Agile Governance
How do you design agile governance to grow high performing teams?
Governance is an oversight role intended to provide guidance and support for teams doing work that is outside normal operational management responsibilities. They approve funding for an initiative, ensure the scope and outcomes are aligned strategically and make decisions within their delegated authority. Governance is accountable for ensuring an initiative is being managed in a responsible manner and the risk profile is within acceptable tolerances for the type of work.
In recent times working practices have shifted to using agile approaches as organisations seek improved outcomes for their customers, their people and the organisation. This white paper explores the changing role of governance in supporting the successful delivery of agile initiatives. It covers:
Why agile governance is important and the key insights it needs.
3V agile performance framework’s controls that provide these insights.
Roles & Responsibilities in launching and supporting 3V framework.
Getting started with powerful agile governance questions.
Next steps and identifying your initial metrics.
Why Agile Governance?
As organisations become more responsive to the rapid pace of change and the ask to do more with less they are also recognising they need for greater customer focus and sustainable performance improvement. Agile work practices are deliberately designed to address these needs. They enable early delivery of products and services to real customers at a pace that staff can maintain. Agile working practices are accelerating performance expectations and changing the risk profiles of initiatives. Governance practices are evolving to leverage the important insights provided by agile approaches, namely; radical progress transparency, early risk mitigation, and agile decision making.
Radical Progress Transparency
A regular delivery cycle is at the core of radical progress transparency. Agile teams break up their work so they can regularly deliver slices of the working product for customers to use and provide real feedback. When mapped against the product roadmap, a regular delivery cycle provides governance with real time performance data on team progress, customer satisfaction, and business outcomes. Governance can also experience progress first hand at the regular product showcase and collaboratively engage with their agile teams to understand how governance can better support them.
In the agile world Governance no longer has to rely on subjective activity based milestones and ad hoc reporting narrative to guess at likely progress. Agile ways of working provide transparent progress data based on incremental product delivery, encouraging automated metrics reporting and impact based actions.
Early Risk Mitigation
A regular delivery cycle significantly reduces the risk profile of an initiative. Each delivery cycle is like a mini project and acts as a risk mitigation function. Early agile delivery cycles mitigate the risk of incorrect assumptions about the product design, gaps in the product fit with the customers or stakeholders, and highlight improvements that would immediately benefit the agile team's ways of working.
Agile ways of working are designed to address and minimise the impact of risk by surfacing issues early in the delivery life cycle. With traditional ways of working many of these risks would be ongoing, consume significant monitoring effort and likely endure until near the end of the initiative when there is little or no time to address them. Agile Governance redefines the set of controls required to proactively manage the risk profile of an agile initiative while still leveraging traditional governance metrics such as; time, cost, scope etc.
Agile Decision Making
Delegated financial authority (DFA) is an organisational control that creates accountability within the governance group and ensures investors money is spent appropriately. Traditionally governance has had to rely on time consuming reporting, formal sign offs and interim process stage gates to fulfil this accountability. This is in conflict with the need of agile teams for the fast flow of safe decisions.
Agile decision making addresses this conflict by empowering teams to make decisions as they go. However, It is crucial to strike a responsible balance between the team's decision making autonomy and respect for the accountability governance still holds for those decisions. Agile teams respect their autonomy through transparent prioritisation of future work and a regular delivery cycle to make visible their past decisions. Agile decision making aligns with the agile principles where teams are empowered to make decisions that maximise value and minimise waste.
3V Agile Performance Framework
3V Agile Performance Framework is designed to provide real time insights into the current performance and long term success of an agile initiative. It relies on radical progress transparency and early risk mitigation to provide governance with the controls to safely empower agile decision making within their agile teams.
Value, Velocity and Vitality (3V) provide a set of complementary success dimensions.
3V guides agile governance in selecting and monitoring controls that provide balanced feedback on an initiatives success. They are at the core of the 3V Agile Performance framework:
Value - focusing on what is important.
Velocity - playing the game at pace.
Vitality - ensuring we stay the distance.
Modern digital initiatives use the performance lenses of Human Centred Design (HCD) to maximise successful outcomes. We have leveraged aspects of the lenses for performance insights into Organisation Viability, Product Desirability and Team Feasibility.
Viability - meeting the Organisations operational and strategic expectations.
Desirability - empathising with the real Product needs of customers and staff.
Feasibility - establishing the Team environment and technology needed to succeed.
Agile Performance Controls
Overlaying 3V success dimensions with the performance lenses of HCD, we created a set of agile performance controls guided by agile performance principles. These controls provide a systematic framework within which governance can begin to safely delegate agile decision making and monitor team performance. This has the potential to occur in near real-time compared to traditional governance monitoring.
Roles & Responsibilities
Governance prioritises the Performance Measures that are important based on the risk profile of their initiative and organisation. Not all the performance measures are expected to be used all the time. Some are leading indicators and more useful to focus on at the start of the agile initiative, e.g. Team Capability.
Agile Teams identify and instrument quantitative metrics from their agile tracking repository to provide the data to report on the selected performance measures. The challenge with metrics is ensuring they are unobtrusive, easily collected and encourage positive behaviour, i.e. cannot be negatively gamed.
Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) owns the performance framework as it needs to feed efficiently into consolidated reporting. They will provide the training and support for new governance groups. They also collect the feedback and adapt the framework to suit the governance needs of both new and mature agile initiatives.
Performance Coaches use the framework to focus their coaching plans on supporting teams needing help to improve performance measure metrics. The impact of the coaching plans can be objectively assessed using the improvement in the metric data for the target performance measure.
Getting Started
The performance controls are based on agile performance principles and extended with powerful but simple agile governance questions. To get started we need to establish a Working Agreement between Governance and their Agile Team, including prioritisation of the performance controls to reflect governance needs and the early life cycle stage of the initiative. Governance priorities guide agile team activity and performance reporting.
A Governance Question has been crafted for each Performance Control to guide the initial one page RAG style manual performance reporting. We recommend starting with a simple “Yes / Yes BUT … / No” answer format to make adoption easier.
YES and the Agile Team is encouraged to call out something worth celebrating.
Yes, BUT… the Agile Team is experiencing an issue but has an action plan to get back to green within an agreed reporting time frame.
NO the Agile Team is blocked by an issue and needs Governance intervention to get back to green.
Use existing anecdotal or qualitative data as the basis for the report answer and add a sound byte from the team retrospectives to support the answer. Behind this one page performance summary will be the current visuals and narrative previously used to support performance, progress and risk reporting. This minimises the initial change until leaders are confident to transition to more empowered agile decision making.
Next Steps - Metrics, Visuals & Dashboard
Once comfortable with this style of manual agile governance reporting, the next step is to work with the agile team to identify appropriate metrics that can be automated to provide objective performance scoring. Start small and use the automation to generate appropriate supporting visuals that track performance and risk over time. Ultimately this has the potential to become or feed a realtime dashboard. Remember, start small and gather insights, not just data.
Summary
3V Agile Performance Framework brings together Governance and Delivery using agile controls to collaboratively define and monitor performance.
Based on agile performance principles and human centred design performance lens.
Extended with powerful agile Governance Questions to focus delivery and reporting.
Start with familiar manual RAG reporting and introduce automated metrics based scoring.
Leverage the EPMO and Coaches to guide and support this agile performance journey.
Version 5.5 - updated on 26 March 2024
I would love to talk more - please feel free to get in touch via LinkedIn or agilePete@agilecolab.com.
