Evolving A Continuous Improvement System
Dan Craig, Fannie Mae
In one of the top-rated sessions at the EBA Summit, Dan Craig shared key learnings from building a continuous improvement system across 240 Agile teams at Fannie Mae. He emphasized that continuous improvement is not just about team retrospectives—it’s about building a connected, intentional ecosystem involving people, processes, leadership, and culture.
Dan’s presentation and slides can be found here.
Background
- One single company, 2 large business units, 240 agile teams
- Multiple scaling frameworks
- Seeking to find ways to connect the teams with their customer/s & with leadership, engage them as true service teams
Challenges
- No clear vision or the target state – teams were unclear of the desired target state
- Leadership was disengaged and relied on traditional management
- No consistent or meaningful metrics – there was significant variance in tooling and inconsistent process, making organic and quantifiable metrics difficult to capture and gain insights from
- Little to no structure for improvement – newly formed agile CoE & the enterprise had limited change management plans alongside inconsistent metrics
Actions Taken
- Pilot (30+ teams)
- Defined a targeted vision
- Created an agile maturity model
- Published an agile playbook
- Developed a metrics dashboard at the team & program level
- Measured with consistency
- Set-up a quarterly cadence for TeamHealth Retrospectives
Learnings & Results
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Data alone wasn’t enough—structure and conversation were key
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Quarterly cadence helped solidify maturity and transparency
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Escalation of growth items and impediments became real-time and effective
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The Growth Portal allowed idea sharing and innovation
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Team and leadership engagement increased
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Valuable insights were gained for future planning and investment
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Leadership began to model change and demo outcomes
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Outcome-based dashboards helped track speed, stability, quality, and satisfaction
While they are still learning how to best prioritize and focus on the delivery of outcomes with speed, today, the continuous improvement system consists of a structured approach, engaged leadership, a changed culture & meaningful metrics….not just empty words.
Want to Learn More?
- Learn more about AgilityHealth®
- Measurement & Continuous Improvement Strategy