FATA #6 — Agile at Scale

Introduction to Agile at Scale

Fast prototyping and short feedback loops.

Responsible for outcomes, not outputs.

Scope-driven vs Value-driven approaches.

A scope-driven approach aims to balance three main areas: Scope, Time, and Cost. Recognizing a project as a set of processes, each with inputs, outputs, and structure.

Main processes describing a value-driven approach:

1. Customer needs
2. Product strategy
3. Strategic Planning

The business nature is to achieve business goals though customer needs, it can be faster, better and cheaper providing needed business value to customer.

Value Stream Management (VSM) — Business, People, Processes and technology that maps, optimizes, visualizes, measures and govern business value flow (in form of epics, stories and work items)

Agile Success Metrics for Project Level

1. Customer satisfaction
2. Budget vs actual cost
3. Business value
4. Velocity
5. Iteration burndown
6. Release burndown
7. Individual hours per iteration/week

Agile Success Metrics for Organization Level

1. On-time delivery
2. Product quality
3. Product scope
4. Business value
5. Customer/user satisfaction
6. On-time delivery
7. Product quality
8. Product scope (features, requirements)

Areas of Organization Practicing Agile

Agile adoption involves all levels of the organization, including non-production units like — accounting, HR, operations, sales, etc.,

Challenges Adopting and Scaling Agile

1. Organizational culture at odds with Agile values
2. Inadequate management support and sponsorship
3. Lack of skills/experience with the agile method
4. General organizational resistance to change
5. Not enough leadership participation
6. Inconsistent process and practices across teams

Aspects of scaling Agile

1. Executive Leadership Support
2. Knowledge Acquisition

Business value — make money, save money, get new knowledge

Team Level Challenges

Scrum was initially developed for managing and developing products.

Scrum challenges:

1. Difficult to Level Maturity
2. Part of Scrum is Not Scrum
3. Limit the Number of Team Members / only one team of ten or fewer people
4. Transform the Way of Working
5. It is a Framework, Not Practices

Challenges that usually fail agile adoption

1. Hard to change company culture
2. General resistance to a change
3. Existing rigit waterfall framework
4. Not enough personnel with the necessary experience
5. Lack of management support
6. Business and IT misalignment

Characteristics of Scrum:

1. Quality
2. Value
3. Team Focus
4. Trust

Scrum and the Stakeholders

Executives and project sponsors

Interests: economics, time-to-market, quality, competitive advantage, customer satisfaction

Concerns: risk of failure, unprecedented practices, counter-intuitive planning approaches.

Managers

Interests: ability to cater to requirements change, risk mitigation, team morale, management load.

Concerns: loss of control, role erosion

Developers

Interests: effective working practices, meaningful work, work-life balance, less bureaucracy.

Concerns: resistance to changes forced upon them by management.

User community

Interests: features, project influence, better quality, visible progress

Concerns: missing features, quality

Supporting groups

Interests: reassurance of process, clear communication channels, opportunities for intervention.

Concerns: apparent lack of control, continual requests for involvement, lack of a visible endpoint.

Business and IT Alignment solution

Using facilitation techniques foster a constructive conflict and help all involved parties understand the causes using Conversation Cafe meetings.

More importanly, the group notices that it was possible to talk about areas of disagreement openly. And that created safety.

How to do a Conversation Cafe with 4 rounds:

1. Create group of 5 to 7 participants
2. Send invitation for the Conversation Cafe with questions: “How do you feel about … ?” or “What do you think about … ?”
3. Ask each group tp select a talking object (like a ring, a cup, or a pen)
4. Ask for someone to volunteer as host.

1 round — each person shares thoughts

2 round — each person shares feelings and thoughts after listened in first round

3 round — open and lively conversation about the challenge

4 round — each person shares personal takeways

Afterward, identify action items

Perfecting Scrum Teams

Perfect Product Owner

1. Loves face-to-face communicatioon
2. Knows about building business models and explain them as a product backlog
3. Knows how to manage product backlog to maximize value
4. Understands the business and its domain
5. Knows how to turn the vision into the daily plan for the development team.
6. Knows how and where to provide feedback to maximize the existing value.
7. Flexible to say NO when it is required.

Perfect Scrum Master

1. Leads by example
2. Has the influence at the organization level. The natural authority helps resolve the team’s impediments.
3. Understands and facilitates the project’s lifecycle.
4. Have coaching qualities. Coach team(s) often takes ownership of their processes.
5. Recognizes and mitigate conflicts.
6. Knows and can apply various facilitation techniques
7. Open and great in communicatino with the team, business stakeholders, and product owner.

Perfect Development Team

1. Criticizes ideas, not people
2. Shares info and experiance to upskill teammates
3. Applies Biy Scout Rule on development (always leave the codebase in a better state than you have found it)
4. It’s always open for improving technical excellence (i.e., refactoring, pait programming, continuous integration, unit and acceptance testing.)
5. Understands the importance of non-functional requirements (perfornance, security, and scalability)
6. Can articulate the Scrum values
7. Can reach out to the end-user or customer to receive the feedback
8. Is aligned on DoD (Definition of Done)
9. Helping successfully eloborate the sprint goal.
10. Provides and works with the feedback to timely address issues and risks.

Usually it takes around six months to estabilish basics, educate teams, and get the ball rolling.

Scrum adoption

1. Everyone in the organization needed to understand the impact of moving to Scrum and how it would change how they worked.
2. Fully committing to profesional Scrum for the first 90 days with no deviations.
3. Alignment around the goal for everyone to be able to speak the same “Scrum language”
4. Alignment on changes to the organizational structure.

Scrum Anti-patterns at System level

1. Lack of transparency
2. Lack of leadership
3. Telling people how to do things
4. Steering meetings

Scrum characteristics: Quality, Value, Team Focus, and Trust.

Challenges of Multiple teams

Scrum, as an Agile methodology become widespread practice for teams for small sizes. For running multiple teams for large and complex projects, you need agile scaling models.

Scaling agile frameworks:

1. Nexus
2. LeSS
3. SAFe
4. Scrum at Scale
5. Kanban

Nexus — it’s Scrum of Scrum with Integration Team and Integreted Increment.

LeSS is Scrum — Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS). Truly scaled Scrum is Scrum scaled.

Large-Scale Scrum has two frameworks: LeSS (2–8 Teams) and LeSS Huge (8+ Teams)

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

SAFe configurations:

1. Essentials SAFe
2. Large Solution SAFe
3. Portfolio SAFe
4. Full SAFe

Which Scaling Agile Framework should be adopted

Every organizationn is different, and there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach.

The dominant framework SAFe, provides a way for a large IT group to organize itself into agile teams. LeSS does the same by focusing on improving communication between the teams. Nexus is oriented to the development of software and support of those producrs thar are scalable. Scaling agile frameworks might be a good option for keeping an organization productive and business value derlivery oriented.