Agile Team Benchmark for Novamedia

The Issue at hand

Novamedia runs multiple agile development teams across four countries and knows agile ways of working can bring real benefits — but, left unmonitored, can also produce large budget and schedule overruns. It wanted an objective read on team performance it could track and improve over time.

The Service Provided

We did an Agile Team Benchmark across all four country teams, measuring a few sprints using the ISO/IEC 19761:2011 COSMIC function point standard:

• Value created, measured as COSMIC Function Points added, modified, and removed.

• Productivity (effort hours per unit of value), Cost Efficiency (cost per unit of value), Delivery Speed (value per calendar month), and Sprint Quality (defects per unit of value).

• A best-practice Assessment to explain differences in performance between teams.

• Benchmarking each team against a peer group using similar technologies.

The outcomes achieved

Every team reported real value from the exercise — a clearer understanding of how to focus on value creation and which best practices to adopt to improve further. Novamedia senior management received a comprehensive, cross-team and cross-industry comparison that surfaced genuinely useful insights about what set the stronger teams apart, plus a foundation for more accurate cost estimation and business-case analysis once a productivity baseline exists for every team.

Deliverables

A cross-team, cross-country comparison report covering Value, Productivity, Cost Efficiency, Delivery Speed, and Sprint Quality, together with a best-practice assessment and a peer benchmark for each team.