Evolving A Continuous Improvement System

  Dan Craig, Fannie Mae

Dan’s presentation was one of the top rated sessions. He shared his top  learnings building a continuous improvement program across 240 teams. He highlighted his learnings and spoke to the reality that continuous improvement means more than a team sitting in a room for a team retro…it’s a complex and delicate ecosystem that requires intentional focus to pull it all together.   

Dan’s presentation and slides can be found here. 

Background

• One single company, 2 large business units, 240 agile teams
• Multiple scaling frameworks
• Seeking to find ways to connect the teams with their customer/s & with leadership, engage them as true service teams

Challenges

• No clear vision or the target state – teams were unclear of the desired target state
• Leadership was disengaged from the teams, unclear on how to support them & relied on traditional management practices 
• No consistent or meaningful metrics – there was significant variance in tooling and inconsistent process, making organic and quantifiable metrics difficult to capture and gain insights from
• Little to no structure for improvement – newly formed agile CoE & the enterprise had limited change management plans alongside inconsistent metrics

Actions Taken

• Pilot (30+ teams)
• Defined a targeted vision
• Created an agile maturity model
• Published an agile playbook
• Developed a metrics dashboard at the team & program level 
• Measured with consistency 
• Set-up a quarterly cadence for TeamHealth Retrospectives

Learnings & Results

• Metrics and data was not enough
• Quarterly cadence solidified maturity progress
• Focus on managing growth items allowed teams the ability to escalate items just-in-time
• Impediments started to move through the system with resolution
• Growth Portal provided the opportunity to gain and share ideas
• Engagement increased within both teams and leadership
• Valuable insights were gained for future investment planning & gaps that needed to be filled
• Ongoing issues & problem were finally being resolved and had a place to go for resolution
• Leaders set an example, demo’d their results (at both the program & portfolio level)
• Outcome-based metrics dashboard allowed focus on speed, stability, quality & satisfaction

While they are still learning how to best prioritize and focus on the delivery of outcomes with speed, today, the continuous improvement system consists of a structured approach, engaged leadership, a changed culture & meaningful metrics….not just empty words. 

Want to Learn More?

• Learn more about AgilityHealth®
• Measurement & Continuous Improvement Strategy