Organizations achieving Agile at scale can deliver quickly against larger programs, initiatives, or strategies. Agile Program Management is integral to this, providing a better, more Agile way of managing the work of interrelated teams. Here are three short case studies describing how different organizations are scaling Agile using Agile Program Management – and reaping the benefits. Some are reconciling and combining their traditional project portfolio management (PPM) practices with Lean-Agile techniques.
Scaling Agile to Accelerate Program Delivery
A multinational financial institution needed to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions and improve performance. Stuck in a traditional style of work, the company overcommitted to requests and often failed to deliver on time. An internal audit team consisting of Certified Scrum Masters and Certified Scrum Product Owners chose Planview AgilePlace to scale their Agile teams and gain visibility across business units. They now use customizable Kanban boards for managing audits, portfolio planning, analytics projects, and overall teamwork. Their cadence is two-week iterative cycles to speed delivery. With visibility into team boards and associated work, managers and leaders can map patterns and behaviors to learn, experiment, improve accountability, find efficiencies, and accelerate program delivery.
Advancing Agile at Scale and Better Teams of Teams Management
A major retail manufacturer had a highly mature Agile organization using elements of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) across the business. However, the IT group lacked a program-level view of work across teams of teams and had to access multiple systems to obtain information. This delayed getting critical data to the business for strategic decision-making. The team chose Planview AgilePlace and connected the cross-team work – from Planview AgilePlace, Atlassian Jira, and Microsoft Azure DevOps – into program-level boards.
They now have real-time visibility at the portfolio level, enhancing dependency management while advancing Agile at scale. Collaboration across teams of teams has improved as well, as they leverage enterprise Kanban to plan and manage the backlog of work, work in progress (WIP), and flow. Team members choose their own technology solution to deliver work.
Boosting Business Agility & the Strategy to Delivery Process
An insurance and financial services company needed to accelerate the strategy to delivery process and advance Agile transformation initiatives. The IT team implemented Planview Portfolios and Planview AgilePlace to support scaled Agile as well as the entire portfolio management process from demand management and time tracking to project delivery.
They now use continuous planning to better react to customer needs. The group is driving better collaboration among teams, improving capacity planning and resource utilization, and reducing the costs of IT delivery. The process improvements have freed up 15 minutes a week per associate – totaling 75,000 hours per year – enabling each to focus on more strategic work. By running actuals weekly instead of monthly, the team gets faster feedback and better data. This creates the business agility to pivot much sooner.
For a short introductory on Agile Program Management, check out our in-depth guide here: What is Agile Program Management.
Planview’s Agile Program Management Solution Bundles give your Agile teams a way to visualize, plan, coordinate, and deliver your organization’s biggest initiatives quickly, effectively, and with clear visibility into the value delivered. To learn more, read our Agile Program Management data sheet.
![Agile Program Management: How to Increase Agile Scaling Success [Video]](https://blog.planview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Apm-video.gif)
