Skip to main content

Home/ Agilesparks/ Group items tagged starting with managers

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Yuval Yeret

Tailor your Message To Gain Support for your Agile Initiative | Enabling Agility - 0 views

www.enagility.com/r-your-message-to-gain-support

tailor agility agile adoption transformation

shared by Yuval Yeret on 21 May 09 - Cached
  • Connect Agile’s Benefits to your Company’s Priorities
  • aying that Agile is “better, faster, cheaper” may not be enough to cause a company to be willing to go through the often-painful process of cultural and process change.  You could implement Agile, but you could also try Six Sigma or Lean.  Saying that Agile is a general get-better remedy puts it in line with many other get-better methods.
  • f they don’t see a meaningful update from us, at least once a quarter, we’re going to get kicked out of the game.  We’ve all acknowledged that as we’ve gotten bigger, our processes have become more cumbersome and now is the time to do something about it.  Agile will give us the ability to regain that rapid pace of delivering innovations to market that we were know for in our early days.”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • ur last two releases have looked like me-too updates, where we are just barely keeping up with our competitors
  • We’ve been losing market share
  • If you can refer to a specific business issue and show the linkage, you are much more likely to get a receptive audience.  Here’s an example.
  • The CFO, developer and QA manager have different roles in the organization and their needs are different.  If you want to enlist their support, be sure you know who you are talking to and what they value.
  • Use Focused Messages for Key Individuals or Groups
  • certain volume of people who are enrolled in the idea of Agile before you’ll see adoption start to accelerate,
  • People have specific needs in their role and they want to understand how Agile will affect and benefit them directly.  
  • Developers, on the other hand, probably wants to know if they will have interesting work, the opportunity to learn new things and the ability to make an impact on the company’s products.
  • a QA manager is probably interested in hearing how Agile helps enrich the QA profession.
  • The focus isn’t on Agile, its on business, as it should be.
  • The easiest way to find out what interests someone is to ask them.  When you meet, leave plenty of time for talk.  Motoring through a well-rehearsed Agile presentation usually doesn’t work.  A lot of times I’ll have slides with me, but they are a backdrop for the conversation.  I’ll refer to slides when it helps move the conversation along, but otherwise don’t use them.  You might want to forget slides altogether and just draw things on a whiteboard as necessary.  This technique is particularly useful with an individual or a small group.  
  • Take it One Step Further: Collect Data to Gain Insight
  • you’ll be most effective tailoring your message if you invest some time conducting data through a series of structured interviews. 
  • First, you’ll need a small set of questions prepared for the interviews.  Here are some examples. What is working with our current methodology? What’s not working with our current methodology? How do you think Agile would help our organization? What concerns do you have about Agile?
  • Interview a wide range of people: developers, testers, business analysts, managers, product managers, senior management, project managers and someone from finance. 
  • When you conduct the interviews, it is good to have one interviewer who has the primary responsibility for talking and the other person who has the primary job of taking notes.  You can switch off roles each interview so no one person gets stuck in either role.  Here’s how I typically start off.  
  • stories that people tell about the organization and make sure you write them down
  • I put all of the information we’d gathered into a mind-mapping program (Mindjet) and grouped like things together.
  • Make sure you keep interesting stories intact.  Specifics will help you make your cases
  • When there’s numerical data, people engage with a presentation in an entirely different way than they do when there are stories.  I find stories more effective, but do what works for you.
  • As an Agile evangelist, you job is to get Agile deployed effectively.  Along the way there are many people will be willing to go out of their way to help if you effectively speak to their interests and concerns.
Yuval Yeret

Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior - Craig Larman - 0 views

www.craiglarman.com/...index.php

agile-change-management-list

shared by Yuval Yeret on 08 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Yuval Yeret on 08 Jul 14
     
