Fortune 100 Company Redesigns An Enterprise Agile Assessment

This case study highlights the agile assessment built on the 9Lenses platform by a major financial services company that specializes in credit cards, home and auto loans, and banking and savings products. 

A Fortune 100 financial services company needed to assess their company’s agile health.

This 9Lenses customer needed to assess the maturity of the company’s overall agility. Company leaders had led the initiative to take their IT department’s agile approach and promote it across the entire organization, ensuring that every part of the company was operating according to agile principles.

Manual methods of agile assessment were insufficient

Previously, the company ran an annual agile health assessment using a survey provider to collect information around agility from each department. The data would then be exported to Microsoft Excel, and the coaches of each department would analyze the results.

These manual tools proved insufficient to obtain the kind of results the company needed to truly understand each department’s agile maturity. The surveys were time-consuming and included as many as 150 questions, which resulted in a low response rate. Data was thus limited, lessening the value of the project.

Additionally, there was no standardized approach to the agility assessments. Every leader who ran the assessment was reinventing the wheel every time, and there were as many as seventeen different versions of the assessment throughout the organization. Nor was the data collected in a centralized place, where different departments could compare their results and learn from each other. Due to the lack of standardization, the company was unable to benchmark their data and measure the company’s progress in becoming more agile.

Attracted by the tailored analytic views and benchmarking capabilities that the 9Lenses platform provides, the company decided to use 9Lenses to run the agile health assessment.

9Lenses enabled the company to improve its approach to measuring agile health

Instead of using a survey and Excel to measure agile health across the organization, the company built an interview on the 9Lenses platform, reducing the 100+ survey questions to 9 deep-diving topic areas. Whereas the previous survey took participants over an hour to complete, the 9Lenses interview took only 20 minutes, a huge efficiency gain for participants. Because the 9Lenses interview was so much easier to complete, the response rate increased by 50%, and the quality of the data was vastly improved, allowing the coaches of each department to do in-depth segmented analysis. With the results, the coaches of each department were able to recommend solutions based on the weak points they identified.

Because the 9Lenses interview and the data collected were stored in one central location, the data was easily shareable between the coaches of each department, and the interview was consistent across the organization.

The company was able to standardize the assessment and run it recurrently, benchmarking on past data in order to measure improvement.

Using 9Lenses, the company created an enterprise solution for assessing agile health

Due to the success of the 9Lenses agile assessment, the company decided to use the 9Lenses platform as the basis of an enterprise solution to improve agile health and team health. Team leaders were able to use the anonymous communication feature to reach out to individual participants to gather more in-depth information, and coaches were able to view other teams’ data in order to learn from other departments.

To date, the interview has collected data from 14,000 respondents.

To learn more about what 9Lenses can do for your organization, request a demo today!