Company Admin Guide to Rolling Out AgilityHealth®

If your organization is rolling out AgilityHealth®, this guide will provide you with valuable information about the process. You can always reach out to your CSM, if you have additional questions.

What is AgilityHealth®

Before we begin, a basic understanding of the capabilities of AgilityHealth® is necessary. Watch this 9-minute video to learn about the Six Capabilities of AgilityHealth®.

To learn more about the capabilities and be guided to articles that provide more details, visit our What are the Six Capabilities of AgilityHealth® article.

What's the first step?

Now that you have an overview of what AgilityHealth® is, let's talk about what's next. The first step in the journey is to obtain a baseline assessment of each of your team's health and performance, along with developing a growth plan for each team to propel their growth over the next quarter. Watch this 3-minute video to learn how teams accomplish these goals, using our most popular option, the TeamHealth® Retrospective.

For more information about retrospectives and how they work with our AgilityHealth® Radars, please visit the What is a Retrospective article. This article will talk through the steps in more detail, including who facilitates the retrospective and the steps taken during the session.

How does a Roll-out of AgilityHealth® work?

There are 5 main steps involved when conducting roll-out for AgilityHealth® and the steps are similar if your organization is rolling out AgilityHealth® as a Pilot to a few teams, or using our Org Baseline roll-out strategy.

Note: If you're rolling out AgilityHealth® across your entire enterprise and using our Enterprise Baseline roll-out strategy, the steps are similar, but done in a different order, at the same time, or done differently to accommodate more teams. Your CSM will walk you through the Enterprise Baseline roll-out strategy.

A Pilot or Proof of Concept is usually comprised of running baseline assessments on 5-15 teams, within a program or train to experience our improvement program and gain Leadership buy-in.
An Org Baseline roll-out occurs within a Portfolio or Line of Business to get a baseline across 50-300 teams and launches the recurring schedule for continuous improvement.
An Enterprise Baseline roll-out happens throughout your organization, with 300-1,000+ teams, to launch a continuous improvement program for the entire enterprise.

While the steps are similar for Pilots and Org Baseline roll-outs, there are differences in timing for each scenario, in order to effectively educate and complete retrospectives for the varying number of teams involved. The steps are generally done one at a time for a Pilot or Org Baseline roll-out, but for an Enterprise Baseline roll-out, there may be some overlap. Again, your CSM can walk you through the differences.

Pilot and Org Baseline Steps:

Step 1: AgilityHealth® Foundation

Regardless of which type of roll-out your organization is utilizing with AgilityHealth®, our platform will need to be configured to suit your organization's needs. You will need to walkthrough:

Procurement and Vendor Setup - this may already be completed or may not be required for your company
Learning your options around security and accessing our platform
Enabling integration with your ALM and using our existing Rest API's (optional, additional fees apply)
Ensuring the right items are whitelisted to ensure everyone receives their assessments
Identifying Programs, Teams and Facilitators who will participate in the roll-out
Understanding the roll-out schedule and necessary prep before launching assessments to teams
Customizing our communication templates to fit your company's needs
Differentiating Teams, Multi-Teams and Enterprise Teams
Setting up Tags so you can filter your results accordingly
Creating Users in the appropriate type so they can access and view the information you desire
Adding Teams to take our assessments.
- You'll want to be sure to learn about Work Types and how a Team Member's Role affects the type of questions they receive on some assessments.
Understanding assessment setup

A note about communication: To help you in communicating to the various groups of people in your organization about AgilityHealth®, we have compiled sample emails and sample invitations for you. There you'll find everything from organizational-wide communication to an invitation to Scrum Master Training to an invitation for the team's Retrospective, where they will take their assessment and build their growth plan.

Step 2: Education

Talking with Leadership and Team Members about AgilityHealth® prior to any retrospective sessions being scheduled will help increase participation. We have a number of options to help educate your organization.

We offer training sessions for all of the options below and some of them have been recorded to offer you a virtual solution when you are unable to bring a large group together in time.

The scheduling for these sessions can become challenging - so we suggest you do this as much in advance as possible to ensure the highest number of attendees.

Prepare Leaders to understand what their teams will be partaking in and how this valuable data can be used to help your teams continuously improve their health and performance
- Overview for Leaders presentation - this can be provided by us via a virtual session
- Key Manager/Leader Responsibilities - several articles to help a Leader understand their role
Teach teams about AgilityHealth® and ensure they understand the importance of participating in the assessments and retrospective sessions, providing open and honest feedback while helping to develop a growth plan for the next quarter
- Overview for Teams presentation - this can be provided by us via a virtual session
- Flyer to help teams understand the retrospective process
- Team Members also have a guide to help at any time
Provide training to Scrum Masters, who will act as Team Admins in keeping their team's information updated in AgilityHealth®, while also helping to build the growth plan and incorporate growth items into their team's backlog
- Scrum Masters have a guide to help them follow their training
- Scrum Masters are commonly set up as a Team Admin user type in AgilityHealth® and we have a role guide available for Team Admins as well
You will need to certify Facilitators through our AgilityHealth® Facilitator (AHF) Certification course. We offer a self-led online course, a monthly instructor-led public virtual course or can provide a private instructor-led virtual course, depending on your number of participants (additional costs apply).
- Facilitators also have a guide to help them after the certification
- We also offer facilitation guides for various types of radars, including how to facilitate a big-room retrospective
Work with your Agile Coaches who may play many roles including helping Facilitators to hone their skills, facilitating retrospectives themselves, helping to determine growth plans, helping form and train Leadership Members into a Continuous Improvement Leadership Team and more
- Coaches may need to be certified AgilityHealth® Facilitators
- We offer facilitation guides for various types of radars, including how to facilitate a big-room retrospective
- Coaches can be trained to facilitate the Continuous Leadership Readout & Planning Session that your Leaders will take to learn how to pull in the team's growth items they cannot resolve themselves. You can read about this later in the article.

