The Problem

The CFO of our customer wanted to capture the costs of engineering new products and product maintenance. When investors evaluate the profitability and valuation of SaaS product companies, two factors come into cognizance: Annualized Recurring Revenue and EBITDA. Without enforcing the engineering crew to adopt a very arduous time-keeping process, our customer wanted a financial model that leveraged productivity data directly from JIRA to ensure the model could stand up to rigorous auditing practices. They wanted the model to capture operating expenses (maintenance costs) and capital expenditure(new products and capabilities investment) from productivity data in Jira.

The Solution

Agilité’s toolkit consists of a financial model that connects to Jira and uses raw data points like velocity, user story points, team allocation, bug story points, and FTE costs. Using this data model, engineering leaders can quickly report cap ex and op ex costs by computing “cost per story point” for one Scrum (or Kanban) team. The model calculates capital costs for not only new features but also maintenance costs by the individual product team. This model addresses the needs of finance teams but also lays a great foundation for calculating the ROI and NPV of a portfolio.

The Result

Our customer adopted the financial model from the Agilité toolkit to cap ex costs very accurately. Since the amortized component of the cap ex is reported below the line on a P&L statement, the EBITDA calculation was accurate. Moreover, this model passed the scrutiny of external financial auditors to validate its accuracy.

The Problem

Businesses operate in ever-shifting environments, and client goals evolve to such an extent that client goals discussed initially aren’t current. Clients often get so caught up in the daily routine that they lose perspective of the product/service. Clients share positive feedback and acknowledge that things are running smoothly, but they might not be able to see the scale of their achievements and the overall impact on their organization.

The Solution

Agilité has a client-centric focus, and the client’s opinion about our products/services carries much weight. We maintain regular touchpoints with them by conducting quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to ensure that the Agilité team is always in tune with the client objectives, has a recurring conversation around the value, and has regular feedback on the current/future processes. Each QBR presents a forum to highlight new ways to help clients achieve their goals, uncover addressed risks and opportunities, and ensure complete customer involvement in plans. The Agilité toolkit has templates that enable us to work with our clients to quantify the global team’s value, costs, risks, performance, overall strategic compatibility, and implement effective accountability.

The Results

Agilité conducts QBRs with all our customers. Over nine months, we uncovered operational challenges and risks because of disconnects between strategic and engineering functions for a life sciences customer during a series of QBRs. Since the QBR forum allowed for transparency into operational metrics, we successfully implemented action plans to remedy underlying issues. Consequently, the client saw tremendous value in the partnership and grew their investments with Agilité 2.5x.

The Challenge

Our customers adopted the Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX) framework to execute their business strategy. The proven framework encourages all participating teams to develop lead measures that would, in turn, impact the lag measures that help achieve the primary goal of any strategic plan. The technology and engineering team operate using a methodology that does not blend with typical lead measures in a 4DX paradigm. This dissonance inadvertently resulted in silos between tech/engineering teams and the rest of the cross-functional teams at the customer.

The Solution

The 10X methodology of the Agilité toolkit enables engineering and technology teams to internalize practices like agile risk management, planned vs. delivered, velocity, % automation, and RPO/RTO, to name a few. In addition to these metrics that blend as lead measures, 4DX encourages a regular cadence of accountability for the participating teams. Leveraging planning and retrospective sessions under the auspices of the “cadence of accountability” sessions become a very organic efficiency. In short, the essence of any Agile method (Scrum or Kanban) with the right choice of practices around planning and execution, as mentioned above, very seamlessly merges with the 4DX framework. This seamless merging helps break down silos across teams.

The Result

After deployment of the 10X methodology, Agilité helped internalize metrics to measure the speed, efficiency, and quality of technology and engineering teams. By picking the correct practices (cadence of accountability and keeping a compelling scorecard) and metrics (lead measures), we assisted our customers in attaining alignment between technology and engineering. We demonstrated the following lead measure improvement because of 4DX and 10X alignment: 

1. Sprints with groomed backlog improved from 0 to 4 in 6 months
2. % Regression Automation improved from 10% to 60% in 6 months
3. % Code coverage using Sonarcloud improved from 0 to 100% in 6 months

The Challenge

Our materials engineering SaaS customer wanted to launch a new product in 3 months to meet market demand. As was evident with the customer, prioritizing and organizing a product roadmap is a qualitative exercise that evokes unnecessary debate between product management and in-house engineering teams. Engineering teams respond well to empirical techniques, while product management methods often use qualitative methods for the right reasons. Lack of an analytical prioritization method during roadmap creation results in a volatile backlog, adversely impacting the engineering delivery metrics like time-to-market, quality, and wastage.

The Solution

Agilité has developed a product management toolkit that uses empirical and quantitative techniques. The product management team can utilize these methods to construct a prioritized roadmap quickly. These techniques help the engineering teams rally behind roadmaps with gusto while enabling product teams to seek investments from business sponsors effectively. The Agilité toolkit uses two parameters to quantify roadmaps “epics”, viz. 

1. Strategic Value, and 
2. Customer Value.

The toolkit enables score assignment to each sub-element, deriving a composite strategic and customer value score for each epic. This score helps order epics and create a more impactful and strategically aligned backlog for releases and sprints.

The Result

Using the Agilité Toolkit, our product management and engineering teams delivered a product for a customer to track Covid-19 samples and test results for employees at many manufacturing facilities. When all businesses were shutting down to contain the virus, this product helped manufacturing facilities utilize our customers’ products to open operations safely in record time. By embracing empirical techniques innate to our toolkit, our customers could quickly deliver to the market, exceed market expectations, and, more importantly, improve business profitability by gaining a first movers’ advantage.

The Challenge

The product owner was accountable for end-to-end delivery: from roadmap creation to deployment of capability after engineering at one of our customers. This structure resulted from team composition before Agilité was engaged; each product team consisted of a product owner, a tech lead, and the engineering team. Product priorities frequently changed, and release dates mutated quickly based on client interactions and feedback, making releases a moving target with no single accountable party who could make the team focus on deliverables and meet timelines. This adversely impacted delivery metrics like velocity, defect leakage, team engagement, and higher-than-forecast operating expenses.

The Solution

Using a playbook from our Agilité toolkit, we introduced a scrum master for new product development products teams after analyzing the team on our standard Agilité Agile Maturity Index (AAMI). The AAMI tool helps empirically benchmark teams’ performance to industry standards using our bespoke 10x methodology. The 10x methods also enable the deployment of practices grounded in Agile principles like Agile risk management, backlog grooming, release planning, and retrospectives. Team engagement improved with the product owner, the scrum master, and the tech lead banding together. Other metrics like roadmap deviation, defect leakage, automation testing code coverage, velocity, and cap-ex to op-ex ratios improved.

The Result

After deployment of 10x methods from the Agilité toolkit, and to name a few, we saw the following improvements: 

• Velocity improved 2x
• After the adoption of Shift Left methods, quality improved by 95%
• Regression Automation increased by 100%
• Risk Age consistently reduced by 1.5x sprint after sprint
• Zero deviation from product roadmap