Agile Governance refers to how the organization inspects, monitors, and the portfolio of agile initiatives. Its objective is to direct, monitor and align each one of the business strategies with the organization’s expectations.

In this way, it needs to be transparent and clear to everyone, demonstrating what its roles and responsibilities, as well as its deliverables, communicate to achieve the company’s goals and strategies. This makes teams able to make better decisions, since they know the direction they need to go.

Agile governance creates value

Agile Governance will ensure that the organization’s initiatives follow values, principles, planning and execution, connecting the strategy to the product/service according to the customer’s perception of value.

This will make it less difficult for you to face the fragile, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible market world. In this way, it will also create internal mechanisms capable of adapting differently, focusing, aligning and connecting value creation.

Governance is not command and control

On the other hand, when mentioning that Agile Governance has processes or monitoring, many may associate that there is command and control. On the contrary, inspection-related artifacts are primarily to ensure that the execution of deliverables is in the direction of delivering value to stakeholders.

Therefore, it relates more to the efficiency of delivery, mirroring the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto. Therefore, it does not only address processes, functions, execution methods or tools.

Foundations of Agile Governance

In addition to the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto, Agile Governance is based on:

• Take care of the development of people and teams;
• Deliver what stakeholders have a perception of value;
• Continuously improve organizational performance and competitiveness;
• Establish stable and dynamic elements in decision making;

• Promote the empowerment and autonomy of teams;
• Encourage synergy and collaboration between teams;
• Enable monitoring of metrics and indicators assigned to each team responsible for generating value deliveries;
• Reduce time to market waste.

To accelerate the journey, it is necessary to establish standards that cooperate in maturity, within an evolutionary approach. Both in relation to the value stream and the teams. In this sense, it is common to use a platform that supports all needs. But it should be noted that it needs to meet all the necessary requirements.

To complement management in an effective way, beefor stands out among the other tools, as in addition to managing the entire value stream, it has the purpose of increasing the maturity of teams so that they are incredible.

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Improving the agility of the company is to improve the performance of the agile team. Because when there is an evolution of each component, there is also, consequently, an evolution in the value deliveries that the team is capable of making.
Discover 05 items on how to invest in developing the technical and behavioral capabilities of agile teams that generate value for the customer and organization.

01- Know how the agile team really is

First to have a starting point, find out how the team is doing:

• • • How is the work environment?
    • How is the learning progress?
    • How is the collaboration between the members?

To get this knowledge, the One-on-One (or 1:1) meeting, use this time as an opportune time to build a solid relationship with the members.

Learn how to hold 1:1 meeting: How to hold One-on-One Meeting

02- Build a better environment

In this sense, after knowing how all the members are doing, deepen bonds in the trust and transparency of all, looking for ways to express themselves.
Through Niko Niko Calendar, each team member is able to express themselves daily. Over a period, he manages to reflect on how the team is doing and implement actions for the best environment where everyone can express themselves.

Learn about Niko Niko Calendar

03- Awaken new habits and behavior patterns

Encourage a growth mindset among team members. Since no one knows everything or possesses all the skills and abilities capable of doing everything alone. Therefore, even if it is a small team, when it comes to complementing skills so that everyone can maintain the level of efficiency capable of producing the results desired by the organization.

However, if they remain stagnant and without stimulation, members end up disinterested, which directly affects productivity.

Stimulate the Mindset Triad .

04- Be clear about the purpose of the team

If organizations exist to meet a specific market need, the teams that comprise them are certainly part of this strategy. Somehow, from the individual to the sum of everyone’s work, it has a significant contribution to achieving certain goals.

That way, the direction that everyone follows needs to be the same. The more they are aligned with the objectives, the better decisions they can make about the value delivery they are responsible for.

So, it’s about aligning the purpose for successful delivery.

Understand how to build an agile team with purpose

05- Evaluate the growth journey

Ultimately, the team is equivalent to a living organism. With each delivery cycle, it learns about its results, whether positive or negative. From there, they adapt evolutionary improvements to get rid of problems and promote actions that can generate value in the customer’s perception.

