Agile Tour 2010 – Part I

Orit described transition to Agile in NSN, a large corporate with 160000 employees:

• Waterfall works much better for large organizations: progress is planned, expectations are drawn, monitoring is in place and everything is very hierarchically.
• But since it is much harder to change direction for such companies, they need Agile even more! Eventually, waterfall just didn’t work well for NSN (I wish there were some concrete examples brought).
• Switching to Agile had its own challenges for NSN:
  • Syncing between different teams, running as independent startups.
  • Breaking existing hierarchy and specifically-experienced teams.
  • Dealing with internal organizations that don’t really belong to Agile transition.
  • Doing Agile globally across the world.
  • Dealing with teams identity.
  • Agile coaches were coming from a different culture and speaking a different language.
  • Dealing with managers that were “out of job” but still with responsibilities and deliveries in their hands.
• The solutions were:
  • Local coaching. People using the same language, coming with the same mentality and background, knowing, feeling and understanding regional nuances.
  • Go in phases. Phase I is a limited number of local pilots, no extensive “buy in” is imposed, no global operations yet. The goal is to create a success and make a lot of noise out of it.
  • Phase II is maturity: responsibilities are defined, marketing teams are involved, features are developed in an agile way.
• Switching to Agile worked well for NSN: it created a very strong buzz in a company, people see it positively, and there is much more readiness to make the transition.

Aviram explored this process from a coaching point of view:

• Strong management backup is required.
• It takes for the process to settle down through all internal conflicts and politics.
• When in doubt or endless arguments, it helps to have a guru to reference to: “That’s what master said!”
• First initial phase:
  • Do not force theoretical Scrum, match needs and pain points, make successful pilots.
  • Choose a meaningful pilot that minimizes existing problems.
  • Multi-site development is not recommended at that phase as it would be physically hard to maximize people interactions. Distributed Scrum is different from a usual Scrum.
  • Identify change leaders, create a success.
  • Give pushers all tools needed, use empowerment efficiently.
  • Success does not come from doing Scrum practices “by the book”, it mostly comes from organizational changes which are much harder to achieve.
  • There may be people that feel threatened by Scrum: “What’s in it for me?”
  • It is important to learn from problems, identify change leaders and rejectors, create a winning team and involve all stakeholders.
• What successes brought into organization:
  • Better projects visibility, smaller gaps in planned vs. actual, targets became more realistic.
  • It became possible to keep predictability of each version.
  • While waterfall provides expectations 1 or 2 years ahead, “knowing” that much in advance is troublesome: company will be slow to move and react. In Agile, smaller and faster teams still provide expectations ahead but their time windows are shorter and more dynamic.The key word is balance.
  • Prioritzation works better, features are cut more easily, “knowledge islands” are reduced.
  • Teams are happier, “get on the code” happens faster, marketing teams are product owners.

agile

New Maven plugins released! Agile Tour 2010 – Part II