Group items tagged

training strategy for a significant enterprise that is contemplating an “all in” (immediate and across the entire company) enterprise scale transformation approach

for the enterprise, a combination of team-based and role-based training that would touch every practitioner is ideal

all team practitioners receive a minimum of two days of agile training, (agile team training for the each team in the enterprise)

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.

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.

ur last two releases have looked like me-too updates, where we are just barely keeping up with our competitors

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.

Part 2

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

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.

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.

Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.

Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.

Bob Martin’s idea Bob Martin of Object Mentor posted an interesting variant to get around this problem: a base fee per story point, plus a lower-than-usual (close-to or below cost) fee per hour. This biases the contracted company’s to deliver early, but gives them some protection in case work proceeds slower than expected. Bob Martin described it this way:”[A]gree to pay a certain amount for each point completed, plus a certain amount for each hour worked. For example, let’s say you’ve got a project of 1000 points. Let’s also say that a team of four has established an estimated velocity of 50 points per week. This looks like about an 80 man-week job. At $100/hour this would be a $320,000 job. So lets reduce the hourly rate to $30/hour, and ask the customer for $224 per point. This sets up a very interesting dynamic. If the job really does take 80 man-weeks, then it will cost the same. If it takes 100 man-weeks then it will cost $344,000. If it takes 70 man-weeks it will cost $308,000. Notice that this is a small difference for a significant amount of time. Notice also that you, as developer feel strong motivation to be done early, since that increases your true hourly rate.” I have not seen that model in action myself, but several people have written in recommending it.

Coaches help teams learn Agile practices get from 'Agile seems to be something we should do' to 'we are practicing Agile development and succeeding by regularly delivering business value'.

ncreasingly there are reports of initial success followed by failures with Agile adoption.

I believe that there is a problem to how current Agile coaches - especially external ones (such as the author) - have traditionally performed their jobs. In fact, I think we are part of the problem

Tom Grant, a Forrester analyst who covers agile and product management, brought early results of his research on business agility to P-Camp. He has divided technology companies into An agile "vanguard" implementing first-wave improvements in their software development models, and Agile "transformation" companies making broad corporate-wide improvements in understanding customers and cross-departmental coordination.

"the end of Soviet-style development." He reminded us that Soviet five-year plans had little to do with the reality of hungry Russians and empty store shelves. In the same vein, technology companies with top-down command-and-control waterfalls tend to be unresponsive and overly optimistic. They often lack good market-sensing mechanisms or useful bottoms-up development metrics, so they routinely deliver unexciting products later than planned.

Responsibilities Vary by Software Business TypeSince the business mission, organization, operating methods, roles, titles and responsibilities differ dramatically across industry segments, it follows that the patterns of agile adoption vary across these segments as well

Information Systems/Information Technology (IS/IT) -teams of teams who develop software to operate the business; accounting, CRM, internal networks, sales force automation and the like. Customers are primarily internal to the enterprise.

Embedded Systems (embedded) - teams of teams who develop software that runs on computers embedded in other devices - cell phones, electronic braking systems, industrial controls and the like. Customers may be either internal or external to the enterprise.

The Roadmap consists of a series of planned release dates, each of which has a theme and a prioritized feature set.

While it is a simple thing mechanically to represent the Roadmap, figuring out the content for anything beyond the next release is another matter entirely. The topic of what else the team plans to ship and when can be a fascinating and contentious topic in agile

the easiest way to think about the Roadmap is that it is an output, rather than an input to the Release Planning process.

RFPs the Agile Way -- or -- Fear and Loathing in the Procurement Department

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.