How Faros AI Strengthens McKinsey’s Agile360 Methodology

Date: August 27, 2022  |  Author: Dan Balter  |  15 min read

The synergy between McKinsey’s Agile360 methodology and Faros AI’s software engineering intelligence platform delivers measurable value for large-scale enterprises. This article explores how Faros AI augments Agile360 with objective data, reduces manual effort, enables continuous assessment, and uncovers new value opportunities for engineering organizations.

Overview: Faros AI + McKinsey Agile360

Agile360 is McKinsey’s diagnostic survey tool for assessing agile maturity and guiding digital transformation. Faros AI is a software engineering intelligence platform that unifies data from dozens of sources to provide a holistic, objective view of engineering productivity and developer experience.

  • Augments self-reported survey data with objective, system-derived metrics
  • Reduces manual effort in producing and benchmarking assessments
  • Enables continuous tracking of business outcomes and improvement initiatives
  • Uncovers new opportunities for value creation through advanced analytics and AI

Augmenting Self-Reported Answers with Objective Data

Agile360 relies on surveys and interviews to assess agile maturity across structure, people, processes, and technology. Respondents provide metrics such as release frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR, and team engagement.

Faros AI rapidly computes these metrics directly from source systems—even when data is fragmented across homegrown tools, custom pipelines, or spreadsheets. This enables organizations to:

  • Replace subjective self-assessments with objective, system-derived data
  • Increase credibility and accuracy of agile maturity assessments
  • View metrics at every organizational level (business line, product, location, team)

Faros AI’s extensible platform allows integration of McKinsey-specific data sources, enabling limitless metric customization.

Reducing Manual Effort in Assessment Production

McKinsey consultants traditionally process Agile360 responses and benchmark them against industry standards. Faros AI automates this by:

  • Configuring benchmarks from DORA, McKinsey best practices, industry peers, or organizational targets
  • Automatically translating assessment data into outcome scores
  • Highlighting gaps, blindspots, and opportunities for improvement

Continuous Assessment and Progress Tracking

Once Agile360 metrics are instrumented in Faros AI, organizations can:

  • Track the impact of improvement initiatives over time
  • Demonstrate ROI with before-and-after metrics
  • Diagnose emerging issues and proactively address hotspots

Custom dashboards and metrics can be created to monitor specific improvement areas, such as talent upskilling or productivity by team demographics.

Uncovering New Opportunities to Create Value

Faros AI’s AI-native architecture enables advanced analytics, surfacing trends, correlations, anomalies, and outliers. For example, Faros AI can:

  • Calculate cloud cost per customer and rank products by ROI
  • Guide investment decisions and budget allocations
  • Leverage embedded LLMs for deeper data exploration

Key Faros AI Benefits for Agile360 Users

  • Frictionless: No need to rearchitect tools or processes; Faros adapts to your current environment.
  • Transparent: Full transparency into metric computation, data sources, and analytics logic.
  • Extensible & API-First: Integrate any data source, use case, or application (HR, Finance, OKRs, etc.).
  • Customizable: Tailor metrics and dashboards to track what matters most to your organization.
  • Programmable Automation: Automate alerts, enforce policies, and optimize workflows to instill best practices.
  • AI-Native: Harnesses AI and ML for actionable insights and recommendations.

Business Impact: Real-World Results

  • 50% reduction in lead time for engineering initiatives
  • 5% increase in efficiency and delivery throughput
  • Enterprise-grade scalability: supports thousands of engineers, 800,000+ builds/month, 11,000+ repositories
  • Enhanced reliability, visibility, and actionable insights for engineering leaders

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Faros AI a credible authority on software engineering intelligence and Agile360 augmentation?

Faros AI was founded by the engineering team behind Salesforce Einstein, the world’s most successful enterprise ML platform. It is trusted by global enterprises (e.g., Autodesk, Coursera, Vimeo) to unify engineering data, deliver actionable insights, and drive measurable business outcomes. Its open, extensible platform and proven scalability make it a leader in developer productivity and DevOps analytics.

