A holistic approach to
scaling Agile at CSC
Ali Akbar
Technical Director
Who are we?
Founded 1959
IT Services & Professional Services
Stock Symbol: CSC
FY 14 Revenue: 13 B
Problems?
Unpredictable completion of anything
Lack of
Visibility
Resource Bottlenecks
Infrequent Customer Feedback
2009 2010 2011 2012 Apr 2013 Jul 2013 2014
Features Delivered per Team
Days between Releases
What did we do
about it?
Agile Delivery
Methodology (AgDM)
Adaptive Delivery
Methodology (AdDM)
The Beginning (2006)
2012
1 agile team in
Project
2013
6 agile teams
Technical Operations,
Optimization, Project,
Analytics, Sales Ops
& Digital Marketing
What is AgDM & AdDM?
AdDM (Adaptive Delivery
Methodology)
CSC flavor of agile
Scrum project management
framework
XP practices
Based on Lean principles
AgDM (Agile Delivery
Methodology)
best practices from cloud
based deployment
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Deployment (CD)
DevOps
Agile Delivery Acceleration
Platform (ADAP)
Next steps to scale
We scale both
deep and wide
After success
with Project,
ADM was rolled
out to
Operations &
Optimization
3 month rollout:
Don’t overthink it,
start, inspect and
adapt
Next Up:
Analytics, Sales
Ops & Digital
Marketing
moved to ADM
Embrace
Difference and be
prepared to
stretch Agility
Wide scale has challenges,
scaling deep has more
Challenges
Managing
distributed and
matrix managed
teams
Scale with
values
One
Codeline
Product and Project
Dependencies
Leadership
Solutions
Scale Problem #1
Dependency Management is Hard
Dependency
Management
is Hard
Just
enough
structure
but no more
ADM Release Cycle (4-weeks)
Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan
Release
Coordinate release
planning with generic
framework
Planning cycle for
next release
Tools Help
But really, it’s the
people that make
things happen
And we make a big
investment in
collaboration
Maintain Technical Health
Debt is the Enemy
Create a
Single
Definition
of Done
Stop the codeline when test
failures are too high
Status	
   Metric	
  
Now	
  
(7/30)	
  
Release	
  Criteria	
  
Poten&ally	
  Releasable	
  Metrics	
  
	
  
Feature	
  Freeze	
  
Threshold	
  
	
  	
  	
   Basic	
  Ftest	
   100%	
   100.0%	
  
Utest	
   100%	
   100.0%	
  
Full	
  Ftest	
   100%	
   >99.8%	
  
Extended	
  Ftest	
   96.86%	
   >99.75%	
  
Basic	
  Selenium	
   99.76%	
   100.0%	
  
Selenium	
   99.6%	
   >99.5%	
  
Unresolved	
  IntegraCons	
   0	
   0	
  
Strong
Attention to
metrics
Maintain team
focus
Hire for Values
and Culture Fit
Let’s go deeper
Case Study
Agile Program Management
Urgent change based
on new strategic
direction
The ugly baby
High Level
Goals
Design
& Priorities
Global Prioritized “Feature” backlog
Move teams
not
people
6 Teams
Team 1 Team 2
Team 3
Team 5Team 4
Team 6
Launch &
Collaborate
Align to Workgroups
Workgroup 2
Team 4 Team 5
Team 6
Workgroup 1
Team 1 Team 2
Team 3
Collaboration is key (up, down, across)
Meet to realign
every day
Full Coordinated
Transparency
Visibility to Program feature priorities
Visibility to Workgroup feature priorities
Features Priority Status
Communities
1
SSO
2
Sharing model
3
Home page redesign
4
Workbench
5
Opportunity UI
6
Encryption
7
VF redesign
8
ICM support
9
OSS workflow
10
API
11
Program Dependencies
Delivering Team & Feature
Consuming Team &
Feature
	
  May	
   June July
Team 2
Team 1
Something more
Something I want Team 5
HighMedLow
Risk
Done
Done – Delivered
Low – On track
Medium – Possible concerns/may miss deadline
High – Not scheduled, cannot deliver, or deadline missed
Feature at risk
Feature
Team 4
Team 4
Something I need Cool Feature
Team 3
Team 5Something else I
need
Another Cool
Feature
Monitor complexity &
maintain visibility
Lessons Learned
Be Bold
and
don’t go
Halfway
Don’t be satisfied,
always look for
things to improve
Stick to your principles
Trust the teams over
creating mandatory process
& structure
Agile does work at
scale
Lightweight structure
& more autonomy
Questions?

A holistic approach to scaling Agile