After all, as time passes, challenges are overcome and new learnings emerge. Correctly evaluating this journey helps to understand how the team is becoming agile.

Conduct Maturity Assessments.

In this way, continuously develop and improve each team in the organization.

Try beefor, with it you can inspire and empower people, making your work amazing, with today’s visibility and predictability for tomorrow’s success.

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The results of agile metrics can provide analysis from different perspectives before a closer look. At the end of each Sprint, it is common to perform an analysis of the results achieved in relation to what was planned.

However, many teams reduce this moment only to a descriptive analysis of what happened. Where they inspect the superficiality of problems, or even worse, turn it into a status report moment.

Carry out the Retrospective that promotes the continuous improvement of your team .

The Retrospective is the time to observe, examine and reflect on how the team is working and promote continuous improvement. Therefore, it is an occasion to help the team explore new opportunities and solutions to achieve the best results. Therefore, for both the team and the organization, it is necessary to pay attention to agile metrics is of paramount importance.

Metric: Throughput

It is related to delivery capacity and is defined as the number of deliveries in a given period in which they met the definition of ready.

Know what to do with Throughput, master the flow and get more results .

In this aspect, it is not worth continuously seeking to increase the quantity of items that will be delivered. But rather measure, manage, adapt to increase value from what is being delivered.

Metric: Capacity

To better manage the agile team, pay attention to the number of deliveries that will be possible to complete within the Sprint period. Because, overloading or having work idle, represents waste with the consequent reduction of the generated value.

Master Capacity: How to Estimate Work Capacity in Agile Teams.

The more you know the team’s capacity, the better you will plan effectively. That way, understand how much work they can do with a focus on defining the product.

Metric: Lead Time Breakdown

Once you understand capacity and quantity, consider how long it will take to deliver new features, services or products. Soon, you will get knowledge about the duration with which deliveries are made. In addition, it is also important to pay attention to time, if it meets the needs of customers’ perception of value.

At the same time, it is necessary to consider each stage of the value stream with its respective duration. By reducing non-value added activities, you will be able to eliminate inefficiencies and waste.

Focus on what really generates value with Lead time Breakdown .

Agile Metrics and Company Results

The sum of the results of each team contributes to the company achieving its goals and results. The teams represent the gears that fit together and make what has been planned happen.

So by promoting continuous improvement and leveraging maturity, each team member will feel valued, generating engagement and commitment to results.

Empower people in your company using beefor. In addition to making these and other metrics available, the platform brings together several agile practices. With each one of them, you will achieve more than managing the entire value stream, it will also elevate the maturity of the teams so that they are amazing.

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How task automation reduces waste

Task automation reduces waste from activities that do not follow guidelines to deliver the final value perceived by the customer. The value stream is a series of stages that take place for the product or service to reach customers. Along the way, it goes through phases or departments that constantly add value until the product or service can meet all requirements. Thus, differentiating what generates value or not contributes to the reduction of waste.

First, before carrying out any type of automation, it is important to perform a detailed analysis of the flow using the following metrics : ;

• Capacity – how to estimate work capacity in agile teams Throughput – number of tasks delivered in a given period;
• Cycle Time – how to improve the delivery time of the agile team;
• Lead Time Breakdown – measure how much time passes between task creation, highlighting the duration of each phase until when the work is completed.

In this way, this verification will provide elements to provide insights into which process steps need improvement.

Benefits of Task Automation

Transforming manual tasks into automatic tasks has the following benefits:

• Increase in productivity – by not depending on the manual intervention of some component of the team, in order to concentrate on what really adds value;
• Team optimization – enhance the team ‘s time availability;
• Eliminate bottlenecks – eliminate tasks that limit you from producing more ;
• Improves productive flow – increase fluidity between stages;
• Focus on what will provide value to the customer.

However, to enjoy these benefits, it is not enough to make the improvement and that’s it. The improvement process is constant and needs to be part of the organizational culture so that the results are sustainable.

