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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.

*Please note that I'm specifically talking about productivity. Velocity is a great tool for estimating and planning and I'm not trying to change that. It's just not a good measure of productivity.

rather than asking your business experts to measure business value after delivery (difficult!), have them estimate it beforehand. Every story (or feature--keep reading) gets an estimate before it's scheduled. At the end of each iteration, add up the value estimates for the stories you completed in that iteration. This is your "value velocity."

And rather than reflecting the hours programmers work, as cost velocity does, value velocity actually reflects productivity. Remember, productivity equals output/time. Value estimates are a much better indication of output than cost estimates are.

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.

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.