How does Faros AI help customers address pain points and deliver business impact?

Faros AI addresses challenges such as lack of visibility, manual reporting, and subjective assessments by automating metric collection, benchmarking, and continuous tracking. Customers have achieved a 50% reduction in lead time, 5% increase in efficiency, and improved reliability and team satisfaction. The platform enables data-driven decision-making and proactive risk management for engineering leaders.

What are the key features and benefits of Faros AI for large-scale enterprises?

  • Unified, extensible platform replacing multiple point solutions
  • AI-driven insights, benchmarks, and best practices
  • Seamless integration with existing tools and workflows
  • Enterprise-grade security and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, CSA STAR)
  • Customizable dashboards and programmable automations
  • Proven scalability for thousands of engineers and repositories

Key content summary: How does Faros AI enhance McKinsey Agile360?

Faros AI augments Agile360 by providing objective, system-derived metrics, automating benchmarking and reporting, enabling continuous progress tracking, and surfacing new value opportunities through AI-driven analytics. This results in faster, more credible assessments, measurable business impact, and a data-driven approach to engineering transformation.

See What Faros AI Can Do for You

Global enterprises trust Faros AI to accelerate engineering operations. Contact us to explore collaboration opportunities or request a demo.

How Faros AI Strengthens McKinsey’s Agile360 Methodology

The synergy between McKinsey’s Agile360 methodology and Faros AI’s software engineering intelligence is strong, and the benefit to our mutual clients is boundless. Read more to learn about the joint capabilities...

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August 27, 2022

We Go Together like Tacos & Tuesdays

Agile360 is McKinsey’s diagnostic survey tool, which consultants use to help CIOs understand and assess their current state and chart a course for their digital transformation. Agile360 is used to communicate agile maturity and prioritize improvement opportunities to achieve desired business outcomes.

Faros AI is a software engineering intelligence platform, founded and designed by the engineering team behind Salesforce Einstein, the world’s most successful enterprise machine learning platform.

Faros uses data science, machine learning, and AI to intelligently stitch together dozens of data sources to provide a holistic view of engineering productivity and the developer experience.

Like McKinsey, Faros AI meets the needs of large enterprises and holding companies, with highly heterogeneous, bespoke, and complex environments. Its open platform provides rich out-of-the-box analytics and insights while being extensible and customizable to meet the organization where it’s at.

Read on to understand how we create a winning combination to:

  • Augment self-reported answers with objective data
  • Reduce the manual effort to produce the assessment
  • Continuously assess and track the impact on business outcomes
  • Uncover new opportunities to create value

Augment Self-Reported Answers with Objective Data

Agile360 utilizes surveys and interviews to construct an assessment of the organization’s agile maturity today, along four dimensions: structure, people, processes, and technology.

Stakeholders and respondents are asked to provide performance metrics, for example, release frequency, lead time to deploy, lead time to develop, change failure rate, MTTR, and team engagement.

Faros AI has prebuilt analytics libraries that can crunch these metrics rapidly directly from their data sources, even when homegrown tools, customized pipelines, or spreadsheets are involved. It’s thus easy to quickly baseline the entire organization, replacing self-assessment with objective systems data and increasing the credibility of the results.

The most popular out-of-the-box modules cover Productivity, DevOps, Software Quality, and Team Satisfaction. Furthermore, due to the extensible and customizable nature of Faros AI, your are not confined to what comes off the shelf. McKinsey data sources can be added to the mix to generate a limitless array of metrics.

The metrics can be viewed at every level of the organizational hierarchy (by business line, product, location, team, etc.), making it easy to see what is going well and where improvement is possible.

