This is a Presentation that I made as a Co-Speaker at the Agile Tour 2015 Chennai. The topic was Innovations in Agile Program Management

1. Kamal Tejnani
Agile Tour 2015 Chennai: Agile Program Management

2. Leading Student Card company in the US
Developers
Location 1
Time zone 1
Testers
Location 2
Time zone 1
3rd Party API
Location 3
Time zone 1
Dev + QA +
3rd Party API
Location 4
Time zone 2
Dev Horizontal
QA Horizontal
Agile Horizontal
Account Program Management that owns the Delivery
When Distributed is taken too literally …
Innovate or Perish

3. Inspirations from the Checklist Manifesto By
Atul Gawande
Average length of patient stay in ICU dropped by half
when the Doctors and Nurses in the ICU just by having
checklists
In the UK, research by the National Patient Safety Agency
released last year showed that using the checklist can cut
surgery-related death by up to 40% - and there are plans to
make the checklist compulsory in hospitals in England and
Wales by February 2010.
In the US construction industry, a succession of day-by-day
checks that guide how the building is constructed and
ensure that the knowledge of hundreds, perhaps thousands,
is put to use in the right place at the right time in the right
way. Annual avoidable failure rate of less than 0.00002
percent

4. Inspirations from the Checklist Manifesto By Atul
Gawande – Aviation Industry
• Today’s generation of commercial
pilots carry handbooks which made
up of hundreds and hundreds of
checklists.
• They include “normal” checklists for
everyday aircraft operations and
“non-normal” checklists which
cover every conceivable emergency
situation a pilot might run into during
his or her career.
• There are literally hundreds of
checklists in every pilot’s handbook
they hope they will never get to use
The pilot and copilot got out their
checklists and managed to restore
engine power without the
passengers even noticing anything
was amiss.

5. Checklists in Agile are well known - We just used them to the hilt
Stories shared by Product Owners (n-2) days
PRE-GROOMING DONE (n-1) day
GROOMING DONE n day
In Agile requirements are “evolving” and it is understood well. But it is not acceptable
when there are lots of loose ends after the Sprint has started.
The problem was sufficient thought had not been given to the stories during the
Grooming/Grooming was not happening correctly
So the Solution ?
Task breakup done for the just groomed user story
Confirm DoR met
Pre-Planning
Regression Test Cycle
Release Planning
Production Rollouts
and Deployments

6. CREATING POSITIVITY – WHY NEEDED ?

7. CREATING POSITIVITY – A SIMPLE
APPROACH THAT WORKS
“I did not know so many of
my Team mates had so
much positive to say
about me”

8. Pre-Grooming: For a Program where
teams don’t get the time to prepare for
stories
We saw this earlier in Checklists

9. Pre-Planning: For a Program where teams
don’t get the time to Plan for the next
Sprint
A Program where the teams are still TRYING to meet their Sprint Commitments till
the last day of the Sprint

10. Q n A