Agile Work
Management &
Cross-functional Teams

Score: 100-80

Agile Work Management is a proven method encompassing a series of tools, processes and techniques to manage prioritization, delivery and value realization in areas with high levels of complexity and change. It is part of a Digital Product Execution Ready triad that also includes DevOps and Cloud.

Done right, Agile excludes dogmatic, big-bang implementations and supports incremental MVP deployments and rapid iteration. Agile is about discipline and consistency at scale to achieve transparency and velocity.

There are tools in place to support on-demand transparency, collaboration and onboarding/continuous learning systems to ensure new staff and old skills are refreshed.

Section Scoring

100 - 80 PTS

You have cross-functionally aligned Agile teams and work management processes driven by outcomes and customer or business impact. Your Agile transition did not take an all-or-nothing approach across IT but focused on products where iteration and rapid response to feedback drives revenue or profit. The result is some critical mass of high-performing, small teams, each with a clear mission that they can deliver end to end. Trust and two-way transparency exist between business and IT at all levels. The business supports product owners as the proxy voice for their customers and strategic priorities.

Digital Execution Ready

100 - 80 PTS

You create Agile teams for highly variable and/or complex work, but existing decisions or traditional project-based annual funding cycles stand in the way of incubating and iterating. Agile teams may be aligned to projects rather than products, and it may be difficult for teams to build an effective working rhythm. Product vision, roadmap and user journeys are available but may not be broadly understood by delivery teams. Therefore, delivery teams cannot make the transition from milestone management to value/impact-driven development. The business may not see an optimal value-to-investment ratio. These gaps are viewed as startup issues rather than fatal flaws. IT and business leaders have an aligned focus or use tools like the Digital Ready Workbook to refine investments required to accelerate Agility.

Digital in Process

80-60 PTS

Your IT organization either sees Agile as a bottom-up/team-level tactic or an all-or-nothing approach. Bottom-up direction allowed each team to determine scrum team size, Agile artifacts/tools and/or sprint durations. On the opposite side of the spectrum, heavy focus on process — aka Agile artifacts and practices — obliterated understanding of outcomes or impact. The result is the business sees IT’s Agile transition as driving more chaos and less effective execution. Delivery teams are seen as order-takers rather than partners in product development decision-making, much less technology product strategy.

Digital Gaps

60-0 PTS

Questions & Answers

The question-and-answer section outlines why the questions are important, how they are weighted, and what best practice looks like.

What is the state of Agile adoption?

Why we ask this:

Your approach to adopting Agile determines your success. IT organizations typically drive Agile adoption in two ways:

A top-down, all-encompassing approach where Agile becomes a form of dogma to be applied across the organization; or
A bottom-up, build-your-own-method approach, which does not support the discipline necessary for real-time transparency or consistency at scale.

Because Agile adoption may impact OpEx/CapEx funding models and require new workflows, accountability and tools, clients see accelerated results when they invest in adoption where it is needed before applying broadly.

How we weighed this question:

Agile adoption is the second most important factor in measuring a digitally ready engineering organization.

What best looks like:
The Agile adoption roadmap invests in cross-functional Agile teams with high variability or other complexity that would benefit from an iterative approach. The early teams build Agile discipline with an eye on how those emerging practices will scale. They do not just think at a team execution level. Early adopters become coaches/mentors to other teams, so that practice depth and consistency permeate naturally across the organization.

Next Steps:

If you are not seeing business result from Agile transformation, consider getting IT to shake up their approach. It may mean decoupling digital product teams from traditional IT operations and accountability. It may mean setting up incubators in specific areas. You are fundamentally transforming work, don’t expect speed.
Measure impact by metrics like accelerated time to market, not on the practice itself.

How is Agile transformation measured?

Why we ask this:

Organizations often implement Agile as another management flavor or overlay on top of existing work management processes. Digitally capable organizations use Agile as a tool to enable better alignment, transparency and iteration based on business and customer needs rather than as an end goal.

How we weighed this question:

The success and relevance of Agile transformation are based on how it delivers business outcomes, not how dogmatically the methodology is applied.

