Achieve Portfolio-Level Visibility while Scaling Agile and DevOps Across the Enterprise
The Annual State of Agile Report provides software professionals deep insight into Agile trends, best practices and lessons learned to help them succeed with their agile transformations. Results from the report over the past few years have consistently highlighted three trends in the enterprise:
- AGILE IS EXPANDING WITHIN THE ENTERPRISE – Agile adoption is growing within organizations, both more broadly and deeply.
- ORGANIZATIONS ARE SCALING AGILE – The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is reported as the most widely-used approach to scaling agile.
- DEVOPS INITIATIVES ARE ON THE RISE – The report reveals the importance of accelerating the speed of delivery of high-quality software, and the emphasis on customer satisfaction
In working with our TeamForge customers, we have found that many organizations are following the industry trends by starting to incorporate more Agile management practices, and have initiatives to scale both agile and DevOps across the enterprise.
Digital.ai has responded to customer needs and provides the ability to extend TeamForge capabilities with Enterprise Agile Planning, DevOps release management, and Value Stream Management solutions. These solutions address specific software development and delivery challenges, and will help your organization achieve Agile and DevOps transformations.
There are three distinct solutions that combine TeamForge with either VersionOne or Continuum to accelerate delivery, increase agility, and ensure alignment between business and IT.
- VersionOne (now Digital. Agility) is an Enterprise Agile Planning platform built from the ground up to scale Agile in the enterprise. It enables your teams at all levels—Enterprise, Portfolio, Program, and Team— to strategize, develop and deliver software faster. VersionOne also provides a centralized environment that simplifies your adoption and implementation of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®).
- Continuum is a DevOps Release Management platform designed to provide the real-time insight needed to improve delivery velocity, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and lower deployment costs.
And, when TeamForge is paired with both VersionOne and Continuum, you have a powerful Enterprise Value Stream Management (EVSM) solution and are able to solve the problems of managing, visualizing, and, more importantly, measuring business value throughput across your distributed environment.
Challenge #1
Portfolio Visibility Across Development Teams
Your development teams are currently all using TeamForge, but some teams want to remain using TeamForge and other teams want to transition to utilizing either some Agile or move to 100% Agile. This creates a challenge for Portfolio and Program Managers because now they don’t have visibility into projects across all of the teams.
Solution
TeamForge + VersionOne
TeamForge + VersionOne gives your organization unified portfolio, program and project management, as well as enterprise-wide collaboration, community, quality management, and business intelligence. Teams can use different tools and different development methodologies, while also providing visibility at the portfolio and enterprise levels to make sound business decisions.
Development can occur in TeamForge and/or VersionOne and then it is an automatic process to roll up the work, aggregate the data, and then utilize VersionOne’s Program Management and Portfolio/Product Planning capabilities.
VersionOne provides Portfolio and Product Planning to:
- Track initiatives across programs and inspect key performance indicators with a Portfolio Dashboard and Scorecard
- Visualize and manage lean workflow with a Portfolio Kanban
- Allocate budgets across strategic themes or projects with Budgeting
- Give your customers a voice with Customer Ideation
- Align strategy to execution with Strategic Themes
VersionOne provides Program Management to:
- Configure team planning environments with PlanningRooms™
- Simplify product planning with backlog management and Backlog Planning
- Define and communicate strategic plans with Product Roadmaps
- Measure value delivery and process improvement with SAFe® Metrics & Visualizations
- Identify sequencing conflicts and blocking issues with Portfolio Item Dependencies
- Identify dependencies across teams and iterations with a Program Board
Challenge #2
Ability to Visualize & Measure the Flow of Business Value
Your organization has a company-wide DevOps initiative to optimize the software delivery process and the challenge is to visualize and measure the actual flow of business value across the DevOps value stream.
Solution
TeamForge + Continuum
With TeamForge and Continuum, your organization can have traceability from idea to deployment—and achieve a DevOps transformation—by connecting DevOps tooling, processes, and data into a single, centralized platform.
