I do agree with you on the fact that the teams are not aligned and ‘Agile’ is not the solution. My comment was oriented more towards prioritization.

About metrics, you are right. ‘HPA claims’ and ‘ISD claims’ are not measured on the same metrics though the value stream encompasses both groups. I’m excited about the new PAs (I still have not seen it yet) where the metrics is more oriented towards behaviour.

Anand

You are far more connected to the work then I am so I thank you for your comments.

I do believe that we still have alignment problems across the production system. We still struggle on a daily basis in keeping operational teams aligned, let alone supporting teams.

I believe Agile provides a lot of value in helping bridge this gap, but I would argue that just because the business teams make decisions on what the priorities are of IT projects moving forward does not mean that teams will be in alignment. Alignment will result only when the management and measurement systems come together in support of the Value Stream. Toyota has mastered this alignment and when the Andon cord gets pulled everyone knows what needs to be done to get the production line up and moving and the root cause of the problem fixed.

Please don’t take my post as being critical, I believe the work being done on both sides of the house is impressive and encouraging. And I agree 100% with your comment about change, it will take time and a lot of hard work. The important part will be that we keep learning and working together to solve the hard problems!

Thanks for the post,

Lee

I work in Claims Information Sytems (IS) group and we are following the Agile development methodology. In this new process, the business sets the priorities and not the IS group. The prioritization happens every month based on the need. So the discussion of aligning priorities between the processing group and the IS group does not make sense.

But, to a certain extent, what is mentioned is true. This is regarding the urgency to get something done by both groups. Claims IS group does not support just HPA Claims. They support the Web team, Finance, Contracts, eWatson, etc. This is just one reason why priorities are a little different.

The problem here goes back to an older post on managing change. Not all groups are changing at the same time and this is the disconnect. Though we cannot use a big-bang approach, this is something we have to live with during the transition phase and we are all still learning.