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 Problem 

Agilité works with Private Equity or Venture Capital strategy consultants on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) activity. Private Equity or Venture Capital firms are continually attracted to the evolving technology landscape resulting in a remarkable increase in software and technology-enabled deals. M&A Strategy consulting firms provide specialized investment advice and due diligence services to investors in Software, Technology, Cybersecurity, and E-Commerce (B2B and B2C). Our strategy clients work on several due-diligence projects concurrently, with detailed reports produced in aggressive timeframes. At Agilité, we analyze a large amount of information to glean valuable insights and recommendations for PE/VC investors. Based on these recommendations, investors pursue ensuing activities for a typical M&A deal.

The Solution

Agilité has a strategically designed team of experienced technologists and strategists, who efficiently collaborate with the client strategy team, perform a thorough document analysis, and deliver high-quality, complete, and detailed due-diligence reports with granular insights within a short timeframe. 

The Agilité team provides valuable perspectives to ensure that all potential risks are uncovered, which may have been overlooked owing to the vastness of the information corpus. The systematic approach used by the team helps to quickly analyze VDR documents well before the technical due diligence meetings so that all missing relevant information can be obtained and analyzed. The team corroborates information provided in the Tech due-diligence meetings with buyers/sellers/investors and the documentation to catch red flags and suggest improvements.

Agilité team strategically comprises a mix of technologists and technical writers for quick scalability and cost-efficiency. Using this blend of high-quality talent and offshore cost arbitrage, we have worked on M&A deals for our clients in the past in a very cost-effective manner.

The Result

The Agilité team assisted our client in producing high-quality and complete due diligence reports with valuable insights faster, enabling the client to attend to an extended investor base. Because of our ability to scale up while reducing costs, we have worked on more than 12 M&A deals between August 2021 and August 2022.

The Challenge

Attrition rates for offshore engineering and technology teams globally are alarmingly high because of various macro factors. One of our Life Sciences Customer wanted to switch engineering partners becayse the attrition rates adversely impact teams’ productivity and resulted in unpredictable delivery of capabilities or new products to the marketplace. Any deviation of go-to-market timelines could be detrimental to business because maintaining the competitive edge in a fiercely competitive technology SaaS arena is existential. 

The Solution

Technology services companies maintain a “bench” to ensure customer continuity. Although this solution is very cost ineffective and could address a problem in the short term, it only serves as an antidote for symptoms and does not remedy the underlying problem. At Agilité, we hire team associates based on principles they subscribe to as individuals: Pride in Ownership, Outcomes Orientation, and Collaboration are non-negotiable principles for us. After the associates get engaged after a rigorous screening process, they pair up with experienced mentors who act more than a typical manager. The mentors serve the associates by showing them the ropes and reminding them of the principles every associate should live by at Agilité. A culture of open feedback (positive and negative) is encouraged through a regular dialog between the mentor and the associate. 

The Result

Agilité has consistently exceeded industry benchmarks for attrition for 3 years now. Since we internalized the new process, voluntary attrition rates have remained below 4.75% YoY. As a positive side effect, our tenured associates have worked on product engineering initiatives for an average of more than 2.5 years per client.