How to Automate Repetitive Tasks

For your organization to always reach new heights in terms of agile maturity, beefor launched the functionality for task automation.

This is how beefor supports the agile evolution of agile teams. It gets releases that cannot negatively interfere with value delivery, passes all the stages of value streaming, takes care of people, strategy and portfolio all in an integrated way all in one place.

Therefore, to provide greater productivity, beefor adds to its functionalities the possibility of automating repetitive tasks. Through it, without having to understand anything about programming and fully customizable, it is possible to create automations between different teams, boards and projects.

Count on beefor to perform the automation. Just access the Board menu, click on the three dots at the top of the available columns. Then “Configure Automation”.
Through this option, you can choose from the available options the one that best meets your needs.

So free your team from tasks that can be automated and achieve better and better results. Seek the agile evolution of teams and workflow aligned with the strategy with delivery of value to the business with beefor .

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Conducting the Daily Scrum constantly contributes to improving the communication and engagement of the agile team in favor of the desired results through the product vision. However, knowing exactly how this meeting is carried out is important so as not to lose the purpose for which it is intended.

Read more here: Your Daily is about to change

Several teams were used to periodically presenting the “status” of the project’s progress or deliveries to the leadership. Therefore, when making the transition to agile methods, they transfer some vices that harm the result of the meeting.

Daily Scrum with results

The Daily Scrum needs to be an effective and results meeting. In other words and in a practical way, it is where you inspect progress towards the Sprint Goal and the evolution towards the completion of the work in the Sprint Backlog. So here are 5 tips to implement today and get more benefits:

01- Respect the 15-minute timebox

According to the Scrum Guide, the maximum duration of the Daily is 15 minutes. This imposes on the team the need to be objective and direct. That is, it allows members to focus on what really matters and report progress or impediments to achieving the Sprint goal.

If the speech of a team member is not adding value, suggest that a certain issue can be resolved later, so that the focus is maintained and the timebox respected.

02- Focus on the Sprint Goal

The focus is on evaluating progress towards achieving the Sprint Goal. Each day needs to represent progress towards the Sprint goal. Therefore, in each Daily, activities are reviewed and planned for the next 24 hours.

This is where the team’s progress is inspected, limiting itself to what has been done, what will be done and its impediments.

03- Identify impediments

During the reports, impediments may arise. They appear throughout the development of activities and hinder or delay progress. It should be noted that the Daily is not to solve them, but to carry out their identification.

Then, after completion, together with the Scrum Master, take time with the members who identified the impediment to understand in more detail to help them.

04- Give visibility to activities

One of the principles of agility is to make it clear and understandable to everyone involved what is happening. In this way, transparency becomes relevant, especially in projects that involve a high degree of complexity. To achieve this, simply make available to the team, for example, the Scrum Board or kanban. Through them, the team maintains the activities and their respective status in a visual way of the progress of the sprint. By demonstrating the different stages of the value stream, it encourages communication between members and clearly conveys progress.

In this sense, hold the meeting around the task board, if you are remotely, share the virtual board with everyone to highlight the evolution towards the Sprint goal.

05- Produce an action plan for the day’s progress

At the end of each Daily, have an action plan agreed between the members for the working day. It should be possible to meet until the next day, when a new meeting will be held and the progress will be inspected again.

That way all members focus on what really needs to be accomplished.

The daily meeting is the moment in which the team articulates adaptations to be executed during the day and to be able to advance towards the Sprint goal.

With beefor you can register the Daily, make action plans and check the history.
This provides greater transparency for the team and focus on what is most important.

Get to know today what it’s like to have the beefor experience and bring more agility to your team! And you don’t need a credit card ?

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If you liked this article, you may also be interested in these that describe the other Scrum meetings:

• Sprint Review: in addition to the demonstration of what was done ;
• Retrospective: making the continuous improvement of your team ;
• Sprint Planning – result and value for the organization ;

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CFD chart: understand and improve the value stream

CFD Chart – Cumulative Flow Diagram – translating to Portuguese cumulative flow diagram, are stacked area charts that show the number of items in each phase of the value stream.