What best looks like:

IT and business are aligned on how to use Agile work management to support target revenue or profit outcomes. They use retrospectives or other mechanisms to adjust and iterate Agile disciplines. Agile is viewed as a continuous improvement engine. Adoption is evaluated based on the impact on customer experience, top-line growth, product delivery velocity, quality and overall business/engineering engagement, satisfaction and ownership.

Next Steps:

If you are not getting results from Agile, whiteboard with the CIO organization on how to reframe metrics and targets for business impact over process/methodology attainment.
Focus enablement and investment on a short list of products where iterative development matters. Using a start small, then scale approach, it may be necessary to separate out teams so that you can build the right roles, drive the right discipline and practices, and demonstrate delivery effectiveness.

Select the metric that best describes how IT measures product delivery success.

Why we ask this:

Your IT organization's KPIs need to be business outcome-oriented, not IT operations-aligned. Digital ready organizations manage effort based on maximizing return rather than a team-level adoption or practice adherence.

How we weighed this question:

Primary measures show maturity in sustainably growing Agile adoption in a way that achieves business results.

What best looks like:

Digitally capable organizations use time-to-value and value-to-investment as key outcomes for development priorities. To achieve targets, there are mature workflows and tools to facilitate business/IT engagement in strategy and processes that enable development or listening posts with actual customers. Teams can forecast commitments aligned with priorities and are held accountable to value/outcomes produced rather than a feature count, spend or milestone achieved.

Next Steps:

Make sure you have established the right KPIs to drive the change you want. For financial institutions in transition, defining time-to-market targets and then investing in near-team actions to reduce development cycle time can be more easily translatable to legacy IT organizations than value.

Which statement best reflects your opinion of how the bank has evolved from Waterfall or hierarchical decisions and prioritization to supporting self-discipline and self-regulation with engineering execution?

Why we ask this:

Agile works when teams have empowerment. However, most traditional enterprises have many layers of approval or governance. They also lack the tools, Agile practices, or management discipline to enable empowerment where it matters.

How we weighed this question:

Your impression or belief in how effectively execution teams work without external oversight is an indicator of how far Agile principles may be adopted in the enterprise.

What best looks like:

Leading financial services companies use Agile as a framework, not a management overlay or team implementation. As such, they focus on building the people, processes, and systems to effectively enable engineering execution, self-discipline, and regulation within the context of business strategy. The Agile transition is designed to strengthen alignment and customer-centricity that will provide better results for the company in the short, medium, and long term.

Next Steps:

Reality check Agile outcomes (ex., velocity that helps attain revenue targets more quickly) that support your strategy over Agile implementation (ex., number of teams adopting).
Evaluate what tools, governance, or workflows support on-demand transparency to delivery against those outcomes.
Whiteboard product execution decisions into reversible and irreversible decisions. Highlight which reversible decisions are currently made by external stakeholders and could be made by execution.
Define what stepping stones might look like for execution to earn greater self-regulation and decision-making.

Are rapid release cycles and the ability to ingest customer inputs and iterate considered a competitive advantage for digital strategy?

Why we ask this:

We get enamored with the idea of velocity and iterative development. Sometimes it makes sense to pause to consider market or business dynamics and determine whether or how impactful velocity and iteration are. Depending on your business position, competitive threat, and/or the market dynamic, including regulatory or compliance, Agile might be inefficient or counterproductive.

How we weighed this question:

This is a fit-for-purpose question. Adoption of Agile should be in context of a business need for experimentation and small, rapid releases.

What best looks like:

We have a north star but are entering new territory with digital. The enterprise loses revenue because of product feature delays and/or is experimenting with new offerings or new technologies. Defining Minimum Viable Product, incubating, and iterating is critical for some of our digital products, and we have applied Agile where it matters.

Next Steps:

Work with your CIO or Agile transformation leader to rationalize Agile adoption and investment where velocity and iteration matter.

Resources

For more detail, check out BreakFree’s point of view on Agile Work Management and Cross-functional teams.

Relevant Blog Posts:

Communicate: It’s Simple, It’s Not Always Easy

Continuous Retrospect

Is Your Team Cross-Functional or Multi-Functional?

Effective Application of Scrum Techniques and Tools

Swap Deadlines for Do-Lines

Workbook Sections

Agile Work Management & Cross-functional Teams

Section Scoring

Questions & Answers

Resources

Agile Work
Management &
Cross-functional Teams