    "Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior After decades of observation and organizational consulting, here are Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior. These are observations rather than laws to follow ;) 1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and "specialist" positions & power structures. 2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as status quo. 3. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be derided as "purist", "theoretical", and "needing pragmatic customization for local concerns" -- which deflects from addressing weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo. 4. Culture follows structure. i.e., if you want to really change culture, you have to start with changing structure, because culture does not really change otherwise. and that's why deep systems of thought such as organizational learning are not very sticky or impactful by themselves, and why systems such as scrum (that have a strong focus on structural change at the start) tend to more quickly impact culture. i discovered that john seddon also observed this: "Attempting to change an organization's culture is a folly, it always fails. Peoples' behavior (the culture) is a product of the system; when you change the system peoples' behavior changes." "
Yuval Yeret

Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Fails | NetObjectives - 0 views

www.netobjectives.com/...questioning-why-scrum-fails

shared by Yuval Yeret on 22 May 09 - Cached
  • I do believe for Scrum to work beyond the team you need more than Scrum
  • what to add to Scrum making it more effective when it won't readily work
  • lack of team agility is not always the major impediment to Enterprise Agility
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • While starting at the team level with Scrum is often good, you often need to start with the product management team - that is, where product enhancements to be worked on are selected
  • Even when Scrum works at the team level, organizations very often report little impact to the bottom line.  While this is better than nothing (if the teams are happier, that's good), it usually doesn't justify a huge investment
  • in many contexts in which Scrum does not work readily, Scrum has no power to improve the context in which it is in.  In other words, the impediments that one must fix are often outside of the scope of what Scrum helps you do.
  • These impediments are often not even seen or if they are, are often viewed as "just the way it is."
  • certain Scrum attitudes often makes things worse
  • Scrum does little to let management to know how the team works or what impact management decisions have on the team
  • There is almost a religious zeal that Scrum tells you little of what to do
  • While SoS works well for certain types of work, it does not work well when the different teams have different motivations. 
  • the high failure rate is due to the fact that Scrum works in certain contexts but has little ability to change the contexts in which it doesn't work wel
  • One needs to pay attention to where to start as well as see how to change the context.  Separating the team from management doesn't help.  Focusing on only the team part of the value stream - giving little guidance both up and downstream of the team also doesn't help.  Lean provides guidance here (meaning Scrum with the aid of Lean could provide insights),
  • look into using Lean as a context for any improvement in your software development organization
  • While Scrum may be an appropriate choice in many circumstances, other methods may be better (e.g., Kanban Software Development).  Scrum's rapid ascension probably has more to do with its success in the places it easily fits.  Now that it is past the early adopter phase, we may see it having even a harder time as people attempt to scale it.
Yuval Yeret

Kanban development oversimplified: a simple explanation of how Kanban adds to the ever-... - 0 views

