Imagine one of your Agile teams is six months deep into a strategic digital initiative when they realize the solution isn’t working. Maybe it isn’t meeting customer requirements, or there is insufficient visibility into the project to specify where things are going off track.
That’s not an uncommon scenario, according to The Agile Advantage study, in which 42% of Agile practitioners cited “unclear project requirements or scope changes” as top reasons for rework. A lack of visibility and clarity can cause teams to fall back to Waterfall approaches rather than engaging in the Agile methods your organization has in place.
Not only that, but a lack of visibility into successful practices of other teams makes it difficult to replicate those practices across your Agile groups.
Lucid Software’s new Agile Accelerator is designed to help organizations scale Agile practices by sharing standardized, yet flexible ways of working. It surfaces qualitative insights about team confidence and health, and helps teams to respond to change with agility by performing data-driven scenario planning.
Product, engineering, and portfolio manager leaders can use the Agile Accelerator to speed up and scale Agile practices, product road-mapping, and big-room planning.
Why acceleration and agility go hand-in-hand
The business depends on innovation for competitive advantage. That puts pressure on development operations (devops) and engineering teams to speed up processes like writing code, development, and deployment.
However, accelerating innovation isn’t just about increased productivity and faster processes. For example, if your teams are more aligned and can foresee roadblocks, dependencies, and issues earlier, then they can make strategic decisions and take swift action.
Make Agile teams even more agile
Lucid Software helps organizations better scale Agile practices to improve team performance, as well as increase visibility for teams and leaders with the Agile Accelerator. Its capabilities include:
Scalability for best practices and resources: Many organizations struggle to ensure that all teams have access to a set of the latest and most successful processes and templates, especially as they grow to 50, 100, 200, or more teams. Having that many groups also makes it difficult for Scrum Masters or Agile coaches to gain visibility into progress and help influence collaboration.
With the Agile Accelerator, team leaders can automatically create team hubs and blueprints—which are a set of templates—to quickly share proven ways of working. Blueprints speed up work by providing teams with a starting point to conduct their sprint, big-room planning, or new product discovery. They also have the ability to customize templates as they see fit, making it easier to follow processes without feeling restricted to doing things a certain way.
Collect and surface qualitative insights: Agile leaders often have quantitative datapoints to meet, such as a percentage rate for project completion. Yet, what is the team’s confidence level that they’ll actually get there—and on time?
When team leaders deploy a blueprint with the Agile Accelerator, they can include confidence determinants, sentiment check-ins, as well as potential project risks and blockers. These datapoints are then integrated into an insights dashboard, allowing leaders and their teams to review and drill into the most critical information to answer questions and deepen collaboration.
Make better decisions with scenario planning: Agile leaders need to quickly make data-driven decisions on staffing and scope adjustments while ensuring accurate planning and avoiding potential errors.
With the Agile Accelerator, team leaders can test data-backed scenarios safely and visualize impact before making permanent changes. For example, by pausing the data sync between Lucid and Jira or ADO, they can work through a scenario without changing data in their system of record. They can also see how changes in scope and assignments affect the scenario by adding a team’s capacity to a dynamic table.
Take the next step to true agility
By enhancing visibility, surfacing critical insights, and enabling data-driven decision-making, the Agile Accelerator empowers teams to scale Agile practices effectively—ensuring alignment, adaptability, and transparency. Take the fast track to transformation. Learn more about the Lucid Software Agile Accelerator here.
