Agile adoption: bridging the gap between development and management

In recent years, Agile has been blazing a trail through various industries, helping organisations to sharpen their market edge and deliver more to their customers, faster.

Effective for even the most complex projects, Agile delivers enhanced collaboration, flexibility and product delivery, ensuring projects are streamlined, results are high-quality and clear value is provided to the customer throughout.

But despite all the benefits of moving to Agile, the shift can be difficult – even for the most enthusiastic teams. There’s a risk that Agile ways of working will create a disconnect between development teams and those in management, and this challenge can threaten to derail projects entirely.

Common Agile working challenges

One of the key complaints about Agile comes from management teams who struggle to stay in control of projects once traditional project plans and status reports are no longer available. They find that Agile doesn’t give them the quick answers they’re used to around product delivery and cost – so there’s a risk they won’t have sufficient clarity about key responsibilities and timescales.

The tools teams use when working with Agile – like Jira and Azure DevOps – typically present data in a way that’s hard for non-developers to understand, making it difficult to ascertain what progress has been achieved. It’s often only developers, and those involved in the day-to-day work, that will understand the details of the project.

Without transparency and clarity, managers lose confidence in product delivery and disillusionment around Agile can quickly set in. In the most pressurised digital transformation projects, it can even start to be viewed as a problem rather than a solution. This rift can jeopardise the entire delivery if a solution isn’t found quickly.

How to make Agile work for you

To make Agile work, organisations must urgently address their transparency issues. Clear information about timescales, budgets and functionality needs to be regularly presented in a way that’s easy to understand, regardless of job role and expertise. In addition, product roadmaps, delivery metrics and clear answers to common management questions will help to rebuild confidence in the work being done. Agile provides all this information, but it needs to be properly extracted and presented in order to inform and inspire everyone working on the project.

How CGI AgileUnity can add transparency and confidence to your Agile product development

Working on digital transformation projects with multiple organisations, we recognised a clear opportunity to make Agile working a smoother process by bridging the gap between development and management teams.

That’s why we created CGI AgileUnity.

CGI AgileUnity is a delivery portal that pulls out the metrics you care about during Agile product development and makes them easy to understand. It gives senior leaders the reassurance they need and fosters better communication and collaboration by:

• Using real-time project data to create a product road map to track progress
• Allowing accurate data-based forecasting of the future with customisable timescales
• Giving a single-pane summary dashboard that focuses on outcome-based metrics rather than outputs, so you can see exactly what product your customers are getting.

As a result, teams can quickly address any inefficiencies in workflows, overcome bottlenecks and expedite project delivery. CGI AgileUnity integrates fully with work management systems, like Jira and AzureDevOps, and is designed to work with any Agile managed delivery.

By providing transparent data that’s visible to everyone, anytime, CGI AgileUnity helps foster understanding and gives clarity to Agile managed delivery regardless of sector, scale or complexity.

So far, clients using CGI AgileUnity have benefited from:

• Increased confidence and less resistance to Agile ways of working
• A shorter time to market through improved product delivery
• Efficiencies achieved through optimising their workflow.

To help you make the most of CGI AgileUnity, we also offer user adoption training and ongoing support for your digital transformation journey.

Find out how you can realise your Agile transformation ambitions with CGI AgileUnity.

Get in touch to discuss how we can help your organisation to embrace agility or discover more about our Agile Digital Services