Metronome Support for High Performing Teams in Federal Government IT Programs
During an excellent and very informative webinar that we co-hosted last week with Dr. Stephen Mayner of SAFe, Dr. Mayner shared some insights about what high performance teams ‘look like’ within the parameters of Federal Government IT programs. What some of the success tenets are, what some of the barriers to these tenets being demonstrated, and other perspectives.
In looking at these tenets, it does not take becoming a ‘rocket scientist’ in order to be able to understand the parallels to seeing ‘high performance’ behavior and realizing the mission and business impact that these kinds of behaviors drive. Some of the core tenets he focused on were, shared vision, (team) focus and, most importantly Trust.
To create an environment where these and other success tenets are enabled and driven, one needs to understand:
- what high performance “looks like’’
- that, as in many things, metrics drive behavior and
- that sometimes, the tools you or one uses can dramatically determine relative whether, or not your environment is conducive to enabling and reinforcing the kinds of success tenets that Dr. Mayner shared
After Dr. Mayner had finished sharing his thoughts, Sudi Sankavaram of Radus Software provided some valuable perspectives in taking five of these success tenets and showcasing how Radus’ incredible SAFe tool, Metronome-Orchestrated Agile, enables and directly supports them in multi-vendor program environments.
Per the screen shot below:
It is very difficult to make effective decisions if you or your leaders don’t have easy and available access to insights relative to how the teams, programs and enterprise are performing. Metronome provides these insights via ‘built in’ dashboards. These dashboards enable actionable decision making via insights at all levels of the SAFe framework- from the Team Level up to the Portfolio Level. There is little guesswork when you have direct knowledge and views of how, where and what people are doing. Metronome supports effective decision making via quick access to relevant intel, such as Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Velocity and Iteration Burndown metrics, ‘Out of the Box’.
In this snippet below,
Sudi shared how Metronome provides context for the establishment of an organization’s vision and ‘purpose’. As we all can suspect, without a clear and well communicated vision statement, it is much harder for any series of ‘teams’ to be able to proceed and row ‘in the same [proverbial] direction’. Metronome facilitates not only the ability for leadership to communicate their vision and purpose statements, it also helps organizations easily calculate the “potential” and “actual” business value of objectives, before and after, their realization. By enabling your organization to create and visualize Epic Hypothesis statement(s), Lean Business Case verbiage, Goals (Iteration statements), the teams are well aware of a lot of leadership’s thinking as to ‘why’ the teams are focused on the workloads that they are.
In a similar way, Sudi aligned and shared how Metronome enables and promotes team’s abilities to demonstrate open and effective communication, to be able to cooperate in cross-functional ways and how Metronome can be a source of more effective and timely feedback. Due to time constraints, we were not able to showcase how Metronome can be a driver of some of the other remaining 13 high performance team success tenets, but the good news is that Metronome can- and does! – enable teams to demonstrate all of these positive behaviors!
