The session offers insight and tools that can be applied within an engineering leader’s environment to increase the level of agility while still maintaining a traditional product roadmap. The goal in these situations is to be “Agile Enough!”. Many challenges and solutions exist for applying Agile software methodologies within an organization that has a traditional product release philosophy. This is particularly prevalent in B2B businesses where the customer has a large influence over the overall organization direction and has leverage to demand specific features within certain timelines on real-world experiences.

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Agile Enough?
Expanding Agility Throughout the Organization
Mike Watson, VP Engineering

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Building Software is Hard

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Why Agile?
It’s NOT rocket science.
1) Reduce risk
2) Deliver intended results

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Agile is
everywhere,
right?
Agile is inherent to engineers
Outside of engineering…
The concept is new
4

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Agility and the Business Domain
The ability to be highly agile has everything to do with your organization’s customer profile
High-risk customers require
products with extremely
structured processes
B2C customers have little say and
agility is the way to stay relevant
to the widest audience
B2B or B2B2C customer agility limits:
• deadlines and features
• contract negotiations
• tolerance to change

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Agile Resistance
• Sales-driven orgs favor satisfying customer demand over customer collaboration.
• Product-driven orgs favor their own ideas over customers needs.
• Large or established orgs favor governance over flexibility.
• People resist change!

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Identifying Resistance
Watch for the signs:
• Friction between teams
• Emphasis on rituals and process
• Agile ceiling

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A: An Igloo doesn’t have walls.
It only has a ceiling.
Q: What does an ‘Agile Ceiling’ have in
common with an igloo?
IT? PM?Exec
Mgmt?
Sales?
Customer?
What is your ceiling?

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What is Agile Enough?
 Stakeholders are comfortable with the delivery,
quality and cost/benefit of the software.
 The account team pushes back on unreasonable
customer demands.
 Executive management recognizes that adding
capacity is the way to get more throughput.
 Trust between the business and delivery teams.

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Expanding Agile
The key to expanding an agile footprint is to evolve the culture
BUT…Care must be taken to avoid unintended consequences

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How to Gain Momentum
1) Make sure your own house is in order
2) Ensure constituents goals align
3) Identify resistance and negotiate modification
4) Look for easy wins
5) Don’t change too much at once

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“A complex system that works is invariably
found to have evolved from a simple
system that worked. A complex system
designed from scratch never works and
cannot be patched up to make it work. You
have to start over with a working simple
system.”
–John Gall [1975]

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Lead by Example
• Teach the team how to execute
• Stick to the basics
• Define a cadence
• Establish metrics
• Be transparent

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Tips and Techniques
• Scope buffering
– This is similar to range estimates, but instead of guaranteeing 100% in a
range of time, you guarantee some smaller % at a specific time.
If more gets done, it is considered a bonus.
• Proxy product owners
– Assign someone from engineering to play the role of product owner.
This works really well with remote teams.
• Heartbeat-based delivery
– Kanban approach helps orgs with a high-level of agile resistance.
– Establish a weekly delivery cadence.
Weekly backlog reviews, progress demos, etc.

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Take Aways
• Most orgs have an agility limit.
• The key is to continuously look to be more agile than last year.
• Establishing trust within your constituency is critical.
• Increasing agility is a cultural shift.
AND…changing culture is harder than software

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Join the conversation:
linkedin.com/in/michael-watson-jr/

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Your Trusted Agile Software
Co-development Partner
1.Accelerate delivery of your
product/technology roadmap
2.Address technology skills gap in
your inhouse team
3.Save >50% with India based
software development talent
4.Leverage US based professionals
to make it easy for your inhouse
team to collaborate
17

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Representative Clients - 14+ Years
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Upcoming Webinar
Design Sprint Process
Thursday May 16, 2019
@ 11am ET | 10am CT | 8am PT
Presenter:
Douglas Ferguson
President @ Voltage Control

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