Alka Forsikring Uses AgilityHealth® to Understand and Improve the Potential of their Agile Teams
With the help of Safe Journey, Alka Forsikring conducted a TeamHealth pilot over a period of two months. The pilot included two strategic retrospectives facilitated by Safe Journey using AgilityHealth® TeamHealth radar. As a result, the agile team improved significantly within their focused improvement area. This was measured using TeamHealth, and the organisational leaders received a holistic picture of the health and agile maturity of the team.
Alka Forsikring agreed to participate in the pilot because they wanted to understand the potential of their agile teams better. They wanted to try an independent and more advanced agile maturity assessment tool.
Furthermore, they wanted to evaluate if the way Safe Journey used the agile maturity measurement as an integrated part of a strategic retrospective could bring a more structured approach and offer better support to the way the agile teams work with their own improvement.
Lastly, they wanted to compare the outcome of using the approach supported by Safe Journey with their experience of using another agile maturity measurement approach.
Positive Results of the Pilot for Alka Forsikring
During the first strategic retrospective, the team members identified lack of improvement based on team retrospectives as the strategic problem they wanted to address during the next four sprints. The team did not identify any organisational improvement items for the organisational leaders.
The team focused on the strategic improvement story. At the next strategic retrospective the team members felt that they had implemented the story enough to close it. The AgilityHealth® TeamHealth radar showed a significant improvement in the impacted area.
At the end of the pilot, the team members were happy with both the method and the result. They stated that they wanted to continue to have their strategic retrospectives supported by TeamHealth radar. Some of the reasons for this were:
The result of the TeamHealth radar “hit the nail”. The team members recognised the result and thought it reflected their actual challenges.
All team members had been engaged and contributed to the work related to the improvement story. They felt that they were doing it together.
Compared with the previous agile maturity measurement method, the team members felt that AgilityHealth® resulted in more concrete actions.
The organisational leaders involved in the pilot felt safe from start to finish. They could initiate the pilot and then step back once they saw that the pilot was well managed.
The industry benchmark was a unique feature that the previous solution used by Alka Forsikring did not have. And based on the results, the leaders could see that they already had gone quite far on their agile journey – even though the team still had growth potential. However, they would have preferred to have created a baseline at the beginning of their agile journey.
The Potential to Improve Agile is Great
Many companies have chosen to adopt agile, most often to accelerate software delivery – and most with success or with the perception of success* . However, what does success look like? Is it simply to do better than the often not so im- pressive results of waterfall projects? At the same time, the respondents reply that only 12% believe their organisation has a high competence level in agile.
Based on previous transformation experiences, we see that one of the biggest challenges to make an effective and efficient transformation is to understand what will actually get you to where you want to be.
Safe Journey can supply you with a structured, repeatable and effective method to measure, analyse, evaluate and communicate the development in the important practices and behaviours. These results can then be used to define what to improve and how to improve it, and then follow up by measuring that improvement.
It is really common sense. When you embark on a journey in your car, you either rely on own experience (have done the trip many times before), others’ experiences (maps) or you try to figure out where you are and where you are heading, and measure progress as you go along (GPS). AgilityHealth® is what you could call an agile GPS.
Safe Journey is the preferred partner in the Nordics for AgilityHealth®**.
*According to VersionOne’s 12th Annual State of Agile Report, 98% of the respondents said that they had success with agile projects in their organisation and 74% indicated that more than half of their agile projects had been successful.
**AgilityHealth® is a platform plus partner of Scaled Agile Inc.. See more on www.scaledagile.com.
