Agile teams bring constant business value

IT consultancy company Knowit has been the partner of KONE in research and development services for 17 years. KONE is a global leader in people flow solutions. The company 
aims to make people's journeys safe, convenient and reliable with a portfolio of elevators and escalators, as well as solutions for maintenance, modernisation and new digital services. KONE is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in Helsinki Finland

The new team model was built to achieve high results and speed up the client's research and development. Agile team model is based on the principles of agile team building, which enables more effective and continuous development. The team is a mix of developers with different competencies and experiences that complete each other. However, team members and roles can vary, since the team is aimed to be optimal and to be able to respond to the project competence needs.

"Knowit agile team enables us together with the client to boost their business and development methods. The client has a high performing and scalable agile team that helps them to develop modern services and products. Utilizing data for decision making allows us to react rapidly with the correct operations. The team is greater than its single member, and the agile team has all the elements to execute successful collaboration between committed professionals", says Harri Salminen, the Business Unit Director of Knowit.

Knowit agile team's performance is analyzed with three metrics: team happiness, competence confidences, and work focus. Measurement helps the team to develop their performance and provide on-time solutions. Measurements have an important role for teams, as they provide indicators of changed situations on time since measures are taken on a bi-weekly basis. For example, one of the measurement metrics is team happiness, and changes in team mood can be detected using measurement results. That makes it possible to identify the problem and determine its root causes. Once the causes are identified, the problem can be solved together with the client. All necessary actions can be taken based on the findings.

Competence confidence measures how well each team member positions their competence against the current tasks. Qualification metrics help to allocate adequately sized responsibilities with the right persons and to keep them motivated. People in the team remain motivated when they each have suitably challenging tasks relative to their competence level. In the team model, the focus is also on developing the team's competence levels, so this allows team members to develop their competencies.

The third metric represents the work focus. The purpose of this is to ensure that working time is used optimally for the project. Measurements can be used to monitor if there are deviations in focus. Once the deviations are identified, they can be solved together with the client. The purpose of all the measurements is to follow up with the team and to make sure that their work time is spent on optimal project tasks while at the same time ensuring progress in development.