How do you deploy agility across a company?

The context in which Map & Match was used

Map & Match worked with one of its clients on an organisational shift to agile. An external consultant, a specialist in setting up agile processes, had done their part — and the IT director was then left with the harder problem: getting the teams to make those new ways of working their own.

What was the Map & Match platform used for?

The main challenge was to keep the agile philosophy alive inside the company culture. To help people take ownership of the new processes and make them last, the IT director and the transformation project lead decided to rely on the Map & Match platform.

Their questions were:

• How do we identify the people most naturally drawn to the specific roles agile requires (Scrum Master and others)?
• How do we help the project teams that already exist perform better?

With Map & Match, the answers took shape around three objectives:

• Identify the profiles most suited to the specific roles of agile.
• Build agile squads that are genuinely diverse and complementary.
• Give each person their best role, hiring included.

How Map & Match supported the project

Within the Scrum framework, Map & Match invites a team to look at:

• its productive performance;
• the quality of the interactions inside it;
• its own dynamic, which is what its performance ultimately rests on.

People end up sharing a common vocabulary for reading their own internal dynamic, and understand at the same time how to adapt to their environment and fit into it.

Everyone also gets a clearer grip on their role — Scrum Masters and Product Owners in particular — thanks to the Map & Match role profiles, defined specifically for the needs of agile and Scrum teams (see below).

The engagement ran in several steps:

Step 1: presenting the platform and the Map & Match approach to the IT department. That conversation with the leaders in charge of the agile transformation is what identifies and confirms the project.

Step 2: to roll the platform out to everyone, each person completed their T5 Profile^TM, followed by an individual debrief on what naturally drives them. People were then invited to share their profile with their team, so that everyone could see the dynamics and drivers of their colleagues — and understand what will make working together easy, or hard.

Step 3: to make the shift last, the project lead was trained on the platform so as to run the programme independently. From that point on, they were able to debrief each profile, support each person in their agile role, enrich the hiring process by having candidates complete their T5 Profile^TM, build squads, and support the managers of existing teams as agile processes took hold.

Step 4: Map & Match then checked that the squads matched the agile role profiles — that the T5 Talents^TM were well spread across them — and adjusted the teams where they were not.

Step 5: finally, the leadership team used Map & Match in hiring, to complete the squads. Having candidates take the T5^TM assessment says a great deal about what they genuinely enjoy doing, and gives real reassurance about fit and cohesion.

What the platform delivered on agility

Mapping every person's profile showed where the squads were complementary and where they were not — and therefore where the friction and the points to watch were.

Working from the French IT job framework (SIGREF), Map & Match also characterised the T5 Talents^TM each of the main agile roles calls for (the Product Owner role is shown below).

With that reference in hand, the IT director could check whether the people holding a role also had the natural drivers needed to sustain it over time.

The benefits of the Map & Match approach were to:

• help project managers work better with their teams, by combining role profiles with the map of the team;
• support people moving into specific new roles, or move them to a different role — which for some came as a relief.

The platform helped embed a company culture built on collaboration and agility, and make it last.