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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.

Identify the technical leaders within projects; those that are “self-driven to produce quality results on time … combine technical ability with enough people skills …are trusted and respected by both their managers and fellow developers, are determined to make the team succeed, and usually live the work.” (Chief programmers, Chapter 2:  A Practical Guide to FDD).

Sell them the vision: if you cannot sell these people on the benefits to them, their colleagues and the organization of the new way of working then something is wrong

Provide in-depth training and on-going coaching. It is better to have a single lead person trained in-depth who can coach his teammates through the basics than to have the whole team trained on the basics with no-one on the team to turn to when the basics are not enough.

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.

So if they needed the ScrumMaster role filled, then this was something they were prepared to train and assign to either a project manager or possibly a technical lead. The consensus of this team was, if you found a project manager skilled enough to have a real technical dialog with the development team, then this person could be trained and perform the ScrumMaster role.

The Scrum Alliance published a survey that has some supporting evidence. Over 60% of the 1100 people that responded to the survey had nine or more years of industry experience, 15% of them had twenty or more years of experience, and 35% had Masters degrees. Also, of the people who responded, 22% were project managers and another 21% were either Managers or Directors. So my simple translation is that practicing ScrumMasters are managers (project or other) with significant (10+) years of proven experience. Training and assigning this role to experienced project managers or software development managers seems like a viable approach to have the responsibility filled and having a dedicated ScrumMaster separate from these roles may not be necessary.

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.”

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)

We measure progress in business-valued terms such as time-to-value, cost/benefit ratio and customer satisfaction.

There is no "score" to this assessment.  It is administered anonymously with results reported in aggregate.  This is a diagnostic tool to help us all reflect on our processes and identify ways to improve.  It cannot measure "improvement" from a previous assessment, only relative importance of potential improvements to our current situation.  

inally, this is not a competition.  The results will be most useful in helping you reflect on your current circumstances and establish priorities within your teams on areas of potential growth.

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.

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.