agileproductdesign.com/...kanban_over_simplified.html

lean kanban

shared by Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09 - Cached
  • It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.
  • It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.
  • Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • Managing little stories forces us to keep better track of how they fit together. Product owners are often asked to break down stories to a level where a single story becomes meaningless. To keep track of what’s meaningful to them and other stakeholders, they often need to keep track of bigger items such as the features of the product and how many stories contribute to building up that feature.
  • The result of these herniated time-box activities is a cycle that’s actually 3-4 times longer than our time-box. To get work done, we’ll use a time-box to elaborate stories, one to develop them, another to more thoroughly test them, and if there are bugs, possibly another to fix them.
  • Anyone who’s attended an Agile planning meeting knows they can often last about an hour longer than you can stand it
  • It’s difficult to fit thorough validation of the story into a short time-box as well. So, often testing slips into the time-box after. Which leaves the nasty problem of what to do with bugs� which often get piped into a subsequent time-box.
  • During an ideal Agile time-box we’ll have frequent discussions between developers, testers, and those on a product owner team — like business analysts, user experience people, and business people. We’ll do this to understand what we need to build and describe what we’ll do to validate the story was really done. When time-boxes are short, there’s less time for this conversation. It’s common to move many of the conversations to detail the story and describe acceptance to the time-box before so we can be ready to really get moving with development when the time-box starts.
  • As time-boxes shrink those on the product owner team and testers find themselves in a constant mode of getting ready for a next time-box and evaluating past time-boxes
  • “Kan” means visual, and “ban” means card or board.
  • Kanban cards are used to limit the amount of inventory the factory builds. It doesn’t do the Toyota factory any good to build doors faster then they can assemble cars. It just wastes money on excess doors, and parts of doors. Excess work in progress is considered to be waste in Lean manufacturing. (It’s probably waste in non-Lean manufacturing too.) In the above completely made up example, you’ll never have more than 15 finished doors hanging around. (Mudha is Japanese for waste. Learn it to impress your Lean friends.)
  • work long hours, attend lots of meetings, and seem to have less time to be available to help developers with the current time-box. Since their focus is on a future or past time-box, questions about this time-box seem like interruptions. Collaboration decreases and tensions increase. Their work load is heavy, bumpy, not smooth or even.
  • Kanban thinking in software development attempts to do a similar thing. We want to limit unnecessary work in progress to be no higher than it needs to be to match the throughput of the team.
  • In Kanban development: time-boxed development is out stories are larger and fewer estimation is optional or out completely velocity is replaced by cycle time
  • Exactly what’s left of Agile if we get rid of time-boxes, change the meaning of stories, and stop measuring velocity. And, exactly what do car doors and Kanban cards have to do with software development? Don’t get hung up on process. Remember, agile development isn’t a process.
  • These columns aren’t set. You should discuss with your team the phases that stories go through to be completed. Some organization may use columns for writing documentation, or preparing customer service people to support the feature in production.
  • You might have a column where business analysts spend time tracking down technical details that developers need to understand to write code.
  • The top is used for stories currently in progress in that phase. The bottom is the buffer. When work for that phase of the story is completed, it moves from “in progress” to the “buffer” where it’ll wait to be pulled into the next phase.
  • When we set limits for work in progress, we’ll set a total number for the process step that includes both “in process” and the “finished buffer” for that process step.
  • Stories must be minimal marketable features
  • To be marketable the feature needs to be large enough to be useful — probably larger than the teeny stories that take a couple days to build and seem to be best practice in Agile development today. A MMF may take weeks to build. But the important thing isn’t how long it takes to build, but that it be understandable and valuable to those who’ll receive it. To identify a MMF some folks ask the question “Would I announce it in my company’s product blog?” If it’s too tiny to mention, then it’s not a MMF.
  • To be lean, we’ll limit the number of stories we allow onto the board. A common formula is to add up all the members of the team in all roles and divide by two. All roles includes developers, analysts, user interfaced designers, testers, deployment people — anyone immediately responsible for getting features to market. For example, if team members total 20, we might limit the number of MMF-style stories on the board to 10.
  • Today developers have finished a story, and s they walk to the Kanban board to move it out of development, they notice their single buffer slot is full — and the “testing in progress” column is filled to its limit. What now? The developers talk to the testers. “We’re really struggling to keep up here. It’ll be till tomorrow morning before we can get some of these stories moved out.” “Hmm�” says a developer “Can we help test?” “Of course you can!” says the tester. “With your help we can get these cleared out by the end of the day.“ The tester grins “I just don’t want you validating a story you implemented.”
