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)

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.

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.

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.

Scrum in a nutshell Split your organization into small, cross-functional, self-organizing teams. Split your work into a list of small, concrete deliverables. Assign someone to be responsible for that list and to sort the list by priority. The implementation team estimates the relative size of each item. Split time into short fixed-length iterations (usually 1 – 4 weeks), with potentially shippable code demonstrated after each iteration. Optimize the release plan and update priorities in collaboration with the customer, based on insights gained by inspecting the release after each iteration. Optimize the process by having a retrospective after each iteration. For more details check out “Scrum and XP from the Trenches”. The book is a free read online. I know the author, he’s a nice guy :o) http://www.crisp.se/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.html Kanban in a nutshell Visualize the workflow Split the work into pieces, write each item on a card and put on the wall Use named columns to illustrate where each item is in the workflow Limit WIP (work in progress) – assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress at each workflow state. Measure the lead time (average time to complete one item, sometimes called “cycle time”), optimize the process to make lead time as small and predictable as possible.

Simply using iterations, user stories and velocity doesn’t mean your project is agile – or on the way to success.

why “iterations” may be hazardous to your project: ‘’Danger grows when the results of the iteration are not directly linked to delivering the product to the end user.’’ Without that linkage, iteration results hang in the air

What gets in the way is that the project is set up as a pipeline, with programming put somewhere in the middle of the pipeline. In this project setup, there is really nothing the programmers can do to show how their work connects to deliveries, because there are work stations before and after theirs. All they can report is that “some new code is integrated into the code base.” They are doing incremental development but not agile development.

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.”

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.