Agile Executive Briefing - Situational Assessment + 50k Ft View

Agile Executive Briefing: Situational Assessment and 50,000 ft view of Agile Michael Sahota October, 2009

Michael has been doing Agile for 8 years including senior leadership roles B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science M.Sc. in Computer Science Companies I have worked at … Universities I learned at …

There are two distinct parts to this talk: Assessment and Overview
Part I: Situational Assessment
Situation
Complication
Resolution
Action
Proof
Part II: 50,000 ft view of Agile
What is Agile?
What does Agile do?
How does Agile work?
What does Agile achieve?

Situational Assessment Part I

Situation Exercise: What problems do your organizations face with project delivery?

2009 Standish Group report shows problems delivering projects Graphic Copyright Standish Group

Much effort on software is wasted Graphic Copyright Duncan Kinchen

Business satisfaction is low…
Uncertain when their project will be delivered
Projects are not responsive to the changing needs of the business:
By the time the project is delivered, needs may have changed
Small high value business request cannot be accommodated

Complication

#1 – Focus is on delivering projects and not on building lasting products and teams
Project outlook is common with a focus on only on the next delivery
Product and people are usually around for the long term
Activities critical for sustainability are ignored or inadequate:
Staff capability, knowledge sharing
Quality of code, design and architecture
Don’t kill the goose! Image by techliberation.com

#2 – Often too much work and no time to do things right
Project team members often working on several different projects or have activities that compete for their time
Highly skilled people (architects, DBA’s) are often unable to fully support projects
All of this makes it harder to follow practices needed for sustainability
Of course, there is no time for innovation or process improvements
Image by techblog.tilllate.com

Resolution

Resolution #1: Deep IT and business partnership to prioritize work
Structure the work into small deliverables so work quality and completeness can be assessed
Allows changing priorities with low impact
Focus on most important work first
Use a transparent process so that rate of progress is visible
Work can be prioritized based on importance (business value, risk, sustainability)

Resolution #2: Long-term view to invest in people and products
Investment in the team, technology and process has a long time horizon
Use stable teams to manage product lines over the long term
Team members fully committed to one initiative supports focus and commitment
Creates the opportunity to grow high-performance teams since membership is stable

Action

Action #1: Create stable teams around product lines for long-term view
Form cross-functional teams around each product line with BAs, developers, testers, architects, DBAs
Build technical skills needed for quality work (code, design, architecture, testing) through training and mentoring
This includes eXtreme Programming practices
Sustained success requires a commitment to learning and improving
Support shift to a communicating and learning culture

Action #2: Adopt Agile to manage the process and facilitate prioritization
Adopt Agile/Scrum process practices for the product team
The Product Backlog becomes the repository of all work to be done by this team
Work can be prioritized with all stakeholders and aligned to business strategy
Let the business lead!

Proof: Agile adoption survey results demonstrate significant benefits Productivity Business Stakeholder Satisfaction Quality Graphics Copyright 2008 Scott W. Ambler www.ambysoft.com/surveys/ Source: 2008 Dr. Dobbs adoption survey

QSMA Study of Agile Projects shows Agile is faster with better quality
Companies using Agile were on average:
37% faster delivering their software to market
16% more productive
Able to maintain normal defect counts despite significant schedule compression
From “ The Agile Impact Report” (sponsored by Rally) .
QSMA benchmarked 29 Agile development projects against a database of 7,500 primarily traditional development projects.

Largest procurer of software in the world prefers an Agile approach
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the largest and most experienced procurer of software
In 2000, after years of learning, identified evolutionary delivery (Agile) as the preferred approach over Waterfall
Made official policy in DoD 5000.2

50,000ft view of Agile Part II

What is Agile?

Agile consists of values, principles and practices
Values – People learning and working together
Principles – Ways of working effectively: Feedback, small steps, quality work, etc.
@see: agilemanifesto.org
Practices – a set of work practices/process that follow the values and principles: Scrum, XP, etc.

What does Agile do?

Adaptive planning approach that incorporates learning and new priorities
Agile allows plans to be updated base on new information (delays, unplanned work, challenges, opportunities)
It uses empirical control to guide the work to the highest priority items
Can respond to new business priorities too

Completing work in small increments allows for transparency and feedback
Work is done in small work packages (Stories, feature fragments) so that they may be completed in a short time frame
Frequent inspection of work makes the true progress visible to all
Incomplete work is visible
Photo from www.clipartgirl.com

Creates the opportunity to develop high-performance teams
Treats people as knowledge workers (Drucker) to maximize their contribution to the organization
Fosters a high communication and collaborative environment
Creates safety to express ideas, talk about problems and ask for help
Retrospectives support ongoing learning

Increased quality allows the team to go faster and not slow down over time
Focus on completing work each increment improves quality level
Technical practices lead to substantially higher quality levels
Prevents a “dead core” where productivity falls and changes are unpredictable
Photo from www.porschephotos.info

How does Agile work?

The Product Backlog allows shared prioritizing and planning
Product Backlog is a prioritized list of all the work that needs to be done
Work is prioritized based on business value, risk and effort
Used to build a release plan with target scope and target date
Updated as new information arrives

Iteration ensures frequent planning, evaluating and adapting

Self-organizing team supports shared responsibility and ownership
Scrum proscribes a cross-functional team with all the skills needed to deliver work
The team is collectively responsible for completing the planned work so there is a strong incentive for delivering working software
Structure allows people to focus on what they do best and help out other team members to meet the Iteration goals
Load sharing prevents bottlenecks
Team members are in the best position to see what’s going on and take action

Technical practices improve quality to allow teams to go faster
Write acceptance tests first
Automated testing
Continuous integration (automated builds)
Shared code ownership
Ongoing refactoring
Pairing for mentoring and quality work

Retrospectives allow teams to leverage learning to get better over time
At the end of an iteration the team meets to hold a retrospective
Safe input and observations on what worked and what didn’t
Brainstorming on action items to improve the next iteration (or add stories in the Product Backlog)
Teams get more productive over time
Like a project post-mortem, but do it while the patient is still alive

What does Agile achieve?

Agile enables business to incrementally drive the delivery of valuable software
Way for IT and business to partner effectively
Allow business to drive delivery of value
Most valuable software is delivered first
Low-cost approach to change
Transparency into delivery
Grow high-performance teams

What questions do you have?

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Agile Executive Briefing - Situational Assessment + 50k Ft View

by Michael Sahota on Oct 25, 2009

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