Doing work for the sake of doing work is boring. Super boring. But give individuals who work at organizations a very clear picture of the purpose of the work that they\u2019re doing, and they tend to stay longer and actually go the extra mile in order to make things happen.<\/p>\n
They have an understanding how the work that they\u2019re doing on a day-to-day basis is connected to the grand scheme, and how they can impact the success of that bigger picture. Shannon Mason, VP of product management for CA Agile Central, said, \u201cEverybody\u2019s usually focused on straight business metrics, right? Did we move the bottom line? Are we making more money? There\u2019s also an internal focused metric that we\u2019re looking at. We want people to blow out their concept of what it means to be successful.\u201d<\/p>\n
CA Agile Central\u2019s philosophy is that there are better ways of working to leverage all the Agile principles, whether a developer is practicing Scrum, Continuous Flow, or Kanban. The product is purpose-built to actively support this ideal. Agile Central, formerly Rally Software, started in 2001. Mason joined the company 10 years ago. She shares, \u201cWe fundamentally developed a product with the ideals and the output of the manifesto in mind. Everything that we do and have done in this system is with that backbone still in place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Focus on metrics, automated information sharing<\/strong><\/p>\n According to Mason, one of Agile Central\u2019s major benefits is that it decreases the amount of information sharing that has to go between people who \u201cwant know and track things,\u201d and the folks that \u201cmake the magic happen.\u201d She says, \u201cA developer can go inside of Agile Central and essentially leverage all the things around an integrative development lifecycle. They can move work through their system, through their flow, even if that work is connected to bigger pieces or bigger organizational strategic objectives. They don\u2019t ever have to send out an email that says, \u2018Hey, the status on this work is complete,\u2019 or, \u2018This work is still in progress.\u2019 We automatically track those minute details that oftentimes get sent over email or stored in a spreadsheet, or that a stakeholder might get just in a hallway conversation update.\u201d<\/p>\n The product also focuses on the analytics and the measurement component of a project. Teams that are practicing any sort of iterative development process are looking to optimize how they work and how they operate. Mason says, \u201cWe have tons of data inside the system from a cumulative flow perspective. It shows developers the way that they\u2019re moving work through their system \u2014 whether there\u2019s a bottleneck, or there\u2019s too much work in progress. It also shows the impact that it\u2019s going to have on velocity.\u201d This is performed not just at the team level, but also at the teams of teams of teams levels that are looking to coordinate with each other.<\/p>\n Fitting Hybrid IT into the picture<\/strong><\/p>\n The Hybrid IT melting pot that blends legacy apps and hardware, development tools, developing for the cloud, and moving through different development platforms is part of the practical aspect that Mason says Agile Central embraces. \u201cOne of the things we\u2019ve always wanted and sought to do is to be able to pull people into the system. I\u2019ve had Waterfall teams inside of Agile Central be able to mock up their entire process. They go through all the checks and balances and are able to use all the analysis and kind of flow that we can see inside of the product, which then allows them to connect with their other teams that might be practicing, might be a little bit further along in their journey, and actually interconnect and work in an active way.\u201d<\/p>\n According to her, what tends to happen in those scenarios is that those Waterfall teams end up going to Wagile, a combo of the two, and eventually end up seeing all of the productivity their peers have, and then moving over to a more adaptive way of thinking about it.<\/p>\n Part of Agile Central\u2019s DNA is believing that Agile is a great way to work. She qualifies that, \u201cThe other side is also being super aware of meeting people where they\u2019re at, and that they might be in very different places. You limit the amount of guard-rails, and you put those guardrails in the right places.\u201d<\/p>\n While the competitive landscape is stiff, CA differentiates itself in a number of ways. Mason describes a portion of her customer base as still having a very traditional PMO in place, and managing traditional projects, although she says she sees a gradual shift to more product focus. \u201cYou\u2019ve got the programmatic understanding, or teams of teams understanding. You\u2019re practicing Scaled Agile Framework, sometimes the value streams conceptualization of that. And then teams, and then how teams deliver work. For us, one of the big things within CA is that there\u2019s something that we have in each one of those critical areas. We\u2019re involved from the moment a company starts thinking about whether or not it wants to fund a particular improvement, or fund a new product, to the way that it thinks, then distributing and arranging and organizing all of that work, and then to tracking, whether or not the team is heading towards that particular goal, to the moment it gets deployed.