Treasure Mapping: The Making of CTG's Agile Center of Excellence

Authored by Angela Cleveland and Elise Salvatore

"I need a better way to run retrospectives. The same three people always talk, and I know the quiet ones have things to say."

That question sparked a conversation. Across CTG's projects, similar friction was surfacing. Business analysts, scrum masters, and project leads all held hard-won expertise with no real channel to share it.

Starting with Listening

We didn't begin with a blueprint. We started by excavating the treasure of experience and expertise in our people.

We convened business analysts, project managers, scrum masters, and agile practitioners from across CTG's largest contracts with three questions: What do you need? When can you meet? How do you want this to work?

The responses became our treasure map. Monthly touchpoints instead of weekly obligations. Late afternoon sessions that worked across time zones. Topics grounded in real work, not generic agile theory.

This approach was both practical and principled. Agile teams are supposed to be self-organizing. A community of agile practitioners should be no different.

The invitation was open to anyone involved in agile delivery at CTG. The Agile Center of Excellence launched with six defined goals to anchor its work:

Develop a shared agile resource hub with templates and tools tailored to non-technical roles
Foster cross-project collaboration through shared challenges and lessons learned
Host monthly discussions on topics that matter
Create an agile onboarding toolkit for new team members
Identify common pain points and brainstorm solutions
Support career development through certifications, resources, and mentoring

The goals set the boundaries of the dig. What happened inside them was up to the practitioners. No marked territory, no assigned routes. Just people with picks in hand and the freedom to dig where it mattered most.

Building the Foundation

The first meeting started with a Mural board and a question: What do you want to talk about?

Topics came fast. Stakeholder management. Writing better user stories. Facilitating effective retrospectives. Navigating change management in risk-averse organizations. Managing distributed teams. Scaling agile practices across programs.

The group clustered topics into five themes:

Agile Foundations & Fundamentals
Team Dynamics & Leadership
Agile In Real Life
Growth, Branding & Career Paths
Scaling & Systems

These themes now structure the center’s learning roadmap.

Identifying topics was only part of it. The group also needed lightweight ways to collaborate without creating bureaucracy.

The topic sign-up process is a shared spreadsheet. Anyone can see what's scheduled, what's open, and claim a topic they want to facilitate or co-facilitate. No approval process, no gatekeepers.

Facilitators get a template, not a script. The goal isn't to be the sage on the stage delivering a lecture. It's to be the guide on the side, creating space for the participants' collective expertise to emerge.

Some sessions are recorded, particularly presentations and panels like the recent 'Certifications that Matter' discussion. Other topics, particularly those where vulnerability and honest sharing matter most, stay unrecorded to protect the space for real conversation.

The charter and resources live in BookStack, CTG's internal wiki. A Slack channel enables asynchronous questions, resource sharing, and ongoing conversation between monthly sessions.

All of it supports rather than controls. The infrastructure makes collaboration easier without prescribing how it happens.

The philosophy is simple: The Agile Center of Excellence isn't a committee that dictates agile practice. It's a community that shares, learns, and evolves together.

What We're Learning

In February 2026, the team gathered for an in-person retrospective. The question on the table: what have we actually uncovered, and where do we dig next?

What emerged was a treasure map of what's working, what's hard, and what's on the horizon.

What's Working:

The self-organizing model holds up. When people can claim topics, co-facilitate sessions, and shape the agenda, they show up differently. The center has owned its direction since day one, and that ownership is paying off. Sessions happen because practitioners raise their hands, not because leadership assigns them.
Making space for real conversation. The decision to keep some sessions unrecorded has mattered. When topics get into difficult territory, whether that's navigating complex client dynamics or working through hard questions about the current environment, people need to know the room is safe. That psychological safety is producing the kind of honest exchange that templates can't replicate.
Cross-project learning is actually happening. Teams that don’t frequently interact are now swapping lessons. One project's approach to a ceremony becomes another project's experiment. A question one practitioner is wrestling with surfaces a solution someone else already found. The asynchronous channel keeps that conversation alive between monthly sessions.

Where We're Pushing:

Stepping away from the project hustle. The most consistent tension is finding capacity to participate when projects are full-speed. The center is exploring whether light pre-work, like a short read or a single reflection prompt before each session, could help people arrive more present without adding burden.
Moving from output to outcome. Story points get hit. But do they measure what matters? The group is wrestling with a real federal consulting tension: velocity is tracked, but value is harder to see. There's growing interest in outcome-based thinking and whether it can help teams stay focused on the why behind the work.
Building consistent practices across varied engagements. Not every project runs the same way. Agile in a risk-averse federal environment looks different than the textbook version, and not always in ways that are documented or shared. The center is identifying where shared standards could reduce reinvention without squashing the context-specific judgment that good practitioners bring.

Agentic AI. The conversation has shifted from "AI as a tool" to "AI as a team member," and practitioners are starting to think about what that means for how ceremonies run, how prompts get refined, and how backlog and story work evolves. The community is already experimenting here.
The Value Stream Management and AI Governance intersection. Organizations want to move fast without breaking things or the budget. For federal consulting, where governance and compliance are non-negotiable, this intersection isn't just a LinkedIn trend. It's a real client conversation waiting to happen.
Outcome-based delivery. OKRs and outcome-focused metrics are gaining traction as teams push back against velocity as the only measure of success. The question isn't just whether we shipped. It's whether we moved the metric that actually mattered. Surfacing practical starting points for this kind of thinking is exactly what the center exists to do.

The Path Forward

The February session surfaced a theme the center keeps returning to: how do we move from conversation to action, hold each other accountable, and make our best practices repeatable across contracts?

The next leg is closing that loop: turning the specific gaps that surfaced in February, from data visualization to negotiating sprint goals to understanding federal roles and responsibilities, into resources that actually travel across contracts.

Continuous improvement has always been a team sport.

If this approach resonates with you - if you want to work somewhere that invests in your growth and trusts you to shape how the team operates - we're hiring! Learn more about careers at CTG.

If you're looking for a partner who brings this same collaborative, learning-focused approach to client engagements, let's talk. Contact us to explore how we can work together.