Dan’s presentation was one of the top rated sessions. He shared his top learnings building a continuous improvement program across 240 teams. He highlighted his learnings and spoke to the reality that continuous improvement means more than a team sitting in a room for a team retro…it’s a complex and delicate ecosystem that requires intentional focus to pull it all together.
Dan’s presentation and slides can be found here.
Background
- One single company, 2 large business units, 240 agile teams
- Multiple scaling frameworks
- Seeking to find ways to connect the teams with their customer/s & with leadership, engage them as true service teams
Challenges
- No clear vision or the target state – teams were unclear of the desired target state
- Leadership was disengaged from the teams, unclear on how to support them & relied on traditional management practices
- No consistent or meaningful metrics – there was significant variance in tooling and inconsistent process, making organic and quantifiable metrics difficult to capture and gain insights from
- Little to no structure for improvement – newly formed agile CoE & the enterprise had limited change management plans alongside inconsistent metrics
Actions Taken
- Pilot (30+ teams)
- Defined a targeted vision
- Created an agile maturity model
- Published an agile playbook
- Developed a metrics dashboard at the team & program level
- Measured with consistency
- Set-up a quarterly cadence for TeamHealth Retrospectives
Learnings & Results
- Metrics and data was not enough
- Quarterly cadence solidified maturity progress
- Focus on managing growth items allowed teams the ability to escalate items just-in-time
- Impediments started to move through the system with resolution
- Growth Portal provided the opportunity to gain and share ideas
- Engagement increased within both teams and leadership
- Valuable insights were gained for future investment planning & gaps that needed to be filled
- Ongoing issues & problem were finally being resolved and had a place to go for resolution
- Leaders set an example, demo’d their results (at both the program & portfolio level)
- Outcome-based metrics dashboard allowed focus on speed, stability, quality & satisfaction
While they are still learning how to best prioritize and focus on the delivery of outcomes with speed, today, the continuous improvement system consists of a structured approach, engaged leadership, a changed culture & meaningful metrics….not just empty words.
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