how it’s even possible for something like this to happen. Your team doesn’t have time to resolve everything. Time allocated to resolving critical bugs delays the delivery of new features of your solution. And for stakeholders, such lateness is not acceptable.

Do requests often fall into the next cycle because they are waiting for another team or person to interact? Do requests remain in an on-hold state for long periods of time because of waiting for another team or person to do their work?

Addictions are something of an epidemic in software development. So there are a number of reasons for this, ranging from how your teams are structured, to dependencies on a limited number of specialists, to dependencies on vendors, to the current architecture of your large-scale systems.

It is a fact that dependencies have been, will be, and cannot be completely eliminated. Therefore, your main effort should be on proactive dependency management. There are therefore a number of effective strategies, the key one being flow optimization throughout the solution development process.

(e.g., including the approach to budgeting for tribal activities), it is essential to get real senior management support for such a change. Gaining such support is often not an easy task, especially in situations where the company has invested heavily in adapting traditional waterfall methods of delivering tribal activities in the past.

In our experience, we have identified the following five most common misunderstandings of agile by senior management and have experience in how to deal with them:

• Agile is perceived as a “team sport”, something that individual teams engage in, not the whole company
• Agile is seen as just another way of delivering projects
• Agile way of implementing change hides its inefficiencies from management
• Leaders pay excessive attention to only one aspect of agile
• There are multiple conflicting objectives at senior management level

principles and practices, but has so far only implemented these benefits in the context of software development. You’re looking for a way to apply agile principles to other areas of your company, such as marketing, finance, or HR. These are often the situations you find yourself in:

• We conduct an assessment of readiness to scale agile vertically
• We create an implementation roadmap for such a change
• We help jumpstart agile teams outside of IT

the efficiency and productivity of agile teams. One of the first tasks in this area is always finding consensus on how to measure productivity – that is, defining specific metrics and how to calculate them in a given organization. The next step is to assess all the factors that affect team productivity – the agile practices chosen and the team’s approach to implementing them, the way the team develops solutions. The last step is then the implementation of specific recommendations to increase productivity, which usually come from these areas:

• Optimizing the development process, removing obstacles
• Responsible use of metrics
• Team self-management
• Adjusting the relationship with management in managing expectations
• Adoption of new practices and tools such as acceptance criteria, kanban boards, serialization of work
• Agile team education
• Fostering a culture of continuous improvement

Traditionally, different approaches have been used to organize teams: organizing teams around epics, solution components, funding sources, or even geographies. Each of these approaches aims to create cross-functional teams to promote flow, throughput of the development process, and team member satisfaction.

We work with our customers to organize teams around one goal: continuous delivery of value to the customer. This approach promotes customer-centricity of the team; the team has a direct relationship with the customers they serve. Such a team delivers value to the customer with minimal dependencies on other teams while supporting the solution in a production environment.

is linking the delivery of agile teams to strategic planning and portfolio management. Very often, we encounter situations where on the one hand there is a company strategy and strategic KPIs, but on the other hand it is not entirely clear how the delivery of agile teams contributes to this strategy. We help companies:

• Describe strategic themes in the form of strategic OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
• Decompose the strategic OKRs into tactical OKRs that become the focus of the agile programme, e.g. for the next three months
• Derive from the OKRs a roadmap for the development of the company’s solution and transparent support for its strategy
• Use lean-portfolio management for effective budgeting of individual value streams
• Analyze and present performance and concrete results to support continuous improvement

in some companies it is not easy to be transparent and open. There is a lot of pressure to say what management wants to hear. We believe that non-transparency is one of the reasons agile transformation fails as it causes:

• Distrust of product management roles
• Teams struggle with politicking instead of focusing on delivery
• Team morale and motivation is reduced

Yet measurement is the foundation of continuous improvement, which we believe should be based on facts, not just feelings.

in terms of greater autonomy. This allows employees to operate more flexibly, faster and with maximum customer focus. Such an approach contributes significantly to employee motivation, their desire to develop and to be open to constructive feedback. In addition to employee motivation, such a culture automatically brings increased concern for customer satisfaction, customer location and ultimately the competitiveness of the entire company. We further strive to promote customer satisfaction:

• Effective customer involvement in the development process
• Incremental development of solutions
• Getting feedback after each increment