In other words, CFD Chart is formed through the horizontal axis of the timeline and in the vertical the amount of work items presented cumulatively. In other words, it represents the “picture” of the value stream on a given day, indicating the amount present at each specific stage.

In this way, the CFD Chart is able to demonstrate answers to, for example, these questions:

• 01- Is the team making deliveries continuously?
• 02- Is there a bottleneck at any point in the flow?
• 03- Is the amount of completed items increasing?
• 04- Does the delivery cadence follow a sustainable pace?

Understanding the CFD Chart

The greater the distance between the step lines, the more items are present at the time of measurement in the process part. Consequently, if it is related to the phase of unfinished items, the number of work in progress will be high, that is, the Work in Process (WiP). Hence the importance of having clear limit policies and identifying the break-even point without creating bottlenecks and achieving continuous delivery.

So, as you begin to understand reading the CFD Chart and how items behave within each step of the value stream, you can ask the right questions to correlate with other metrics or data and make improvements that can generate value.

Through experience using the beefor platform will be able to analyze flow metrics. Also, use the data to implement continuous improvements aimed at stabilizing the product/service value stream.

Try it right now, it’s free and you don’t need a credit card

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The improvement is in the details

Finally, analyzing the result data of each stage of the value stream from various perspectives allows for a holistic view of the variables that need to be optimized. Articles in this series of metrics that might interest you:

• throughput ;
• CycleTime ;
• Capacity ;
• Lead Time Breakdown .

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Cycle Time measures how long it takes for a demand from the beginning of development to go through all stages of the flow to completion. The formula to calculate it for each item is quite simple:

Cycle Time = End Time – Start Time

The time being calculated in hours or days, according to what makes sense in the context applied .
According to the customer’s view, what matters is Lead Time, because through it it is possible to measure the total time it takes for the work to go through the value stream, starting at the moment it is requested until its completion/delivery. In turn, the Cycle Time represents the time the team needs to develop the item.

beefor measures Cycle Time

beefor brings as one of the main indicators of agility the Cycle Time metric that is automatically measured from the frames that the team uses for its workflow. In this way, it is easy to visualize the average lifetime of the demands performed by the team.

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How to Improve Cycle Time

Understanding how the Cycle Time result is behaving is the first step to knowing how effective the execution phase is. Therefore, the agile team must observe, examine and reflect on how it is working based on the results of this metric and promote actions aimed at continuous improvement in the meeting of Retrospective.

Also know about: Leadtime Breakdown , OKRs and Continuous Improvement .

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Held at the end of the Sprint, the Retrospective is the time to observe, examine and reflect on how the team is working and promote continuous improvement. Following the specific time box, what impacted the flow of deliveries, practices, people, communication, environment, artifacts, tools and so on will be identified. For this, the following steps are necessary:

1. Set the Retrospective Focus

An unfocused retrospective equals a meeting without an agenda. A lot will be talked about, discussed and the action with an effective result will be none. You will spend team time doing fun activities, but the main objective will not be achieved. Defining focus before carrying it out and sharing it among the participants allows everyone to prepare with the examples, evidence and data.

2. Select activity

Basically, the role of the activity is to create a playful and relaxed environment to facilitate the contribution and participation of everyone. The goal is to create and assemble evolutionary improvement insights. These activities may vary depending on the focus chosen for the Retrospective.

3. Collect evidence and data

Once there is a determined time box and everyone is aligned with the Retrospective’s focus, collecting evidence and data in advance helps to avoid “guessing”. For example: by using metrics to measure quality, productivity, adherence to the agile method, performance, value creation in the customer’s perception and other perspectives, it is possible to enable the team to find ways to identify improvement actions.

4. Prepare structure

It is necessary to define the place, time, facilitator of the activity, necessary resources, call of participants and everything else that is necessary to obtain the desired result of the meeting.

