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Tailored Agile Solutions

Insight and action plans for building better, more valuable software

Whether you already consider yourself Agile, or you are on some form of Agile transformation journey right now, we can help. Not by implementing a canned process but by working side by side with your team to understand your unique situation and building a tailored plan that leads to better software delivery and better business outcomes.

 

Continuous improvement is continuous change. The confusion, anxiety, and frustration that accompanies change can be mitigated when technology leaders are clear-eyed about their team's skills, processes, engineering practices, and culture. If you’re frustrated about your organization’s inability to adapt, then chances are you haven’t fully accounted for these elements in your strategy. That’s where Upslope comes in. We are agile experts and senior software engineers that understand how high-performing product engineering teams work on the front lines.  We collaborate with your team to diagnose problems and design and implement action plans that help you embrace the work of continuous improvement and unleash your organization's potential. 

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The Process

Consultation

A free initial conversation to discuss the vision and goals you have set for your team, the challenges you face as you understand them, a broad overview of the organizational structure, existing processes and engineering practices, and the key technologies in use. From this initial consultation we will mutually determine if Upslope is a good fit to support your needs. If so, we will provide a proposal for an Assessment engagement. ​

Assessment

Our Assessment process consists of senior engineers and agile experts embedding with your team to observe how product ideas are converted to fully-deployed software. By embedding with your developers and product team members as they perform their daily work we are able to get first-hand, reliable data of what we call "capability signals” - indicators of potential bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. We group these signals into the following broad categories:

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  • Product & Process

    • Work in progress

    • End to end product visibility

    • Experimentation

    • Customer feedback

    • Waste

  • People

    • Culture

    • Skill

    • Knowledge

  • IT

    • Architecture

    • Strategy

  • Programming

    • Code quality

    • Test automation

  • Devops

    • CI/CD

    • Data strategy

Consensus

We will present our Assessment findings and build a shared understanding with key stakeholders of how low-performance signals are impacting your organizational effectiveness. Through this process we will also discuss high-value opportunities for improvement, focusing on high-impact changes we can either do quickly or must start immediately on account of long lead times for improvement (e.g., re-skilling requirements or core architectural changes).

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Once we reach consensus on the critical problems and their priority level, we will build a proposed implementation strategy. 

Implementation

This is when we put the plan into action. Our goal is to "teach you to fish". Continuous improvement never ends and you don't want to be left out in the cold after we leave.  This is why skill and knowledge building is such a critical piece of any action plan. In addition to training and education, a typical implementation action plan includes elements of coaching, mentoring, thought leadership, pair programming, code review, data strategy, policy creation and documentation, and consensus building. 

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At all times we are mindful of the pitfalls of change fatigue (i.e., confusion, frustration, resistance, anxiety, apathy) and aim to avoid them by adhering to solid change management principles. ​

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Most importantly, we must remember that this type of work is complex and emergent, characterized by “unknown unknowns” and is complicated by the fact that our very actions can change the situation in unpredictable ways. You can think of any implementation action plan as a “best guess”, but success will hinge less on the plan as written and more on our ability to collectively sense and respond to new information and remain focused on outcomes in the face of changing conditions. 

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