First, let’s review the issue at hand from the perspective of technology leaders. Software development has, over the past decade or more, become the fastest-growing and largest expense line item in virtually every industry. The professional management of software development is a relatively new field, continuously evolving as software development itself has continuously evolved. Many technology leaders began as developers and have grown into leadership roles as they’ve progressed in their careers.

Part of the issue is that the way software developers have been taught to measure their own productivity does not align with the way the business measures the value of their work. Agile/DevOps metrics are aimed to optimize how efficiently a development team operates, but don’t necessarily speak to whether the outputs are aligned with the business’ strategic goals. And while such operational and activity metrics measure defined development deliverables, they fail to take into account the time spent on the front-end or back-end of the software development lifecycle, such as business approvals, testing, release etc, which are often where the most time is spent in the software development lifecycle 

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This integration is intended to bring together the UiPath Business Automation Platform with Planview’s VSM solution Planview Tasktop Hub. This combination allows teams to enhance their automation of repetitive tasks, minimize manual mistakes, and speed up delivery of products.

Planview Tasktop Hub offers CIOs and transformation leaders the ability to keep track of value flow and business outcomes by combining efficient toolchains with a tech stack that improves productivity, reduces bottlenecks, improves time-to-market, and cuts down on lost revenue.

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Only 8% of respondents stated that they have operationalized the shift from project to product, meaning that 92% have yet to realize or capture the full value of a product operating model at scale. However, 63% reported that they are in the exploratory phase and 29% said they are expanding on earlier experiments.

It was also found that, until a mature product model is in place, enterprises spend 70% of their delivery capacity on defect remediation and waste 40% of their efforts due to overload and bottlenecks.

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“As your organization starts to grow, you’re trying to accomplish so much more. So how do you do that? It’s not just by adding more Agile teams across the business. It’s also not just about speed or delivery velocity. We’ve learned along the way that it’s about creating a shared vision across the business and building the right things,” said Brook Appelbaum, director of Product Marketing at portfolio management and work management company Planview.

Organizations who have seen success at the team level often make the mistake of adding more Agile project teams to solve problemsw. Sure, they end up with a bunch of fast-moving teams, but those teams are operating in silos, without the necessary coordination and connection. “They are not really realizing the true benefits of Agile,” Appelbaum explained.

 To be successful at scale, organizations have to take the learnings of their Agile teams and apply them at scale: incorporating feedback loops, iterating and coordinating work across a much more complex structure – and key to all of this is a shared vision. By connecting teams and enabling them to see how their work fits into the bigger picture, Appelbaum believes organizations can improve their ability to plan, coordinate, improve their time to market, and gain a host of other Agile benefits.

“As you start to grow, some of the building blocks of Agile – transparency, collaboration, continuous improvement — become so much more important because you have to be really thoughtful about how you engage, explain, coordinate, share, and iterate to create value at every turn,” she said.

Calculating your Agile ROI

In an effort to help organizations better understand their Agile efforts at scale, Planview recently released the Agile Transformation ROI Calculator. The calculator aims to shine a light on Agile’s art of the possible. It is designed as a way to facilitate hard conversations around Agile transformation successes and failures, and provides organizations with a way to look at cost optimization, reducing time to market, and improving employee job satisfaction and productivity.

 “Often when an Agile Transformation isn’t going as expected, it’s due to reasons that are harder to measure: cultural mismatches, ‘performative’ Agile or lack of executive commitment,” said Appelbaum. “The ROI calculator provides critical information that shines a light on some of these challenges, and provides real metrics that can help organizations carve a path forward to success.” 

The ROI calculator highlights metrics that include how long it takes to get a major initiative or epic to completion, and if those times can be improved. It sheds light on whether teams are working in isolation or if they’re able to communicate, coordinate, plan and work together as a cross-functional group of teams. 

Additionally, it estimates job satisfaction and reduced employee turnover for Agile team members that are able to utilize their favorite Agile team tools. For example, different teams like to work with different tools, Planview provides integration capabilities so teams can still work within their existing processes or tools of choice without disrupting their workflow or productivity. As a result, organizations can get that consolidated view of what’s going on across the business, while keeping their key developer talent happy.

However, Appelbaum also noted that, “Organizations must begin to identify and address some of the challenges that are preventing them from realizing true success with Agile at scale, whether cultural, procedural, or even technical: for example, are the products you’re using limiting your ability to scale? It’s paramount to figure out how to connect [teams], how to get them to plan together, synchronize and collaborate together because that’s really what it’s all about, being able to take these big, important, complex initiatives and decompose them into bite-size chunks of incremental value delivery.”

Planview plans to bolster the calculator in the future. “One of the things we hesitate to talk about is Agile risk and failure, but it does happen…there is still a level of failure in every type of project and we are looking to add some metrics around those mis-steps as well,” said Appelbaum.

The calculator was designed as a way of facilitating a conversation within the organization about their current and future Agile successes. If you’d like to learn more about Planview’s Agile ROI calculator or Planview’s Agile solutions visit their website.

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This is according to a study from work management solution provider Planview: “The State of Strategy Execution: Embracing Uncertainty to Adapt at Speed,” which surveyed 1000 global business professionals. 

The report broke down companies into three categories: the Laggards who are slower to respond to change, the Challengers who move forward in starts and stops, and the Leaders who are the fastest organizations.   

According to the report, Leaders are three times as likely than Challenges to exceed financial targets, three times as likely to exceed strategic objectives, and two times as likely to exceed delivery of innovative products and services. 

In order to see the benefits that these Leaders are experiencing, companies will need to adopt some of the same strategies. According to the report, there are five practices that most Leaders are following that any company can adopt: 

1. Prioritize speed in decision making
2. Implement technology that delivers faster insights from data
3. Utilize short-interval planning cycles for strategies, funding, and operating plans
4. Improve the prioritization process to align resources with the most important work
5. Utilize Lean and Agile practices

“Reducing the gap between strategy and execution becomes even more important as the pace of external disruption increases, and this report provides a clear blueprint about how leading companies are doing exactly that,” said Patrick Tickle, chief product officer at Planview. “We found that the most successful companies are following a similar recipe for success. They are building speed into their business operations to adjust to constant change. They have shorter, more adaptable planning cycles that enable them to respond to shifts in real-time. They remove internal barriers that stand in the way of adaptability. They resist the lure of the status quo. And they use technology and agile processes to build speed and quality into the way they execute on strategy.”

According to Planview, the Leaders are also continuing to invest in improving speed. The three most tangible benefits of accelerating their response to change include improved customer satisfaction; employee satisfaction, retention, and recruiting; and execution efficiency and repeatability. 

The biggest negatives of not being able to adapt to change include decline in growth (43%), lost opportunities to competitors (43%), decreased customer retention (38%), and major loss of profit (38%). 

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