  • For the limits of the story process steps, the limit is often half the number of people that can perform the work for that phase of development. For instance if you have 6 developers, you might limit the development in progress column to 3. Now, this will force developers to work together on stories. I do find in practice that this may not work out for all teams — so I often see limits that equal the number of developers (or those that can perform the process step) or often 1.5 * the number of people in a role. Of course if you do this, it’ll raise the overall work in progress — and as you might expect, items will take longer to finish.
  • When a column in a Kanban board is full, we know that group is at capacity. We also know that if this keeps happening that that process step is likely where a bottleneck is.
  • If you’ve ever waited in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland you might remember signs along the way that say “Your wait time from here is 30 minutes” — something like that. Now you can post your own wait times on your Kanban board. At the bottom of your story queue post the average cycle time with wait time. It’ll say something like “Your wait time for a story here is approximately 18 days.” At the top of the queue post the average working cycle time. It might say “your wait time from here is 14 days.”
  • But, since there’s no development time-box in Kanban development, we’ll measure story-by-story how long they took to complete — the “cycle time” of the story.
  • When you place focus on how quickly you can get functionality done, and have the ability to measure just that, then the estimates don’t much matter. In fact, many using a Kanban approach have simply stopped estimating at all. Yes story sizes vary, but being able to give a wait time plus or minus a few days is sufficient for many organizations’ concerns.
  • Some do still estimate stories. Then use those estimates in conjunction with cycle time. Using a spreadsheet we can calculate the average cycle time for stories with a given estimate. If you do this, consider placing a handy chart next to your Kanban board showing estimate in one column, and wait times in adjacent columns. With this you’re answering the real question stakeholders are asking for when they get estimates: “when am I going to see this functionality in the software?”
  • The only difference is the cycles aren’t used to plan and commit to stories any longer.
  • If I know that during three week time period there where 15 working days and that 5 developers worked the entire time, that’s 75 developer days. Knowing that lets me calculate the average number of developer days per story: 3.4 (75/22) — Which is darn close to pi — which makes me believe it has to be right. ;-) This number, 3.4, is what XP practitioners referred to as load factor.
  • Evaluation cycles, not development time-boxes
  • If your stakeholders are like mine, they don’t want to know when they’re going to get this functionality, the want to know when they’re going to get all this functionality. I find that if I place stories into a spreadsheet with start and end dates, and calculate cycle time, if I select an arbitrary time period — say a two or three week time period — I can see how many stories where completed during this time period. For instance I might see the team finished 22 stories in 3 weeks — that’s about 7.3 stories per week. Given a backlog of 100 stories I can reasonably infer that it’ll take between 13 and 14 weeks (100/7.3). That’s yesterday’s weather for Kanban — at least the way I calculate it.
  • The daily standup or daily scrum meeting occurs as normal, but now it occurs in front of the Kanban board. Instead of the regular meeting ritual of checking in with each person to find out what they worked on yesterday and will work on today, the discussion revolves around the Kanban board and what will likely move on and off the board today, where “traffic” seems the heaviest, and what we could do to clear bottlenecks.
  • Reflect every few weeks
  • Lean practices help teams increase throughput. They don’t make developers type faster, rather they draw attention to bottlenecks that slow things down, help you see them and respond to them quicker. Using a Kanban board lets you easily visualize work in progress across different roles and lets you see when someone is taking on too much work simultaneously.
  • Demonstrate every few weeks
  • A task board as it’s commonly used in an agile approach can give you the visualization too. But, widening the task board to separate testing from development from acceptance or other process steps helps me better visualize where things are clogging up — helps me better diagnose problems. And, setting hard limits for process steps and respecting them really makes me deal with the problem in a way that dropping a pile of stories into a sprint or iteration didn’t. But, maybe it’s just me who’s lazy and avoids dealing with tough problems. I’m sure you’d never run into a situation where you and your team let lots of finished development work pile up waiting to be tested.
  • There’s no one as zealous as the newly converted There’s a lot of folks pretty excited about Kanban out there. I am too. Sometimes that zeal takes the form of telling people practicing common agile time-boxed development that they’re wrong. But, I guess I’m crusty enough to know that there’s lots of right ways to succeed and anyone who believes they’ve found the best ways is likely wrong. Don’t let those voicing opinions strongly for, or against, Kanban approaches stop you for digging in deeper and understanding the ideas behind it.
  • Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09
     
