BUSI N ESS

A GILI T Y
S U R V I VA L G U I D E

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RESP ON D Q U I C K LY
A ND C O N F I D E N T LY
Today’s fast-moving markets present threats and opportunities at every
turn. Whether you’re a large enterprise or a small startup, it’s no longer
enough to simply practice Agile development. To survive — and thrive — in
this disruptive environment, you need agility throughout your organization.

Every industry is subject to disruption. Only a

truly agile business is equipped to respond.

FORRESTER RESEARCH INC.

Forrester Research, Inc., January 2014, Forrester Perspective:
Measure And Improve Your Business Agility.

Agile firms grow revenue 37% faster.

Agile firms generate 30% higher profits.

MIT SLOAN

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H O W T O S UR VI VE
Building agility into your organization means sensing, creating, and
adapting to change: quickly and confidently. You need execution agility
to make speed and performance your competitive advantage. You need BUSINESS
portfolio agility to create opportunities with focus and insight into your AGILITY
organization’s highest-value initiatives. You need business agility to take Sense, Create, and
a disciplined approach to managing change, building responsiveness into Respond to Change
your organization’s DNA.

A global, multinational financial institution with over 100 million

customers launched a brand new business unit generating $600M in PORTFOLIO
top line revenue in just 5 months, using Rally’s transformational services, AGILITY
training, and platform. These kinds of breakthrough business results are Optimize for
only possible when you connect agility throughout your organization. Business Value

EXECUTION
AGILITY
Deliver Value
Faster

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 EXECUTION AGILITY
DO IT FAST DO IT RIGHT

PERF ORMA NC E
Productivity Quality
Responsiveness Customer Delight

Execution is the foundation for building agility. Improving cycle time

DO IT ON TIME KEEP DOING IT
will significantly impact your bottom line. Speed helps you monetize
Predictability Employee Engagement
incremental value and get to revenue sooner. It taps the voice of the
customer early and often, ensuring that you’re “building the right thing.”
You also need to “build the thing right” — deliver with quality and
predictability.
KEY DIMENSIONS OF PERFORMANCE
To be better, faster and more efficient, you need information and insight.
Rally has culled the data of 50,000 Agile teams and 160,000 projects
to identify metrics across key performance dimensions like Productivity,
Predictability, Quality, and Responsiveness. These metrics give you
evidence-based insights for benchmarking, measuring, and adjusting your
performance with real-time feedback and improvement recommendations.

“With Rally Insights, we uncovered the performance costs of

unstable teams … and are seeing 30–50% improvements in both
cost and delivery duration compared to similar waterfall projects.”

MICHAEL SANTORO, DIRECTOR

GVS Global Business Partnership Team, Tata Communications

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 EXECUTION AGILITY SCALING REQUIRES COORDINATION

SC ALE
To deliver customer value, you need a dependable value delivery engine
aligned with top business priorities — giving you fast, predictable execution
across your entire software development organization. For example,
initiatives like mobility and e-commerce, or impending regulatory changes,
need faster responses than waterfall teams can deliver.

Proven approaches for scaling enterprise agility, such as the Scaled Agile
Framework® (SAFe®), can help you begin your scaling efforts:

1. Scale teams: 5-15 teams all working toward a common Scaling Agile requires coordination across multiple roles and departments
release objective, often called a “program” or “delivery — especially across silos. “Scattershot” Agile can’t cross the gap into
group” portfolio and business agility, and you’re stuck leaving real business value
on the table. Unfortunately, many organizations plateau at this level, falling
2. Scale timeboxes: Synchronize team timeboxes (typically short of real breakthrough results or competitive advantage.
2 weeks) to a release timebox (typically 10 weeks)
Rally has deep expertise in helping organizations achieve agility at scale.
3. Scale work: User stories at the team level scale up to With Rally’s Ready > Sync > Go, you can launch and execute Agile delivery
business features and initiatives groups in as little as three months. Once proficient, you’ll be positioned
to transform your entire organization to deliver responsive and sustainable
value. When you measurably improve and scale performance, you free up
resources for growth and chart a path to business agility.

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 PORTFOLIO AGILITY BALANCE INVESTMENT

G ROWTH
PricewaterhouseCoopers has found that most industries spend less
than 15 percent of their IT budgets on innovation. But highly effective
organizations — as measured by stock performance — allocate closer to
50 percent of budget on maintenance vs. growth initiatives. The market
doesn’t give you any credit for maintenance; only for growth.

