The Healthcare Intelligence (HI) team of IS continues to advance its agile practices, with a goal of full operation using key principles of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) by the end of 2021. The full transformation to agile practices will be a multi-year endeavor, but significant strides have been made over the last six months.
Addressing our challenges
This initiative is aimed at solving our challenges in workflow, delivery, and caregiver engagement.
- Our stakeholders experience “time to value” and quality issues with our limited capacity, which leads to lengthened delivery timelines, limited progress visibility, and occasional unsatisfactory results
- Our teams experience excessive concurrent tasks, shifting priorities, and barriers to progress leading to burnout from too much activity without delivery
How far we’ve come
From our first Program Increment (PI) Planning event back in October 2020, with six teams participating, to the most recent one in April 2021, with over 20 teams participating, HI and our business partners recognize we’ve come a long way.
Key accomplishments to-date:
- Creating an agile team structure that clearly identifies the scope or boundaries of each team, empowering them to prioritize their own work in collaboration with our business partners
- Significantly reducing the number of agile teams each caregiver is assigned to, with the goal of have core members 100% dedicated to a single team in Q3/Q4
- Establishing quarterly planning events that bring together HI and our business partners to lay out the features and stories of focus for the next three months
- Setting up quarterly strategic portfolio reviews to evaluate the right mix of agile teams and overall effort allocation needed to meet our strategic objectives
Where we’re going
In Q2, HI will continue to advance our agile practices by:
- Revising our intake and portfolio practices to increase the number of ideas and requests that no longer need to go through Intake, dropping straight into the agile teams’ backlogs
- Establishing portfolio metrics to support strategic decisions and measure value
- Completing the rollout of agile team structure
- Operationalizing the next set of agile ceremonies, such as sprint and system demos, retrospectives, and release train sync meetings
- Establishing the “definition of done” to improve and verify the quality of completed features
- Establishing estimation guidelines at the portfolio and team levels to improve the ration of feature completion to features committed within a program increment
Shifting an organization from a project to product mindset is a challenging, but rewarding, endeavor. HI and our business partners have already benefited from the journey to-date and look forward to more improvements in our planning process and results, customer satisfaction, and caregiver quality of life.
More info
Please contact Jean Richardson, principal program delivery partner/agile coach, HI Planning, Operations & Program Management.