    one of the best articles about Kanban and its relation to Agile I've encountered so far - focusing on Feature development (not maintenance)
Yuval Yeret

Creating an Agile Culture to Drive Organizational Change - 1 views

www.borland.com/...creating-an-agile-culture.html

agile enterprise adoption culture

shared by Yuval Yeret on 15 May 09 - Cached
  • It is critical that everyone has the same understanding of, and commitment to, the desired outcome: a business that is reliable through predictable technology processes that deliver business agility. To do this, there needs to be a management commitment to develop a focused, on-going practice around the pursuit of organizational maturity. As part of this, gaps in skills and capabilities should be identified and positive action – training, coaching, process improvement and tools deployment – taken in order to close the gap
  • the work force needs to understand the business drivers for Agility. They need to be challenged to improve their quality, improve their cycle times, to improve the frequency of releases and the value they deliver to the customer. They need to know how these things fit within the bigger picture and why improvement is their responsibility.
  • To change a culture it's important to recognize that every knowledge worker makes decisions and takes actions that affect the performance of the business. The culture in the organization is the reflection of those decisions and actions.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • all the people understand and internalize the concepts and ideals behind the Agile movement
  • translated into concepts that can be widely applied to the many day-to-day decisions each of them will make
  • internalize and live three principles: making progress with imperfect information; existing in a high trust, high social capital culture; and shortening cycle times. These ideas need to be infused into the workforce at every opportunity.
  • it should spread virally. It can start with just one manager, who educates his immediate direct reports on the concepts and then takes the time to reflect and show how each decision is aligned the principles
  • work-in-progress as a liability rather than an asset.
  • . Every member of the team should be educated to understand it, and to be capable of demonstrating how their decisions and actions are concomitant with it. The Decision Filter is
  • The Agile Decision Filter
  • Delivering quickly can provide immediate value while delay can result in obviated functionality of little value or missing a more lucrative opportunity while completing existing work-in-progress
  • Are we making progress with imperfect information? Or are we trying to be perfect before we start? Does this decision add or maintain trust in our organization and with our partners? Or does it remove trust and breed fear? Are we treating work-in-progress as it if were a liability? Or are we treating it like an asset?
  • the team can start to modify their practices one decision at a time and drive towards a goal of business agility
  • The "transition" to Agile will happen slowly, and supporting the change will require training, coaching and tools – but change will be real and long-lasting.
  • By changing your culture using the simple principles captured in The Agile Decision Filter, teams will adopt Agile. Give it a little time and magic will happen. They will voluntarily change their behaviors and adopt Agile practices. They will behave in a fashion aligned with the principles and values behind The Agile Manifesto. They will not resist because they had a say in the changes, which are tailored specifically to their environment and their needs.
  • this approach may seem less prescriptive and straightforward than an "Agile Change Initiative" project plan. And yes, taking on a management-led Agile Transition Initiative looks faster and cheaper,
  • However, it is all wishful thinking, and the only way to get the payoff is to invest the time and show the courage to lead true Agile change. True Agile change requires you to change the culture. To change the culture, teach all your people how to use the Agile Decision Filter and hold them accountable for every decision they make.
Yuval Yeret

