Briefing to educate project managers on two core Agile techniques - Scrum and Kanban. For those with Agile experience, it goes on to present a number of common challenges to successful Agile adoption and how to address those challenges.

1. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 1
AGILE BASICS &
CHALLENGES
PMI Mass Bay Chapter
South Shore / Walpole Roundtable
20 April 2016
Tim Brook
timbrook1.1@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/tbrook

2. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 2
The Agile Manifesto
Processes
and Tools
Comprehensive
Documentation
Contract
Negotiation
Follow a plan
People and
Interactions
Working
Products
Collaborating
with Customers
Responding to
Change
To be Agile, you must move
the focus FROM:
TO:

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Agile frameworks
• Scrum
• Lean/Kanban

4. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 4
Scrum and Kanban: Common Concepts
• User Stories and Personas
• Product Owner
• Epics & Story Maps
• Backlog
Grooming
& Planning
Game

5. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 5
• Roles
• Product Owner
• Cross-functional Team
• Scrum Master
• Iterations as Sprints
• Events
• Sprint planning
• Daily Standup
• Sprint Review/Demo
• Retrospective
Scrum-specific Elements
Scrum intro video - http://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/p7novk9lc6

6. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 6
• Kanban board
• Work in Progress limits
• Optional daily standup
• Estimates based on history
and Theory of Constraints
• Mean Lead Time
• Cycle Time
• Turnaround time based on
standard deviation in curve’s tail
Kanban Elements

7. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 7
Agile Challenges
• Scrum fatigue
• Symptoms:
• Morale and confidence drops 9 to 18
months after Agile launch
• Inconsistent (often increasing) sprint
length
• Repeating, unresolved issues from
Retrospectives
• Overtime frequently needed to meet
commitments and/or velocity
• Consider:
• Emphasis on realistic estimation
• Make room for overhead (tech debt,
bug fixing, innovation)
• Kanban could help by removing
arbitrary sprint deadlines
• Weak or missing Product Owner
• Symptoms:
• Team meets sprint goals but product
doesn’t interest the end customer
• Scrum Master is doubling as Product
Owner/Business Analyst
• Consider:
• Having a senior engineer on the team
partner with product manager to
collaborate on sufficiently detailed user
stories
• Emphasizing just-in-time user story
conversations with team to ensure
understanding and limit need for
documentation overhead
• Repeating “If you don’t tell me what you
want, I can only guess”

8. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 8
Agile Challenges
• Fake Agile
• Aka “ScrumBut…”, Cargo Cult Agile
• Symptoms:
• Scrum Ceremonies as status meetings
• No flexibility on either release scope or
release timing
• Scrum teams vote ‘minimal confidence’
in making release target
• Consider:
• Getting both product and engineering
management on board with Agile
culture change. You don’t get efficiency
by simply declaring you’re agile
• Escalating the lack of confidence issue
and stop the presses so you can get
alignment
• Complex Product Build
• Symptoms:
• No demonstrate-able product available
for sprint review
• Full integration into test/demo
environment takes place after end of
one or more sprints
• Extensive User Acceptance Testing
before public release
• Consider:
• Investing in automation and continuous
integration tools/processes
• Looking into whether DevOps thinking
and related changes are possible

9. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 9
Agile Challenges
• Remote team members
• Symptoms:
• One or more team members are
physically separated by timezones
• Consider:
• High-fidelity videoconferencing
• Group team members by location, and
consider using Kanban-style requests
between locations with reasonably
stable lead & cycle times
• Unstable Team
• Symptoms:
• Frequent team changes result in highly
variable point estimates & velocity
• Consider:
• Making it clear to management that
changing even a single person on the
team will void the expected velocity
• Using Kanban to average out the cycle
time and allow team to limit work-in-
progress after a staffing change
• Other Challenges
• Coordinating five or more Scrum/Kanban
teams across the enterprise
• Dependencies on external experts or
infrastructure teams
• Double work – producing docs for both old
and new processes
• Continuity when Epic stories stretch across
multiple sprints
• Definition of “DONE” and quality of completed
stories

10. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 10
Appendix

11. Copyright © 2016 Tim Brook 11
1. Spotify’s scaled agile implementation:
• https://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/113617905
2. Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins, 2010
• Both the book and Lyssa’s training sessions are highly
recommended by my Agile coach friends
• See http://www.coachingagileteams.com/
3. User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton, 2014
• Highly recommended for anyone in Product Owner role
4. Scrum for Dummies by Mark Layton, 2015
• Surprisingly good and well-informed treatment of Scrum
and its challenges
• See also earlier Agile Project Management for Dummies,
Mark Layton 2012
5. Scrum – The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the
Time by Jeff Sutherland, 2014
• The most readable of any Agile books I’ve seen, good for
managers and new product owners
• WARNING: Management may read this and incorrectly
assume Agile automatically gives a 4x productivity boost
6. Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by
Esther Derby and Diana Larson, 2006
• Haven’t read yet, but highly recommended and on my ‘to-
read’ list
7. Is Scrum Damaging Morale At Your Firm? by David
Anderson, January 2016
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/scrum-damaging-morale-
your-firm-david-anderson
• Strong points about both Scrum and Kanban challenges,
but be aware of David’s bias as the father of the Lean
Kanban movement
8. Scrum Alliance resources
• https://www.scrumalliance.org/why-scrum
9. David Anderson 04 Feb 2016 Agile NE presentation:
Enterprise Service Planning – Scaling the Benefits of
Kanban
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clNEhkScs-A
10. GetKanban board game
• https://getkanban.com/
• The pdf print files for an older version (v2) are available to
download for free
11. The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, 2013
• Recommended by Marilena Dolan as a highly readable
DevOps story
12. Something Happened on the Way to Agile by Gil Broza,
2016 email subscription
• 20 daily emails – register at
http://www.3pvantage.com/miniprogram.php
Agile Reading List

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Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
http://v3.scaledagileframework.com/