Grow Agile Beyond Your Team into the Enterprise

Know and address the common scaling hurdles and roadblocks.

As an Applications Director you have seen the benefits and value of agile. Look for opportunities to scale Agile development processes in other projects and teams. Each team has unique challenges and impediments that can inhibit its ability to successfully scale Agile. You need to gather the most significant scaling impediments, unravel their root causes, and build tailored solutions to address these issues for each team and project.

While agile teams can improve from just one inning, keep adjusting your approach as you play out the rest of the project. You will encounter new obstacles as your project progresses. Be disciplined and trust that your project teams and coaches will be able to modify their communication, governance, and development practices in order to steer your team back into a winning position.

Common Myths:Myth: Agile will solve all of my development and communication issues. Truth: It will help you surface problems fast, whether development related or other communication issues. Inject these optimization user stories into your backlog to improve the execution of future agile sprints.Myth: Agile does not require documentation. Truth: Just-enough documentation should be completed once your project has reached a stable state in your sprint or when it is necessary for further project progression. This will help maintain traceability, process repetition, and alignment with stakeholder and management expectations. Myth: Agile will make me work faster. Truth: Agile is intended to improve the quality and business value of the project through collaboration, communication, and feedback. You may have to revisit the same user story, but the resulting product will be more aligned to current stakeholder needs.

Understand that agile is a learning frameworkContinuous improvement is a core component of agile methodologies: learn from your mistakes, roadblocks, and impediments in order to create customized solutions to mitigate these issues in the future.Your agile implementation should continually evolve as you grow and mature. As new issues manifest themselves within your projects, encourage your project teams to adapt so that communication improves and the completed product better aligns with business priorities.

For Personal Reference of graph above:Compliance – Alignment to compliancy issues.Organizationally Distributed – People outside the company (e.g. contractors) or stakeholders from several departments.Complex Technology – Multiple platforms with legacy systems or data sources.Complex Domain – Areas that teams consider complex.Team Size – Number of members in each project team.Geographically Distributed – Team members residing in different locations from the main team.

Source: Scott W. Ambler. State of the IT Union 2014 Q2 Survey Results. Scott Ambler + Associates. 2014.

Overarching Insight:

While agile teams can improve from just one inning, keep adjusting your approach as you play out the rest of the project. You will encounter new obstacles as your project progresses. Be disciplined and trust that your project teams and coaches will be able to modify their communication, governance, and development practices in order to steer your team back into a winning position.

There are three common scenarios to consider when preparing to scale agile:Reading The Signals (Communication)Communicating the right directions to every team member is critical in coordinating the effort of many moving parts.Understanding the various cultures and work habits will help you develop techniques to ensure smooth handoffs and executions.Modifying the Game Plan (Governance)Agile practices should be adjusted to fit the current sprint and set of obstacles. Management needs to give teams empowerment to make in-game changes.Report the performance of the team in terms your stakeholders can understand.Adjusting Your Swings (Development Techniques)You won’t generate any runs by using the same swing (development technique) for every type of pitch (dev impediment).Readjust your batting approach and look at new techniques to finally make contact.

(Note: The stats below are not mandatory so feel free to use if you have space. – This might have been used for the infographic for this deck: http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/optimize-the-current-agile-process-for-scalability-to-prepare-for-a-wider-rollout) Biggest success factors when extending agile beyond a single team:*

Executive sponsorship (22%)Training program/workshops (18%)Implementation of a common tool (15%)Internal agile support group (12%)Full-time agile coach (11%)

57% of respondents said their companies had adopted agile practices across five or more teams.*52% of respondents are using agile to manage at least 50% of projects.*

*Source: 8th Annual State of Agile Survey. VersionOne, Inc. 2014.

Focusing on Reading the Signals, Modifying the Game Plan, and Adjusting Your Swings. Can also consider having a large baseball game image with insights being pointed out in the image.

http://www.infotech.com/research/ss/grow-agile-beyond-the-team-into-the-enterprise#infographic_full_size