Agile PMO Role - 0 views

www.gantthead.com/...articlesPrint.cfm

agile pmo

shared by Yuval Yeret on 20 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Institute an agile transition team, and have the agile PMO play a significant role on that team. If you are starting on the journey, establishing an agile transition team can be a critical factor in your success. The agile transition team plans and implements the strategy for the organization’s agile transition (using a backlog, iterations, planning meetings, retrospectives and, in general, responding to change) This group monitors and communicates results throughout the organization, and is responsible for removing organizational level impediments. The PMO representative can act as ScrumMaster for the agile transition team. Members should be leaders representing different departments and functions that are impacted by the agile transition. For example, having leaders from development, QA, product development and the PMO is an excellent practice.
  • Establish a “Meta Scrum” that is tasked with mapping projects and features to corporate strategy. As part of optimizing the whole, it is important for there to be a big picture view across products and features. In general, product managers are tasked with defining, prioritizing and communicating the vision and features for their products. When you have a program that encompasses multiple products with multiple product owners and project teams, keeping everything in line with the corporate vision can sometimes be overlooked.   Unlike the Scrum of Scrums--which is tactical, i.e. focused on execution--the Meta Scrum is focused on the strategic planning and decisions guiding the program or programs as a whole. Establishing a Meta Scrum with the PMO representative acting as ScrumMaster to plan and facilitate meetings (as well as reporting and tracking decisions and action items) can add significant value in having a program able to rapidly respond to change while staying true to the corporate strategy and objectives.
  • I like using story points to establish the velocity of individual teams. From a program point of view, however, story points are difficult to use across multiple teams. The nut there is that one team’s story point is not equivalent to another team’s story point. To crack that nut, I use agileEVM to “normalize” to standard project management metrics like the Cost Performance Index and the Schedule Performance Index, as well as the Estimate At Complete in integrated dollars. These metrics can be aggregated across teams to establish progress against the plan for the entire program.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Establish an agile CoachingCenter. It is important from an organizational perspective to continue to provide coaching and training to agile teams. Team development and facilitation needs continue after the initial shift to agile methods is completed. In addition, new team members are hired, new practices discovered and implemented. Establishing an agile coaching center of excellence can meet this need.   In order to be successful, the center needs to be a legitimate organization with an assigned budget, staff and objectives. The center can be a located within the agile PMO. The center can develop and manage a central agile library, produce various lunch ‘n’ learns and other programs to infuse agile values and knowledge across the organization, and provide proficient, independent facilitators to teams for various retrospectives and other needs. In addition, the center can help the team gather metrics on their agility and health so that the team can take action if the decide to.
Yuval Yeret

Permanent Link to Feature Flow - Increasing velocity using Kanban - 1 views

blog.xebia.com/...feature-flow-1

lean kanban

shared by Yuval Yeret on 03 Jun 09 - Cached
  • team that had some problems getting their process right
  • their velocity was decreasing and spirits were low. Luckily we managed to change our process by changing some basic Scrum practices and replacing some of them with Lean practices, inspired by the new Kanban articles and presentations. Productivity is now higher than ever and we can now focus on what really matters: product quality and customer satisfaction.
  • one major issue: getting things done. The major symptom was the frustration of management and the team with the project. The first 3-week time box (sprint) ending with about 30% (!) of all features still in progress, when, of course, they should all have been done and ready for shipment.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • existing solution to this problem was to lower the expected velocity each sprint, so the next sprint would be on-time. But at the end of next sprint, the same problem occurred, so the velocity was going down sprint after sprint.
  • pressure of the rest of the organisation for the team to keep up their tempo. This pressure from both sides was crushing morale.
  • The way this team reacted to pressure was to work harder. Most people would have 2 or 3 tasks in progress at the same time. When a developer would finish a task, the testers were too busy testing something else, so they could give the developer direct feedback. When the tester found an issue with a new feature, the developers were already working on something else, so the tester had to wait. Simply put, there was too much focus on working long and hard, not on cooperation and the stuff that actually matters: features.
  • most dysfunctional behaviour comes from the system people are in
  • biggest struggle of this team: pressure & predictability.
  • Most Scrum masters challenge the team to reach the same (or higher) velocity each sprint. This pressure should give a team focus to perform at its best. However, it can also go haywire if the team doesn't deliver. No focus, no pride, no happy customer
  • retrospectives were dismal and planning meetings were a huge burden. The teams' productivity dropped in the days after the sprint, finding new courage to start the next one. Because they had an ineffective work-process, the only outcome of each sprint was to lower the expected velocity, to make sure we would be predictable. Estimation and predictability are only a means to an end and since they were getting in the way of fixing the root cause (and were bringing down the team's spirit) I opted to cut out the planning sessions and sprint deadlines.
  • first change we made was to set a limit of 8 tasks on the 'in progress' column
  • We spent 3 weeks bringing the numbers of open tasks from 21 to 8, without picking up any new work. Of course the team struggled with this new limit. They were used to pick up new work whenever they were blocked somehow, this wasn't allowed any more
Yuval Yeret

