our agile journey… · our agile teams have dramatically cut time to market through continuous...

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska

is an Independent Licensee of the Blue

Cross and Blue Shield Association.

Our Agile Journey…Presented by

Jonathan Showalter

Scrum Master, ePublishing Team

How should attend this breakout session?

• Those interested in:

– Delivering HP Exstream solutions using Agile

• This session is not a developer/tech centric breakout

session.

B L U E C R O S S A N D B L U E S H I E L D O F N E B R A S K A 2

On-line Q & A Tool – See Handout

• How to use survey tool

– Smart Phones: Go to http://pollev.com/jonathanshow931

– Text Message:

• Send message text to 22333

• In Body of Message type:

688112 followed by your question


http://pollev.com/jonathanshow931

Agile Experience?


2+ years Experienced with Agile

Know the base concepts and practiced it for < 1 year

Read about Agile

What is Agile?

Agenda

• Personal Introduction

• Blue Cross and Blue Shield of NE Overview

• Enterprise Agile at our company

• How BCBSNE uses Scrum to implement HP Exstream


Personal Introduction

• Started my IT Career in 1991

• Work History:

9 years as a Developer (Client Server, Mainframe, EDI)

10 years as an Enterprise Architect

3 years as a Scrum Master

• Health Insurance and Refrigerated Foods Industry


About Us


About Us - By the Numbers…


The Journey to Agile Begins…


Spring 2008

Large program “in the ditch”

Silos, lack of trust between Business

and IS

Communication was largely done by

email

No visibility into any “real” progress

Must wait months to see any real

business value

Our Challenges / Key Hurdles


Why Did BCBSNE Adopt Agile?

Large backlog of work not getting

done

Constantly changing business priorities

Silos, handoffs, heavy processes,

lack of trust/ communication

Slow time to market, too long to deliver

Missing, incomplete, changing, ambiguous

requirements

No focus, multi-tasking several projects by the same people

Lack of enterprise capacity

measurement

Ineffective and wasteful meetings

Quality and rework issues

Unrealistic estimates and due dates set by the wrong people

Heavy engineering and testing

processes, no automation

Lack of empowerment, low engagement and

morale

Specialized roles, “not my task”

thinking

Lack of collaboration and trust between business and team

Overproduction, working on wasteful

features

No ROI or value measurement or

tracking


Movement toward Stable Teams

Movement from Silos to “Collaboration”

Source: Agile Transformation Inc


Communicating Change

Agile Marketing / Change Management


What We Value Most

The Agile Manifesto (2001)

People and collaboration OVER processes and tools

Working software OVER comprehensive

documentation

Customer collaboration OVER contract negotiation

Responding to change OVER following a plan


More than a Methodology

“Agile” and “Servant Leadership” go hand in hand!

Doing Agile Was Not Enough

Doing Agile Vs Being Agile Culture

KANBAN

LEAN

Six Sigma

SCRUM

Customer First!

B L U E C R O S S A N D B L U E S H I E L D O F N E B R A S K A

Methodology

15

Environmental Changes

Create a Healthy “Nurturing” Environment


Empowerment

Shared accountability

Transparency

Continuous learning

Continuous improvement

16

BCBSNE - First Few Weeks/Months with Agile

First “Feelings”


Expect…squishiness

Get comfortable with

ambiguity

Inspect & Adapt

Be OK letting it bake Agile – the

early days

17

Transforming the Culture

Our “Core Values” and AGILE Principles


Enterprise Coordination

Enterprise Command Center at BCBSNE


Enterprise Team

(Our Capacity) Strategy & 3 Year RoadmapKey Performance Indicators

2014 Strategy3 Year Roadmap Performance Metrics

Enterprise Team

Handouts

19

HP Exstream And Agile

Enterprise Strategy


Simplification Project

Simplify/Reduce/Combine

Implement in HP

Exstream

Stream

Weaver

Retirement


Impact of Simplification


• Over 620 letters have been reviewed by

the Simplification team. The process

continues

• Letters were reformatted to improve

readability and consumer friendliness

• Unused letters eliminated and similar

ones merged

21


Impact of Simplification


• Reduction of total inventory of documents enterprise wide

• New letters continue to be created using the new standards and design.