Step 3: Launch

Retrospective Session Scheduling

Important: From here on in the article, if your organization is utilizing Big-Room Retrospectives, the steps are the same but are conducted in a much different manner. Please refer to our Big-Room Retrospectives article for information.

Each team's retrospective session, during which they will take their assessment, must be scheduled and invites need to be sent to the Team Members and the Facilitator. You need to assign a Facilitator to each retrospective so they can facilitate the discussion and building of the growth plan. Plan on 2.5-3 hours for the baseline assessment and 2-2.5 for each assessment the team takes thereafter. Managers/Leaders do not generally participate in the retrospective, so team members can speak freely. We'll talk about Manager Debrief/Leadership Readouts later.

Assessment Creation and Facilitator Assignment

Once a place and time have been established for the retrospectives, assessments can be created. Before creating assessments, the teams that will take each assessment must be created. This step has probably been completed by the time you are ready to create and launch assessments. If not, be sure to set up the teams first. If you're curious to see the questions that correlate to the assessment being sent, visit this article to learn how to view those.

Many companies utilize their AgilityHealth® Facilitators and Scrum Masters, who are set up as the user type of Team Admin, to create and launch each team's assessment. An assessment can be saved as a draft if you are still working on assigning Facilitators because you can assign them during assessment creation. In order to select a Facilitator for an assessment, they will have to complete the certification class and be tagged as an AHF in AgilityHealth®.

Launch Stakeholder Assessments Early

Many times, our team-based assessments also have an option for Stakeholders, who are not part of the team but are interested parties in the team's growth, to answer questions about the team. If you are using the TeamHealth® Radar, for example, Stakeholders are able to answer one or two questions and the team can see their answers when analyzing their results for comparison purposes.

Stakeholders could have been added when the team was being created, or you can edit the team and add them to the Stakeholder tab now. Once the assessment is created, it can be sent only to Stakeholders, to allow them time to answer the questions before the team will answer their questions. We recommend giving Stakeholders one week to answer the questions, prior to the retrospective session.

Launch Team Assessments and Deliver Retrospectives

During the retrospective session, the assessment can be launched to the Team Members and they will take their assessment with the Facilitator guiding them along the way. If the Stakeholders have responded to their questions, teams will be able to see those results as well.

Build Team Growth Plans

As the team is reviewing and analyzing their results, the Facilitator will review the radar image with them and talk through their strengths and opportunities. The Facilitator will also work with the team and the Scrum Master to build the team's growth items, which will become their growth plan. Most teams will end up with 2-3 team growth items to work on over the next quarter and 1-2 organizational items to escalate to Leadership. Scrum Masters are tasked with taking the team's growth items into their iterations/sprints and executing the growth plan.

Manager Debrief/Leadership Readout Sessions

Following a team's retrospective session, we suggest the Facilitator put together an overview of the results for the team's manager/leader, called a Manager Debrief/Leadership Readout. If the Manager/Leader has more than one team, the team's results could be rolled up into a Multi-Team to show the Manager/Leader information across all their teams.

Step 4: Post-Launch

After every team has completed their assessments, depending on your organization's wishes, some or all Managers/Leaders may become part of the Continuous Improvement Leadership Team that resolves the organizational growth items the team escalates to Leadership during their retrospectives.

In order for the Leadership Team to understand how to analyze the team's results and create their backlog, we recommend a Continuous Improvement Readout and Planning Session for Leaders. This session can be taught by an Agile Coach who goes through our workshop on how to facilitate this session for Leaders.

In the Continuous Improvement Readout and Planning Session for Leaders, Leaders will form their Continuous Improvement Leadership Teams. These teams will:

Learn how to roll up and analyze data across all teams
Develop their Continuous Improvement Plan
Establish a cadence and checkpoints to measure their progress
Demo impediment removal accomplishments to the teams regularly

Utilizing AgilityHealth® Dashboards

As a Company Admin, you have access to all of our powerful dashboards. You can learn all about our dashboards by clicking on each one:

Additional Functionality

Growth Portal - the growth portal is a great way for individuals and teams to help themselves grow. It can be accessed while the team is analyzing their radar results or at any other time.
Reports - as a Company Admin, you can run some reports on your data yourself. Visit the Reports icon at the top of your screen.

Scaling AgilityHealth®

As your organization grows in the utilization of AgilityHealth®, we've created a few road maps to help you plan your growth. Check out the Strategic and Executive Road maps.

Along the way, you may want to pull additional radars into your organization; be sure to check out our Radar Inventory and Guidance.

You may also want to provide additional training and workshops to your organization. Refer to our Workshops and Training.

Don't miss our Enterprise Business Agility Model. This model provides guidance for leading a business agility transformation and incorporates many of our AgilityHealth Radars.

How can we help you?