How to make a LOT more money using agile - 0 views

www.agileforall.com/...e-a-lot-more-money-using-agile

agile roi agile-roi

shared by Yuval Yeret on 04 Jun 09 - Cached
  • How to make a LOT more money using agile
  • More frequent releases
  • expectations must be set for releases to be smaller but still have significant marketable value.  It also means managing scope for smaller releases so the value can actually be delivered to meet the expectations.  If we make the assumption these two pre-requisites can be handled, then we can also assume faster releases are possible.  Yes, I know, releasing software is expensive, requires other groups, etc.  For now, let’s assume all of those costs are negligible compared to the potential results and see where we end up.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • team of 8 people work on a project for a year with an anticipated ROI of 100% after 2 years.
  • $1,000,000 (approximately) in 12 months to build the product
  • get $2,000,000 in revenue within the 12 months following release.
  • ROI is calculated as $profit/$invested which in this case is ($2,000,000-$1,000,000)/$1,000,000 or 100%
  • cash expended, which in this case exactly matches the investment since we did all of the investment prior to receiving any return.
  • Let’s assume that scope can be managed so the product can be delivered in two phases, each taking 6 months.
  • each piece of the product is worth about half of the revenue value of the complete product
  • 6 months at an investment of $500,000 to build the first piece
  • 6 more months at an additional cost of $500,000 to complete the second half
  • after 6 months revenue starts to be brought in for the first release
  • the amount of revenue during the first 6 months of release of the first half of the product would be $500,000 ($2,000,000 for full product for 12 months = $500,000 for half product for 6 months).
  • matches the cost for building the second half of the product, so the cash expended is actually only $500,000 for building the product vs. $1,000,000 for building the product in one step.
  • After phase 2 of the product is completed it too starts to bring in revenue.  We now have the complete product, so we can get full value of it during each time period.  In other words, during the next 12 months it will generate $2,000,000 in revenue.  This brings total revenue to $2,500,000 which means our ROI is now 300% (higher profit divided by smaller investment - $1,500,000 profit / $500,000 invested).
  • Month Expense Revenue Cash (Profit) Total Revenue 6 $500,000 $0 -$500,000 $0 12 $500,000 $500,000 -$500,000 $500,000 24 $0 $2,000,000 $1,500,000 $2,500,000
Yuval Yeret

Why agile transitions initiatives might fail : Jeffrey Palermo (.com) - 1 views

jeffreypalermo.com/...sitions-initiatives-might-fail

agile transformation embedded-agile-list

shared by Yuval Yeret on 08 Jul 14 - Cached
  • The executive makes a “vendor” or external “coach” responsible for the transition If you have handled the first risk and have defined success and success metrics, you likely will not find a vendor who will base his payment on your metrics.  After all, the metrics likely call for less project failure rate, faster response times, etc.  You probably can’t measure these things in less than a year if you really want objective metrics and not one optimized for short-term results at the expense of the longer term.  A vendor might want: # of people trained % of teams using an “agile” project management tool # of teams with an embedded “agile champion” # of successful iterations It is really easy to accomplish the above metrics and still not make any material change in the organization.  I have worked with a client that did something similar to the above.  Most of the teams starting using some new Scrummy project management web application for project tracking.  They declared that monthly status meetings were now iterations.  They declared a member of the team to be the Scrummaster (and sent that person to training).  Overall, the same organizational problems persisted.  Vendors cannot produce real change in an organization unless the organizations executive leadership alters the culture in a meaningful way.
Yuval Yeret