Many customers tell us that they’d like to invest more in growth; but by
the time they respond to regulations, support new platforms, and keep up
with competitive feature parity, there’s often little room for differentiating MAINTENANCE GROWTH
investments. Performance gains from agility at the execution level free up
resources for growth. By enhancing speed, productivity, and quality, you’ll
spend fewer resources on bug fixing, refactoring, and technical debt —
resources you can then allocate to new, differentiating value streams.

Portfolio managers and business leaders can lay claim to these

performance dividends — directly connecting your strategic business
objectives to the realities of execution. You’ll have options and the
confidence to make the right decisions for the business.

MAINTENANCE GROWTH

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 PORTFOLIO AGILITY INCREMENTAL INVESTMENT

ADAPTIVE
PLANNING
To build responsiveness into your portfolio planning, you have to allow
your business to move two key levers: funding and scope. Establishing
a more frequent planning cadence can help you incrementally fund
and dynamically adjust scope to match your highest business priorities.
Investing incrementally reduces risk and increases investment confidence.

This calls for an integrated execution and delivery system. Coordinate

release cycles to match the grain of your investment planning and
commitment, starting with frequent feedback — a cadence of fact and
insight that forms a framework for dynamic response.
Optimizing investment and value delivery in your portfolio planning
involves mapping demand to supply. Many companies struggle with the
LEGACY MINDSET ADAPTIVE MINDSET coordination and transparency required, but tying strategy to execution is
where the benefits of scaled business agility really pay off.
Schedule focused Value focused
Yearly budgets Incremental funding Rally can help you combine adaptive planning with the resources you
Large upfront planning Continuous steering unlock through your execution performance improvements, so you can
sense the market with disciplined exploration and accelerate growth,
Assign FTEs to projects Flow features thru teams
revenue, and profit.
Risks and returns Time to market

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 BUSINESS AGILITY

CREATE CH A NGE
To truly nurture innovation and growth, you need a deliberate approach
to investments in innovation. Business agility connects horizon investing
and disciplined exploration with the Enterprise Lean Startup (ELS) principle
of “fail fast, fail cheap” — which allows you to sense the market for more
confident investing and improved employee engagement. By sensing the
market and testing ideas, the ELS model builds an innovation pipeline that
offers the greatest potential for breakthrough results with the least amount
of risk — similar to how angels and incubators fund and manage
startup investments.

Rally can walk you through the process of disciplined exploration: forming
your team, creating your vision, and developing an innovation sandbox.
DISCOVER
Then you follow steps to successfully Discover, Validate, Transition, and
Validate the potential problem, validate potential solutions, validate your
Operate, making pivot or persevere decisions along the way.
viable business model.

This process allows you to create change within your market and become VALIDATE
the disruptor, instead of the disrupted. Prepare to go to market by removing the barriers between your offer and
your customer’s wallet.
TRANSITION
Bridge exploration with operational execution by transitioning knowledge
from the discovery team into departments.

OPERATE
Make your proven offer ready to operate by guiding it through these steps
and pivoting and persevering along the way.

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 BUSINESS AGILITY CONNECT AGILITY

ORGANIZE AROUND
CUSTOMER VALUE
You must connect with your market, customers, and other stakeholders,
and connect within your own organization. Breaking down functional
silos is imperative: it minimizes dependencies, reduces waste, improves
collaboration and allows you to respond to opportunities and threats quickly
and confidently. General alignment beats local excellence by a mile. Cultural
change is key to business transformation, and connecting people fuels
change from within.

The highest level of business agility requires organizing people around

creating value. This doesn’t mean “reorg” — it means connecting agility
throughout your organization by breaking down internal silos and forming An organization in which only a few teams have mastered Agile
value-focused teams. development isn’t realizing the benefits of business agility: it hasn’t tied
execution work to business strategy, developed a plan for coordinated
Organizing around customer value at the execution level involves scaling and scaling, or done adaptive planning. Rally can help you coordinate along
creating teams of teams, aligned with common release objectives. Scaling value streams, rather than functional groups or legacy systems (for example,
ensures the business and the market realize the value of your execution Agile delivery mismatched to annual funding), to minimize dependencies
agility gains. and allow for adaptive planning.

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Rally’s software and services solutions drive
agility throughout your organization.

Learn more at
rallydev.com

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