Continuum enables teams to visualize and measure the actual flow of business value (e.g. stories, defects, features, etc.) contained within delivery artifacts as they progress through both the automated and manual phases of your DevOps value stream. Continuum is flexible and easily integrates with the planning, code, build, test, deploy/release, and IaaS platforms and tools you already use—such as Jenkins, Chef, Git, Subversion, Docker, Selenium, AWS, and more. Teams are then empowered with the real-time insight they need to improve delivery velocity, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and lower deployment costs.
Development can occur in TeamForge, and Continuum allows you to:
- Measure and improve the performance of your end-to-end release management lifecycle (or your DevOps workflows and activities)
- Orchestrate complex, concurrent, delivery pipelines and value streams across any build, test, and production environment
- Evaluate the quality, consistency, and risk associated with your software deployments via real-time data
- Standardize and automate deployments and DevOps tasks across any environment via an extensible, agentless architecture
- Coordinate both automated and manual release activities, workflows, and approvals across multiple teams and environments
- Ensure traceability and compliance across workflows, applications, and environments
Challenge #3
No Alignment Between Software Delivery and Business Objectives
Your organization has invested in software development and delivery tools, yet real process improvement and return-on-investment data have been difficult to come by. There is fragmented processes and tooling for all the various aspects of the software development and delivery lifecycle, which makes data-driven decision making even more challenging.
Solution
TeamForge + VersionOne + Continuum = Enterprise Value Stream Management
The combination of TeamForge, VersionOne and Continuum, creates a powerful Enterprise Value Stream Management (EVSM) solution that integrates the entire software delivery value stream from strategic planning, budgeting, road mapping, release and iteration planning all the way to release automation and deployment. Plus, teams have the flexibility to select a traditional, hybrid or agile development tool to meet their needs, and DevOps and delivery teams have the freedom to use their favorite tools.
The Enterprise Value Stream Management solution enables organizations to:
- Scale agile and DevOps to support the needs of thousands of developers, managers, directors, testers, and executives across multiple locations
- Ensure maximum visibility and traceability across your entire software development and delivery lifecycle
- Accelerate decision-making and align strategy and delivery
- Easily define product strategy, adapt to rapidly changing business priorities, and track delivery all the way to production
- Tighten integration with your Subversion or Git source code repository, build tools, and delivery platforms
- Drive success with enterprise-wide communication and collaboration by leveraging a common infrastructure for working together more effectively
VersionOne – Portfolio and Product Planning
Make Better Decisions and Deliver Better Software
PORTFOLIO DASHBOARD AND SCORECARD
Track initiatives across programs and inspect key performance indicators
PORTFOLIO KANBAN
Visualize and manage lean workflow
BUDGETING
Allocate budgets across strategic themes or projects
CUSTOMER IDEATION
Give your customers a voice
STRATEGIC THEMES
Align strategy to execution
VersionOne – Program Management
Increase Enterprise Visibility Across Interrelated Projects
PLANNINGROOMS™
Configurable team planning environments
PRODUCT ROADMAPS
Define and communicate strategic plans
SAFE® METRICS & VISUALIZATIONS
Measure value delivery and process improvement
PORTFOLIO ITEM DEPENDENCIES
Identify sequencing conflicts and blocking issues
PORTFOLIO DASHBOARD AND SCORECARD
Identify dependencies across teams and iterations
CONTINUUM
DELIVERY AT A GLANCE
Distribution of backlog items by Package or by Portfolio Item across all phases of delivery in the value stream.
INTEGRATIONS
Continuum is flexible and easily integrates with the planning, code, build, test, deploy/release, and IaaS platforms and tools you already use.
FLOW DASHBOARDS
Key “flow” metrics around the movement of software across the value stream. Identify areas of opportunity, end-to-end lead time, and delivery efficiency.
RISK DASHBOARDS
Insights to commit distribution, rogue commits, risk, and code complexity.
The Digital.ai Difference
UNIFIED DEVOPS PLATFORM - Integrate DevOps & Security capabilities to enable continuous delivery of software
POWERED BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - Generate predictive insights that provide the intelligence to make smarter investments
CONNECTED TO THE ENTERPRISE - Connect to existing processes, applications and infrastructure to propel innovation that find new market opportunities