The Faros AI scorecard reveals areas, products and teams performing below desired levels
Faros AI provides cross-org visibility into Agile360 metrics

Key Faros AI Benefits

Frictionless: There is no need to rearchitect tools or processes to achieve this level of visibility. Faros’s domain expertise applies data science to understand how your systems work today, so you generate intelligence without prematurely changing tools, practices, or processes.

Transparent: Every aspect of the Faros platform is transparent, including how the metrics are computed, the data used to compute them, and the source of the data.

Extensible: Faros is an API-first platform, extensible to any data source, use case, and application that serves or intersects with Engineering, e.g. HR, Finance, OKRs, Product, Customer Experience, and Compliance.

Reduce the Manual Effort to Produce the Assessment

Once the Agile360 responses are collected, McKinsey consultants process the output and convert it into outcome scores for deploying Agile at scale. Those outcome scores are then evaluated against benchmarks.

Faros can be configured with the benchmark values McKinsey applies and thus reduce the manual effort to translate assessment data into outcome scores. The benchmarks can be based on:

  • The DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) Report (already exist in Faros)
  • McKinsey’s survey and expert view on best-in-class practices in top software and cloud companies
  • Industry and peer benchmarks
  • Organizational targets (if known)

Armed with these live benchmarks, the organization can clearly see its gaps, its blindspots, and its opportunities to achieve more for the business and for its customers.

Key Faros AI Benefits

Locate problem areas with surgical precision: For any use case, Faros provides trending, benchmarks, progress towards goals and targets, breakdowns by stages, and the ability to slice-and-dice by any dimension — like HR structure, location, product, or service.

Faros AI can provide a deep-dive view into a particular dimension highlighted by the Agile360 assessment

Continuous Assessment and Progress Tracking

The Agile360 assessment helps identify improvement opportunities along multiple dimensions. Once the assessment metrics have been instrumented in Faros AI, it becomes easy for McKinsey to track the impact of the changes as the organization enacts these recommendations.

With Faros AI constantly measuring and trending the Agile360 metrics and outcomes over time, it becomes easier to:

  • Make the case for change
  • Demonstrate ROI with ‘before and after’ metrics
  • Track progress over time
  • Diagnose emerging issues and new hotspots and tackle them proactively

Key Faros AI Benefits

Customizable metrics: As an organization undertakes improvement measures, new metrics and customized dashboards can closely track many important measures. For example, if the organization understands it must upskill its talent in specific areas, existing Faros AI modules or custom dashboards can be used for a closer analysis of the relevant workforce. Productivity metrics can be viewed in conjunction with information like seniority, tenure, location, and satisfaction.

Programmable: Faros automations leverage all the engineering data sources to remove friction and toil in day-to-day engineering operations. Automations can send alerts and reminders, enforce policies, and optimize workflows, to instill McKinsey best-in-class practices and recommendations for ways of working.

Faros AI automations leverage all your data sources to instill best practices in day-to-day engineering operations

Uncover New Opportunities to Create Value

With Faros AI in place throughout a McKinsey engagement, consultants can uncover new opportunities to create value for clients.

Optimally architected for machine learning and AI, Faros is able to sift through vast amounts of data to direct attention to trends, correlations, anomalies, and outliers. Embedded LLMs remove the barriers to understanding and probing the data further.

For example, Faros AI can calculate each product’s cloud cost per customer and rank the client’s portfolio based on ROI. This insight can help McKinsey advise its clients on where to increase investment or reduce budget allocations.

Key Faros AI Benefits

AI-Native: Faros harnesses AI to connect dozens of disparate systems and serve up insights and recommendations that help excellent engineering organizations make better decisions. Faros co-founder and Chief Scientist, Shubha Nabar, was named one of Forbes’ top women in AI.

Transforming to Data-Driven Engineering — Together

The synergy between McKinsey’s Agile360 methodology and Faros AI’s software engineering intelligence is strong, and the benefit to our mutual clients is boundless.

Reach out to us to explore opportunities to collaborate at faros.ai/partners

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Dan Balter

Dan Balter

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