\u201d<\/p>\n The CA background provides broad support for enterprise\u00a0 management. Many of its customers are in heavily regulated environments and have added security at each layer. Its interconnectivity, specifically with an eye towards managing complex planning and complex execution across thousands of people.<\/p>\n Mason points out another key difference between CA and its competitors, \u201cA lot of our competitors have something that looks like a SaaS offering but often times it\u2019s an ASP, so they\u2019re providing a service. We have a true multi-tenant offering. It allows us to do very complex analytics against our customer\u2019s data to provide them a lot of great insight into how they\u2019re operating and to baseline their information. They get the availability and uptime that comes with being able to structure their system from that perspective. That\u2019s not something that you see across all of our competitors.\u201d<\/p>\n Change is hard, but go with the flow<\/strong><\/p>\n The next stage, according to Mason, will be to embrace going back to the basics. She says, \u201cSo let\u2019s remember why we went through this big change in the first place, right? It was to achieve high value for our customers \u2014 to create a really engaging environment for our employees and make sure that we were really aware of the problems that we were trying to solve, and to try that incremental solutioning process. What has happened over the last few years, frankly, is that people really focused on process and speed of delivery. I think we forgot a little bit about why we went through it in the first place, which was just to build better things.\u201d<\/p>\n She describes \u201cfeature factories\u201d as an element of the original focus that needs to be looked at closely, \u201cEven here at Agile Central, we noticed this behavior is within ourselves. We would congratulate ourselves on the number of features that we would complete every single quarter and completely forget the other side of that question, which was, \u2018Great. Are people using them? Do they like them?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The second part, aside from the back to basics, is achieving full organizational flow. Developers used to think about Agile as encapsulating many different components. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just that you did Scrum, Kanban or continuous flow was usually in there. Lean principles were in there, test-driven development and behavior-driven development were in there.\u201d The groups that Mason\u2019s working with that are really pushing the boundaries are focusing on what it looks like to have full organizational flow.<\/p>\n She describes the historical play by play of developers building things faster, then settling on a DevOps strategy.\u201cSo you got the things out there faster, but then what are the things that are upstream that can also practice that same, very focused, day to day planning, pivoting, persevering mechanism that exists inside of most engineering organizations?\u201d she asks and adds, \u201cIf I were to take a bet, it would be that at some point in the near future we\u2019re going to be practicing flow versus practicing what is a more Scrum-like approach that\u2019s currently practiced.\u201d<\/p>\n Next-gen Agile focused on business outcomes<\/strong><\/p>\n Next-gen Agile is on the horizon, and it will leverage new technologies like machine learning and predictive analytics to expand its focus from program management to business outcomes. Mason\u2019s excited about Next-gen Agile because it\u2019s making use of everything that developers currently use for better outcomes. She says, \u201cThat rotation around looking at very specific delivery metrics is just one facet of what it looks like to be successful. Then when you start to think about it within the concept of how we flow work through the entirety of the organization, from the moment that we think about \u2018Maybe we\u2019re gonna do something,\u2019 to the moment that we actually put that out to production, or someone\u2019s going to leverage it, we\u2019re gathering all these data points.\u201d<\/p>\n She suggests, \u201cRight now most organizations track that sort of information, but they\u2019re probably tracking more whether or not they got the feature done, and we\u2019re trying to actually pull in not just that data point, but also the data points that surround whether or not you achieved the objective that you were seeking to achieve, right? The company\u2019s goal was to release a new piece of functionality that helps organizations understand how their plans change over time. We find that people are going to that page, and so they\u2019re using it, which is fantastic. Those sorts of metrics, that sort of information, starts to build a more multifaceted understanding of how we\u2019re operating as an organization, versus just focusing on one space.\u201d<\/p>\n That said, there\u2019s some really interesting data that\u2019s starting to come out around organizations that have clarity of purpose. In closing Mason points out, \u201cWe tend to think about purpose and clarity as things that are more altruistic, but if you look at businesses that are publicly traded, that have a clear, discernible idea of what it is that they want do for their customers, they tend to have a significantly higher return on investment. That doesn\u2019t happen magically, that happens because everybody understands what it looks like to kick butt.\u201d<\/p>\n Learn more at https:\/\/cainc.to\/ca-agile-central<\/a>.<\/p>\n