This document discusses how to assess an organization's adoption of Agile practices using a rating system. It describes 8 key Agile characteristics: iterative value delivery, breakdown and prioritization, continuous customer interaction, quality focus, self-organized teams, transparent status tracking, extreme automation, and organizational agility. The reader is prompted to rate their project/organization on each characteristic in order to identify strengths and areas for improvement in their "Agile ride". Making improvements across these dimensions can help make an organization's Agile adoption more effective.

1. © Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Anu Khendry
SAFe Agilist, CSPO, ACC, PMI-ACP, PMP, Six Sigma Black Belt
How smooth is your
Agile ride?

2. 2© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
This Session
It is a game
It teaches you Agile
It helps you assess your project / organization
It leads to improvements

3. 3© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
How smooth would we like our project to be?

4. 4© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
How about the wheels?
How does your project wheel look?

5. 5© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Rate your Project / Organization on these Agile Characteristics
1. Iterative value delivery
2. Breakdown and prioritization
3. Continuous customer interaction
4. Quality focus
5. Self-organized empowered teams
6. Transparent status tracking
7. Extreme automation
8. Organizational Agility
Let us not DO Agile, let us BE Agile

6. 6© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Rating your Organization on Agile
1. Iterative value
delivery
2. Breakdown and
prioritization
3. Continuous customer
interaction
4. Quality focus
5. Self-organized
empowered teams
7. Extreme
automation
6. Transparent status
tracking
8. Organizational
Agility

7. 7© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Iterative Value Delivery
Project moves in short time-boxes (1 week to 1 month)
Each iteration produces a completely tested working product
Early value delivery. Focus on time to market and customer needs.
Minimum Viable Products
Teams solve problems better, customers give feedback better incrementally

8. 8© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Breakdown and Prioritization (1)
Objective Prioritization techniques (Don’t use WSTL!!!)
Requirements breakdown into bite-sized user stories
Get early ROI
Increase customer engagement
Agile requirements - You need to know when you need to know, not before!
Avoid extra features - YAGNI!
Standish Group study of feature
usage in 2000 software projects

9. 9© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Breakdown and Prioritization (2)
Prioritization Schemes (Examples)
 MoSCoW
o Must have / Should have / Could have / Would like to have later
 WSFJ (Weightiest Shortest Job First)
o Cost of Delay / Size
 Kano Analysis
o Exciters / Satisfiers / Dissatisfiers / Indifferent
 Customer valued prioritization
o Based on value, risk and cost. If the value is the same, what comes first:
• High risk or low risk?
• High cost or low cost?
 Agile Games
o Prune the Product Tree
o Buy a Feature
(Refer tastycupcakes.org, innovationgames.com)

10. 10© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Breakdown and Prioritization (3)
Let us try out a Product Road Map!

11. 11© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Continuous customer interaction – Every day, all the time!
Customer owns the product
Talk to the right person!
Build the right thing, right from the start
No assumptions!
Continuous course corrections – embrace change!
Verify as soon as it is built
Don’t shield team members!
Traditi
onal
Functionality
Time Resources/Cost Functionality
Agile
TimeResources/Cost

12. 12© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Quality Focus
Agile works best with focus on zero defects and design excellence
“Just enough” documentation
Incremental design
Continuous improvement and refactoring for technical debt
Definition of Done
Simplicity of Process and Product

13. 13© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Self-Organized Empowered Teams (1)
Following rules for Agile Roles
Highly collaborative
Highly motivated
Self-organized and self-managed
Empowered and accountable
Working at a Sustainable Pace
Continuously improving
Cross-functional
Full-time
Stable
Generalized specialists
Assessed based on business outcomes
Teams of 5-9 people
How can we trust the team?
Doing Owning

14. 14© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Self-Organized Empowered Teams (2)
What is Self-Organization?
External activities set the context
 PO/Customer prioritizes work
 Time box defined
 Acceptance criteria defined
Team activities
 Team estimates, commits and delivers
 Team decides how to do the work
 Team decides who does what
 Team communicates progress
 Team re-plans
 Team raises impediments, asks for help when needed
 No one disturbs the team
Innovation comes from the producer
- Edward Deming
A Sprint is like a Container!
Change

15. 15© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Transparent tracking mechanisms
Use Information Radiators or Big Visible Charts
Reports are a by-product of the work
Everyone can update
Everyone can view
Track only what you really need
Hours
40
30
20
10
0 Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri
50
Burn up
chart
Task
Board
Burn
Down
chart

16. 16© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Extreme Automation (1)
Automate everything you can!
Coding environments
Inline code reviews
Continuous Integration via automated builds (30 mins)
Immediate deployment
Automated testing
Defect tracking
Scrum process automation

17. 17© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Extreme Automation (2)
Continuous Testing
• All released code in repository is 100% tested at all times
• Tests give confidence in the system
• Tests give courage to change the system
• Customer involvement in Acceptance tests
• Automation is key for all types of tests
• Use TDD / BDD

18. 18© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Organizational Agility
Agility is not for Dev Teams only
Empowerment culture is top down!!
Ownership is bottom up!
Agile orientation for all
Agile certifications and training for teams
Supporting teams also need to be Agile e.g. IT, deployment, UAT, PMO, Process
Management, Product Management
Agile initiatives need to be scaled up as needed – to program and portfolio levels
Agile COE
Performance Assessment

19. 19© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Rate your Project / Organization on these Agile Characteristics
1. Iterative value delivery
2. Breakdown and prioritization
3. Continuous customer interaction
4. Quality focus
5. Self-organized empowered teams
6. Transparent status tracking
7. Extreme automation
8. Organizational Agility
Let us not DO Agile, let us BE Agile

20. 20© Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
So how does your Wheel look?
Sharing issues and best practices

21. © Anu Khendry 2016 How smooth is your Agile ride?
Thank You!