About us

Vision & purpose of crewlevel

Last Update: 2022/11/28

Hi there,

my name is Stefan Klaffke and I am the founder / developer of crewlevel. If you were wondering who’s behind this app and what the purpose and vision of this project is, then the next few lines are for you.

Have you ever heard of business benchmarking? It’s a method to compare your company with other companies in order to find out how they perform and which areas need improvement. This was one of the topics when I studied logistics in the last 90ies. We had a professor who told us that we should always be aware of our competitors and their strengths and weaknesses. This way we could improve our own performance. Benchmarking can be used both internally (within an organization) and externally (to compare organizations). It is a way to measure the performance of your organization. Benchmarking follows usually a set of steps:

  1. Identify the problem or opportunity
  2. Define the scope of the benchmark
  3. Select the right data
  4. Analyze the data
  5. Interpret the results
  6. Develop recommendations
  7. Implement the recommendations
  8. Evaluate the implementation
  9. Monitor the results
  10. Review the process
  11. Repeat

Does it sound familiar with modern Agile Assessments? Well, it does! The only difference is that Agile Assessment focuses often on individual teams while Business Benchmarking focuses on the entire organization.

During my professional career I was responsible for maintenance and improvements of a supplier's performance management system at an automotive company creating weekly tens of various KPI and assessments for thousands of suppliers. This impressive input was taken for a 360° feedback to review and work regularly on performance improvements of each suppliers (based on the benchmarking process, see above).

For more than fifteen (15) years, I've worked in agile projects and programs at all levels. One of the questions which were raised often by managers is: "How agile are we?" Or even better: "Do we really use agile methods?". To help answer these specific types of question, I created individual reports, searches and assessments.

Vision

Why I am telling you all those things? Because this is my own personal experience which has gone into creating the comprehensive app CrewLevel.

The idea behind crewlevel is simple:

A tool to help you assess the current state of your organization (value stream, tribe, etc.) and its progress of its agile journey.

But what is the difference to those agile assessment tools? They are obviously great tools to measure at a specific point. Regular retrospectives within your teams are also great to identify what goes well and what needs to be improved. But where do you store the outcomes of those inspect & adopt sessions, then? And if you want to do an assessment you need first maybe some input basis and KPIs (key performance indicators) as basis for evaluation to set the stage. Later, when you have conducted your assessments or retrospectives and identified improvements measures, I often realize that those are stored somehow in Excel sheets or somewhere else and often forgotten or only looked after just short before the next retrospectives. A board remotely available for teams and other stakeholders containing only those special type of tasks is often missing. Another issue to be mentioned, if an improvement measure was executed how did your rate that whose outcome was successful or not? Is it possible to link the outcome of an improvement measure to your performance?

"Why can't we just use JIRA for this?"

You may ask yourself. Well, because JIRA is not designed for such things. It is mainly focused on software development and monitoring the progress and their outcomes (the what instead of the how value was created). But if you want to know regularly whether and how your company uses agile methods or not, whether your teams or customers are happy you need something else. And that is exactly why I created crewlevel.

With crewlevel you get a central database where you can store all your data for improvement measuring. You can easily share it with team members, managers and clients. You can easily connect and collect data from your workflow system and analyze important KPIs. You can also track your progress over time and check which improvements help to bring the teams and forward. You remember the benchmarking process above? That is exactly what crewlevel does. It tries to bring your organization forward by continuous measuring of internal teams.

Is that all?

Sharing is caring - Encourage your teams to support each other by sharing their knowledge of improvement tasks and being rewarded for doing so is another key principle of crewlevel.

Remember - what does Amdahl's laws says about parallelism?

Amdahl’s law states that the speedup achieved by adding additional processors depends on the ratio between the fraction of the problem that can be solved simultaneously and the fraction of the problem remaining after the addition of extra processors.

This means that when you have multiple tasks running in parallel, the speedup gained by adding more processors depends on the relative difficulty of the different tasks. The more difficult a task is, the less benefit will be obtained from increasing the number of processors used. If we look at this from an organizational perspective, the most important factor for determining whether an organization has successfully adopted agile practices is the degree to which each team within the organization adopts agile practices. If you're willing to take advantage of crewlevel, overcome team silo mentality, and support each other during an agile transformation, then you can accelerate the process.

We believe that teams should be rewarded for their high performance, but they should also be recognized for their knowledge sharing and collaboration among each other. We believe that the best way to achieve this is through transparency and communication as well through a collaborative platform such as crewlevel. Don't blame your teams for a bad performance but credit them for continuous improvements work.

crewlevel is based on the premise that there is no silver bullet to Agile adoption. There are many factors that influence its success. Some of these include:

  • Team culture
  • leadership commitment
  • Management buy
  • mindset of ongoing, continuous change

In summary, crewlevel is a tool that helps you to measure and improve your agile adoption. It provides you with insights into your current state and allows you to set goals for future improvement.

We hope that you enjoy using crewlevel and join us on providing a free, open and unified collaboration platform!

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