CIO Perspectives: A Conversation on Agile Transformation, Part 2 - 0 views

www.borland.com/...cio-perspectives-part-two.html

agile transformation

shared by Yuval Yeret on 15 May 09 - Cached
  • Part 2
  • The really hard part is around the people transformation - getting developers to work side-by-side with testers and users is a completely foreign concept.
  • The thinking is that IT is mission-critical, so let's not change things without giving it a lot of thought and a lot of consideration
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The reason there's been so much turnover of CIOs in the last ten years is because the end users – the CEOs, the CFOs and the division heads – are unhappy with the results. When IT professionals realize this, and realize that something like Agile gives them the opportunity to create better value for their businesses, then they're going to be a lot more willing to adopt it. I hope that development organizations are starting to see around that corner.
  • We WANT to go Agile. How do we overcome the skepticism at the CXO level?"
  • My recommendation would be "try it." Agile doesn't equal risk, but changing development methods does equal some risk
  • t can be a big deal to say: "I'm going to change our development methodology." It makes people sit up and want to dive into deep detail before getting on board. The question comes in the form of the old development methodology: "Let me see the high level plan and what the change will be in the deliverables and methodology over the next two years." This is exactly what you're trying to avoid by going to an Agile method.
  • try Agile on a few small projects, measure the results, talk to users about their satisfaction, and then readdress
  • nitiate the shift in the most change-prone areas first, and then work it backwards through the rest of the organization
  • It doesn't happen everywhere at all times, and it doesn't work in all areas. It's good to recognize that up front – that software development projects adapt to this easily, but an infrastructure project would have challenges with this approach. So, select a few areas that would naturally lend themselves to Agile, such as application development, gradually introduce it to these areas that need it most, and then measure results.
  • Again I'd say: "Try it." Agile transition is absolutely about organizational change. To win executive support we need to speak in terms of risk management, measurement and the bottom line.
Yuval Yeret

Growth Facilitator role on an OpenAgile team | Agile Advice - Working With Agile Method... - 0 views

www.agileadvice.com/...growth-facilitator-role

agileblog agile

shared by Yuval Yeret on 07 Jun 09 - Cached
  • The responsibility of the Growth Facilitator is about more than simply prioritizing New Work goals and tasks. I see the role as contributing to the organizational culture, and helping to build the business in a sustainable way.
  • As Growth Facilitator, I am also responsible for guiding the team toward delivering greater value for our stakeholders. At Berteig Consulting, our stakeholders don’t just include the company’s owners. Our stakeholders include a wide range of groups, including customers, suppliers, employees, and our families, all without whose support nothing we do would be possible. Delivering value to our stakeholders requires that we keep them in mind when we commit to our tasks each week.
  • When I first started, I made goals that were broad, saying for example “to take care of our clients” or “to work at a sustainable pace.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Berteig Consulting can update the Certified ScrumMaster course content so that all CSM course participants receive the best value in the market.” As soon as I made the direction clear, the team self-organized and generated tasks required to achieve each goal.
  • As the Process Facilitator goes about helping the team overcome obstacles, it can become clear that the team needs to address a systemic challenge during one of the upcoming Cycles. The Growth Facilitator then states the need as a Cycle goal in a S.M.A.R.T. format, allows the team time to give feedback, and prioritizes the goal in the New Work list. When the goal is brought to a future Cycle Commitment Meeting, the team breaks the goal into tasks and solves the systemic obstacle that the Process Facilitator identified.
  • Yuval Yeret on 07 Jun 09
     
    Who is the Agilesparks Growth Facilitator? Who's the Process Facilitator for that matter? Interesting reading. Important aspect of managing self-organizing teams in my oppinion
1 - 14 of 14
Showing 20▼ items per page