5. Carry out the Retrospective

Establish an environment of trust. In this way, everyone can be sure to express themselves without fear of any inconvenience. Through Retrospective, it is possible to search for data and evidence that will make it easier to transparently inspect what has been identified. Capture insights with insights into what could be improved. And then, decide what will be put in place to keep up with the evolution.

beefor has, in addition to alerts for agile ceremonies, metrics and other features that enable the expansion of your team’s capacity in the search for continuous improvement.

Do you want to get the agile evolution of teams and workflow with strategy in delivering value to the business? Request your free access right now!

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Image Credits:

Cover photo developed by pch.vector .

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The main result that is aimed at holding the daily meeting throughout the entire Sprint is to inspect the progress against the Sprint objective, so that if necessary, adapt the Sprint Backlog.

The Daily Scrum has a 15 minute duration limit, where each developer member describes how the progress was in a clear, transparent and objective way.
It’s about alignment to create advancement plan for the day and not status .

Daily on beefor

On the beefor platform, Daily is considered as the team’s fuel to drive them forward. When configuring it, indicating the time, it also starts to score, demonstrating an increase in the maturity of the application of agility.

By carrying out it with constancy, beefor through metrics demonstrates the increased maturity of the team.

On the other hand, the team maintains the pace of development on the right path, delivering valued deliveries.

How to perform the perfect Daily

To realize the perfect Daily it is important that all members of the development team participate and collaborate to re-plan and make decisions, not to solve problems.

In 15 minutes, efforts are focused on solving everything that involves the path towards the sprint goal and managing to generate the expected business value. That’s what’s at stake!

By checking progress toward the Sprint Goal and adjusting its plan accordingly, it’s up to the team to articulate adaptations to be carried out throughout the day.

With a shared vision of what needs to be done, the team is now committed to completing its work before the next meeting.

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Organizations are continually taking adaptive actions so that the customer experience is the best and incredible possible. When starting this constant journey for improvement, it will demand from the teams the creation of mechanisms that respond to this need, revolutionaryly establishing increasingly better levels of deliveries.

This means that each sprint is never equal to the other, both in terms of the value generated in the customer’s perception and for the team. That’s why it’s necessary to know:

• How to measure the improvements offered by agility;
• How much does it deliver through Throughput;
• How long to deliver by Leadtime.

Measuring the time from the beginning of demand to delivery of the product/service to the customer in a total way hides variations in the value stream. As this time span is large and there are several steps to reach the end, it is essential to know which stages of the flow take longer, their restrictions and also where there are bottlenecks or impediments.

Leadtime Breakdown

It is a measure of how much time passes between task creation, highlighting the duration of each phase until the work is completed. With this, it is possible to assess how much time each item took to reach the definition of ready for that phase and be able to move on to the next one. You can start with Lead Time, but you need to “slice” it according to the duration of each step of the process.

The visualization can be done through the accumulated bar graph of each phase, where on the horizontal axis the work items and on the vertical it shows the duration time.

By making it transparent to the team’s inspection, you will find baselines and benchmarks for each type of work item. These more detailed historical references can support more accurate estimates as well as possible improvements.

Improving Leadtime Breakdown

By constantly analyzing what is going through or what has already gone through the flow, it allows you to identify problems such as:

• Waits;
• Stage duration variations;
• Restrictions;
• Bottlenecks etc.

The more visible to the team the proportion of each step, the easier it will be to propose improvement actions. The intention is for the item to advance in a constant and predictable manner and, according to each scenario, improvement actions can be taken such as:

• Limit WIP- limit the amount of running items;
• Synchronize queues – act where items have restrictions or bottlenecks in your process;
• Reduce waits;
• Define upper and lower limits to act on the time variations of each step;

It is possible to manage the portfolio with beefor, the platform provides better synchronization between the end and beginning of each stage, giving more fluidity and improving the leadtime of your product/service.

Try it today, it’s free and you don’t need to register a credit card ?

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Also know about: Capacity, Sprint Planning and Sprint Review.

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