Integration and Tooling
Create Visibility and Flow with an Optimized and Integrated Agile Toolchain
Enabling Your Organization
As Agilists, we know the Agile Manifesto famously says, “We have come to value Individuals and Interactions over process and tools.” But we also know that people need to have the right tools to do their jobs and that in today’s remote and distributed world having the right tools is an absolute necessity. Additionally, we know that automating our processes is one of the ways to eliminate waste and go fast. The key is selecting the best tool that aligns with how your people work together and enables flow, transparency, and actionable metrics.
Agile transformation and adoption initiatives are often accompanied by implementation using Agile Life-cycle Management (ALM) tools. SAFe and Agile at Scale implementations in large organizations often face the challenge of consolidating or integrating many existing ALM integrations, as well as implementing Value Stream Management (VSM) or Lean Portfolio Management solutions across the enterprise. And DevOps transformations require automation and integration across a host of requirements, development, testing, deployment, and monitoring tools.
Our experienced team has been helping large enterprises evaluate and choose the right tooling and integration solutions for more than 10 years. We have worked with all of the major ALM and VSM solutions, and are authorized service providers and resellers for many of them. We only work with the best solutions in each category, and we accelerate your tooling selection and implementation through our expertise and experience. The Agile Rising team will help your organization maximize your investment in tooling, help ensure you get the right solution for your approach, and create and execute a rollout and training strategy.
Our tooling expertise runs the breadth of the Agile, Product
Management, Software Development, and DevOps spectrum, including:
- Integration, traceability, and flow solutions
- ALM, VSM, and work-flow tooling
- Lean Portfolio Management and TBM solutions
- Metrics and reporting
- Team and organizational health and maturity
- Workshop facilitation and team collaboration
Integration and Metrics
For many organizations, the initial challenge is how to get the most from the tooling solutions you already have and how new ALM or VSM solutions being added to the ecosystem will integrate with those existing tools. The foundation for a system that provides visibility, metrics, and flow through the end-to-end process is integration. Our integration experts can help you select, configure, and integrate the right tools to meet your goals.
Agile Rising is a Targetprocess Implementation Partner. Targetprocess is a visual platform that helps organizations scale agile across the enterprise to achieve business agility and see the value flow through the entire organization. Teams and organizations can plan and manage work with agile tools from ideation, planning, task tracking, workflow automation to investment and project and portfolio planning. Accomplishing these tasks requires integrations with a variety of systems to both get accurate costing information and to automate your workflows. Targetprocess helps achieve business agility and visibility of the value flow through the entire organization.
ALM Tooling Selection and Configuration
Agile Rising has been helping organizations evaluate and select Agile Life-Cycle Management tooling since 2009, and we have been on the forefront of helping companies expand to SAFe, Agile at scale, and DevOps implementation with the new generations of Value Stream Management Solutions. We have experts with deep experience in each of today’s major tooling solutions, so we can give you expert advice on what to pick, run product evaluations and comparisons, or work with your team to optimize the configuration of the tools you already have.
Our deep expertise includes:
- Jira Administration, integrating multiple instances, custom extensions and ad-ons
- Rally, Implementation and services partner since 2010
- VersionOne/Digital.ai, Implementation and services partner
- Planview/LeanKit/Tasktop, Implementation partner
- Apptio/Targetprocess
Portfolio Management Solutions
Scaling to the Lean Portfolio Management level and implementing SAFe and other scaling frameworks requires the right tools to provide management visibility, financial tracking, and roll-up reporting from team-level tools. The first key is designing a Lean Portfolio Management process that is appropriate for your organization, which our experienced consultants can help you do. But you also need the right tooling solution. Some ALMs will provide portfolio management capability, but for many organizations, a dedicated LPM solution is called for.
Our Portfolio Management Solution experience includes:
- Planview
- TargetProcess
- Jira Align
- Microsoft One Plan
- Rally/Clarity
Team and Organizational Health
Assessing business agility and the effectiveness of Agile teams and large programs is not a trivial feat. Leaders and team members are often looking for actionable feedback and input into developing continuous improvement plans. The most effective way to get this high-quality data is through a regular cadence of facilitated assessments, specifically focused on each team in the organization.
Agile Rising’s certified facilitators are experts with a variety of assessment tools including AgilityHealth Radars, Comparative Agility, SAFe Assessments, and creating custom assessments tailored for your organization. Our facilitators will develop an assessment and growth strategy for your organization and facilitate in-depth retrospective and assessment sessions with your team members.
Facilitation and Collaboration
Agile Rising’s coaches and facilitators are experts in leading workshops, facilitating large group planning sessions, and delivering remote training solutions, and we provide an interactive digital classroom experience. Conducting these events in a remote, distributed manner requires not just the right facilitation skills, but also the right collaboration tools.
We can help your organization adopt tools that work for you, from video and conferencing tools like MS Teams, to white-boarding tools like Mural and Miro, to the Agile Rising Digital Classroom, to maximize the learning experience.
