Case Study

Fortune 500 Healthcare Company Increases overall Team Agility by 31% with AgilityHealth®

Industry: Healthcare

Number of Teams: 384

Timeframe: 1 year

A top 50 Fortune 500 healthcare company faced a tremendous amount of disruption in their industry. Always looking to innovate to get ahead of the competition, they implemented AgilityHealth® across 354 teams, saw a 31% overall Team Agility increase (34% maturity, 6% performance). 

Quantitative and qualitative data was reported by individual team members. Then, growth items identified and completed by leaders and teams. As a result this company is on a trajectory for market success.

Agile Maturity

34% ↑

Performance

6% ↑

Overall Agility

31%

Maturity + Performance = Agility

The company’s overall team maturity increased by 33% and performance by 6%. 

Challenge

This healthcare leader prides itself on continuous innovation striving to both improve access to care and simplify delivery. They were reacting to unexpected competition entering the market as well as a complex regulatory influence. Their impact is substantial in the space considering they serve more than 40 million people while the corporate goal is to always justify value to new and current customers.

They recognized the need to measure maturity, performance and overall health of teams, keep the results in one place, and integrate with other systems. After one year, they were ready obtain a baseline for ~400 teams. This was no easy feat with a significant amount of change ensuing across the enterprise.

Solution

AgilityHealth TeamHealth® Assessment Radars
Champions in the Center of Excellence purchased AgilityHealth and slowly introduced it to several lines of business. It was not mandatory, but once teams started to realize the power of assessing themselves, its popularity spread. AgilityHealth created structure and standards around measurement which made it easy to adopt. 

“The assessments give the teams a voice. Often, it looks like teams are complaining or whining, whereas now it’s constructive and effective feedback. The anonymity is perfect,” director-level portfolio lead. 

Within two years several lines of business were using the following radars and seeing results:

  • TeamHealth 2.5 
  • Agile Coach
  • SAFe Release Train Health
  • Agile Leadership
  • SAFe DevOps

Find out more about our various radars and how they can be used to measure what matters. 

Growth Items
They identified several areas for growth during the team retrospectives.  A retrospective is a healthy and open discussion to analyze radar results and review strengths and top impediments to growth.

Growth items are compiled and tracked in AgilityHealth. Some items identified by this healthcare powerhouse included the following: 

  • Dedicated in-house testers. 
  • Improved sprint and release planning, backlog grooming, and dependency identification.
  • Allocate resources 100% and reduce frequency of adjustments/movement.
  • Established/communicated clarity around vision and purpose.
  • Quicker, easier access to accurate test data.

Noteworthy is that leaders embraced and took on the organizational items–those items that fall outside of the team’s control–and made a lot of progress.

They also utilized the Growth Portal. Built into the platform, the Portal provides a self-service place to find resources and guidance on what to areas to focus.

AgilityHealth® Radars display health and maturity across each dimension as rated by the team members themselves. Here the rollup data shows the increase on competencies within the TeamHealth Radar during 2019. Certainly the focus on Growth Items contributed to the improvements.

Results

Continuous measurement and growth is embraced!

We could not have gotten this far without AgilityHealth.” 

Multiple lines of business now fully embody the value and power of measuring the health and maturity of teams.

Progress proved across the enterprise
Teams worked to grow in several competencies using AgiltyHealth and the efforts paid off.

Areas of growth for teams include Culture, Foundation, Clarity. In large companies, small changes make big impact.

Growth items
Teams across multiple organizations identified more than 100 team-level growth items and improved on all of them. Sixteen organizational growth items (OGIs) were managed by leaders and showed improvements. Items included focus on process improvement, leadership, and planning among others. These tie right into competencies found in AgilityHealth.  

Conclusion

Success became evident using AgilityHealth among teams. We then introduced the Enterprise Business Agility and they are adopting the concept by mimicking a portfolio rollout of AgilityHealth within each internal organization. In doing so, they are adapting Lean Portfolio Management: Lean thinking to manage portfolios and provide a fast, flexible flow of high-value work. 

Ten EBA workshop days are scheduled for 2020 starting with the Enterprise Baseline Jump Start to establish baseline measurements in health and maturity across portfolios. They want to gain a holistic view of maturity and performance, analyze patterns and implement enterprise improvement plans. All to further their mission and continue to prove value to their customers. Additional benefits include breaking down silos across business and information technology teams and making the case for which projects should be funded moving forward.