Agile team Benchmark for a Dutch Insurance Company

The Issue at hand

This Dutch insurance company has gone through an agile transformation and agile development teams (internal, hybrid, and external) are now developing new functionality for the different applications, e.g., the website, the reservation system, the claim system, etc. The CIO of the company had to demonstrate to its stakeholders that the agile transformation was a success and that the Value for Money produced by the teams is at least market average compared to similar companies.

The Service Provided

The company CIO asked for an Agile Team Benchmarking project to understand the value for money spent and how this compares to industry peers. The approach used was the following:

• A number of teams were selected that were within the scope of the measurement

• Of all these teams, a set of sprints was selected to measure

• A certified FPA analyst measured the functional size delivered by these teams in these sprints.

• In the meantime, data was collected of these sprints: e.g., effort hours spent per function, defects found, and resolved.

• Using the data and the functional size delivered, the following metrics were calculated:

  • Productivity (hours spent per FP delivered).

  • Cost Efficiency (Cost spent per FP delivered).

  • Delivery Speed (FP delivered per calendar month).

  • Process Quality (Defects per FP).

• These metrics were benchmarked against carefully selected peer groups based on factors such as the technology used, industry sector, team size, etc.

• In addition, a code quality measurement was carried out to understand the maintainability, performance, security, robustness, and transferability of the code.

The outcomes achieved

All results were reported to both management and to the teams, where the teams also got an actionable plan to improve the metrics and code quality. The benchmark actually showed that the Team performance of the internal and hybrid teams could be improved, as the metrics showed somewhat worse performance against the peer groups. The external team in scope, however, scored much better metrics and also managed to get the code quality up to a very high standard, without any critical violations of important rules and best practices.

After implementing the recommendations, a second measurement took place after half a year. In this benchmark, the internal and hybrid teams showed significant improvements of both team performance and code quality. The conclusion was that all teams in scope now demonstrated to produce at least market average value for money compared to the industry, and some teams well above.

The Agile Team Benchmark allowed the CIO to regain complete transparency regarding his value delivery function and to demonstrate to his stakeholders that he is in control and that his teams are performing within expectations.