Agile Network India- Ahmedabad Title: Building Scalable Products: My personal Experience by Dhaval Patel Date: Jul 2023 Hosted by: Azilen Technologies

1. Building Scalable Products
My Personal Experience
DHAVAL PATEL
JUL 2023

2. Context setting & Flashback to 2019
• S&P Global: Organization overview
 Multiple divisions
 Multiple products and delivery channels
• Framework followed: Scrum Agile
• Releases frequency: Quarterly
 Monolithic release
Disclaimer: Views expressed here are solely personal in nature and do not necessarily reflect the view of S&P Global.
150+
Scrum Teams
15+
Team Members
4-Week
Sprint
BA, UAT
Additional Roles

3. Case study 1: Showing Covid-19 data on the product
Front-End Team API Team DBA Team Data Supplier
Data Ingestion Team
• Team working in silos
• Prioritization conflicts
• Cross-team dependencies
• Waiting - idle team members
• Inventory – overproduction of goods
• Business Stakeholder
• Scrum Master
• Dev Team
Wastes
Problems Team Sentiment

4. Case study 2: Upgrading common charting library
Front-End Team A
Core Capability Team
• Lack of alignment
• Communication gaps
• Different goals for each team
• Defects – Poor handling of upgrade
• Excess Processing – Extra processing
for the desktop teams to identify and
fix the issues related to upgrade
• Business Stakeholder
• Scrum Master
• Dev Team
Front-End Team B
Wastes
Problems
Team Sentiment

5. From Roadmap to Reality
Onboarding SAFe coach
SAFe transformation
roadmap
Roadmap
01
02
03
04
05
Conduct org-wide Training,
workshops, certification
Train Lean-Agile Change
Agents
Start with leaders
Learning
Train Executives, Managers,
and Leaders
Identify the most suitable
value stream to be launched
Pilot
Launch more ARTs and
Value Streams
Rollout
Ongoing CoP (Community
of Practice) workshops
Agility Assessments
CI/CD Assessment
Support
105+
Scrum Masters
200+
Scrum Teams
25+
Agile Release
Trains - RTEs
170+
Product Owners
8
Portfolio Value
Streams - STEs
1400+
Dev Team members
(Dev + QA)
1.5 yr

6. Key benefits of the transformation
Better planning and risk
mitigation plan
•Teams are made aware of plans of
other teams.
•ROAM board - identifying risks
proactively
•Setting up WIP limits
Transparency & Alignment
•Enables leaders to connect with
every member of the organization
•Helps teams to visualize how they
are adding value to business
•Early feedback loop
Faster time to market
•Communicating effectively
•Making faster decisions
•Streamline operations
Improved quality
•Emphasis on NFRs, added as part
of ACs
•Special focus on Test Automation
•Decouple deployment and release

7. Embracing challenges
• People not happy with new title/role
• Removal of certain roles: e.g., Business Analyst.
• Procedure heavy framework, SCM/RTE are fulltime
job
ROLE & JOB TITLE ALIGNMENT
• A few teams took a long time to adjust to 2 weeks
sprint
• Resulted into carryovers and missing on business
commitments
SHORTER SPRINT WINDOW
• Need for new tools - Miro (digital collaboration
platform), Actionable Agile Analytics, etc.
• Need of new tools and cost associated with
licensing (read / edit)
TOOLS
• Difficult to find suitable timeslots for longer events
like, PI Planning, PI Review etc. for teams spread
across time zones
• Lesser attendance resulted into loss of value
LONGER EVENTS FOR GLOBAL TEAMS
• Teams with no long-term vision (Quarterly) found
it difficult to follow
• Balancing required between work ahead research,
along with current planned activities
• Prioritizing Epics/Features
LONG TERM PLANNING
• All the teams started following it, irrespective of
the nature of their work. e.g. support teams,
release teams
NOT THE BEST MODEL FOR SOME TEAMS

8. Journey towards agility continues
CO N TIN US LEA R N IN G
& S UPPO RT
 CoPs, Ongoing coaching and support
 Team maturity assessments and
improvement plans
A LLOW E X PE R IME NTS
 Adjust as needed, make required
tweaks – PI planning schedule
 No need to have features for BAU
support work, etc. manage with
capacity allocation
 Adjust value area split at each PI
based on the work
A D O PT THE B EST F IT
F R A M E WO R K
 Flexibility to teams - Explore and
adapt the frameworks best suited

9. Taking fact-based decisions
Team Level Dashboard:
 Team Charter, Working Agreement
 Sprint Goals, PI Objectives
 Current Sprint & Current Release view
 Team Metrics
 Work pipeline
ART Level Dashboard:
 ART Leads, Team List
 ART Charter, Working Agreement
 Features analysis – by Status, by Size, by Team, by Value
Area, etc.
 Current PI view – Progress of User Stories and Bugs
 Trends – Team and ART level
 ART Metrics – ART level prediction rate, Quality - Failure rate
(# bugs / Total user stories), etc.

10. Thank you!
dhaval.p.patel@gmail.com
Dhaval Patel
in/dhaval-p-patel/