Update: In early 2022, a product & company reboot has happened, which pivoted the product much more towards setting goals (OKRs) but still has its roots in teamwork, metrics, and evidence-based management.
As the title might suggest, the latest release brings a new perspective to an already existing Ability to Innovate (A2I) Key-Value Area, hence – reloaded. We worked hard through several cycles to pursue our mission of bringing Agile Tools – our B2B SaaS product one step closer to life. We made a great effort to stay true to the purpose of the Sprint to deliver increments of potentially releasable functionality, like bringing in first enterprise functionalities, the possibility to create comments on each metric’s chart, and a 3rd party tool integration to help us get the user feedback which is, needless to say, so important. And yet, in parallel, some significant backward-compatible changes were conceived by the team’s creative minds to support the forthcoming features.
The mission we are on, is to help software organizations to benchmark their current business agility state and guide them to areas of possible improvements on a journey to a successful customer and product oriented organization. -TeamPoolz
The first Beta release of Agile Tools on April 19th introduced an idea, seeking market feedback. Initial encouragements and internal initiatives lead to a “reloaded” version of the Agile Tools. We are laying the foundations to build upon an expandable platform, a solid refactor-friendly codebase, release mechanics in place, and scalable infrastructure.
A new Beta version of Agile Tools is now available.
The Agile Tools is aimed at organizations creating software products seeking help in its transition to become (more) agile. Agile coaches need prep work upfront to embark on a successful transformation journey. Offering metrics with actionable recommendations is an added value, but having a tool to benchmark the current state and have the ability to track the progress to better business agility is a real win.
The benchmarking is not yet available. Still on a drawing board. We use boards a lot, whiteboards, but also digital ones, namely Figma – for wireframing and high-fidelity prototyping.
Also, we eat books for breakfast and dinner to enrich our knowledge, seek ideas, and build upon the empiricism of others. Excellent recent finding:
The true purpose of performance measurement – indeed its real power – is that it helps us achieve more of our goals sooner, and with less effort and money than would be possible without it. It does this by snapping our attention onto the things that matter most to our organisation’s success, telling us in no uncertain terms how well we are (or aren’t) achieving those things, and motivating us to find better ways to achieve them. -Stacey Barr
This sentence resonates with our mission to help organizations choose the right metrics and act as a digital coach, prolonging the guidance from the real one(s), even measuring their success, an aspect to consider for executives in charge of the transformation. In any case – do not use metrics for bonuses – the first step is to get the buy-in to achieve ownership.
New Ability to Innovate Dashboard
Continuous use of Agile Tools will give you an insight into areas that need attention. The “reloaded” version introduces a dashboard with three available views: grid (as in previous versions), radar only (as in previous versions), and a combined one, which is now the default.
A few hints of what is in the oven are a presence of a Product and a Team selector as well as a Dashboard selector for upcoming Current Value, Time to Market, and Unrealized Value Key Value Areas (KVA) dashboards. The values of those selectors are read-only informative, for now.
New Editor
The Metrics editor is completely redesigned. We had to find a solution to cover three scopes (organization, product, team), a handful of input frequencies (weekly, cyclic, monthly, quarterly, n-cyclic), four dimensions (KVAs), and there might be others, like roles (product owner, scrum master, developers, business owner). This single-metric editor will not be the only possible way to provide input measurements, but it will also be a starting point with an educational value. So, for those who have already tried the previous versions – fear not; the “advanced” or “period” editor will have its comeback soon. And yes, the restful API will follow shortly.
A new
The Demo mode
The Demo mode is also overhauled as the tool is growing from team-only scope to an organization one, so we had to change a lot in the background concerning the demo datasets and on the frontend to offer a better user experience.
What’s next?
The next release will introduce the Dashboard, the main one, which will connect all four dimensions (KVAs) and present a strategic insight with the central score named Business Agility Points for your organization. You can expect two metrics for each of the three new Key-Value Areas, some new chart types, and the very beginning of product management features.
Register for free Beta and try the tool.
Update: In early 2022, a product & company reboot has happened, which pivoted the product much more towards setting goals (OKRs) but still has its roots in teamwork, metrics, and evidence-based management.