• Existing letters continue to be added to the backlog regularly for

simplification.

• Currently within HP Exstream

• 393 Documents in 17 Applications

• Several examples of letters combined into one HP Exstream document


Project Launch


Fall 2011 Sprint 0

• 30 day Sprint Focused on:

• Build out of Windows server and PC infrastructure

• Installation of all HP Exstream software

• Full systems test

Hewlett Packard

• HP Consultant brought in to assist infrastructure team


Strategy of Building an Unconventional Team


Team of 10 people

representing

Business, IT, and

HP Staff

Team Goals:

Highly

Adaptive

Able to work

with ambiguity

High

performing

Self-organizing

Innovative

HP Consultant

hired for the first 8

sprints to educate

new team

Team co-located

January 2012


Team Makeup – The First Year


Customer Service Rep

& Claims Lead became HP

“authors”

Corporate Communications

Specialist served team as

PO in 2012, author, QA,

and runs ad-hoc mailing

campaigns via HP

Business Analyst grew into

an HP Developer

Tester later became Product

Owner and a manager of

ePublishing

ETL and .NET

developers built

integration, testing

and administration

applications

HP Consultant joined team

for about 8 sprints

Team never responded with “That’s not my job!”


Benefits of Adaptive Roles


Developer saw the amount of time and effort involved

in testing documents and built a .NET web testing tool

directly integrated with HP Exstream

• The team made an observable gain in testing

productivity.

• The tool enabled business self-service testing for

the first time exponentially scaling our delivery

capacity

.NET Developer left his development role and took on a

dedicated tester role during a very challenging delivery time.

“Challenge”

“Result”


Agile Leadership Triangle – Team


Scrum Master

(Facilitator)Ensures the team can get work done

Tech Lead

(Technical Vision)Advises on choices and impacts

Sponsor

(Strategic Direction)

The

Team

Product Owner

(Business Vision)Define & prioritize backlog

28


Building Stories


Stories are built in terms of business value not IT speak

Acceptance criteria (written by the PO) describes when the

story is done

One story is built per new letter

For existing letter updates, one story may contain a limited

set of letters

Spikes are zero point stories used for Research and

Development work


Building the Backlog


A collection or list of work in story format scattered across future sprints

A story can be added to the backlog by anyone

Our PO weekly grooms the backlog

A story could represent a theme or feature

Stories are considered Epics if they contain more complexity points

than can be delivered in one sprint.

As a story approaches the current sprint it is often decomposed into

multiple stories


Sprints – How We Organize Delivery of Business

Value


Product Owner selects what stories will be worked on within each

sprint

Sprints are 15 working days in length

Day 1 is dedicated to sprint planning

Day 15 – Last day of sprint

Sprint Retro is conducted giving the team opportunity to inspect

and adapt

60 minute Demo is provided of working software from sprint(s)


Sprints - Organize Delivery of Business Value


Stories are expected to close throughout the sprint

Team focuses only on work in that sprint

Serious production support stories is our only unplanned work

When sprint starts no new/different work is accepted

Exceptions: Running out of work, Stories removed

A sprint can be terminated early under extreme conditions


Scrum Board


Stories represent letters

being built in HP

Exstream, .NET/ETL

applications, prod support

items, ad-hoc mailings,

etc.

Tasks look like sticky

notes and can be moved

into columns Active, In

Progress, Validation,

Closed.

Each task represents

about a ½ day’s worth of

work. In rare cases, a

task will represent 1 to 2

days worth of work.


Benefits of our Scrum Board


• The Scrum board gives team a visual indication by letter of its individual status.

Visual View

• Visual list of the exact HP tasks it takes to complete each one.

Task Status

• Team can work autonomously yet still coordinate larger groups of work together.

Easy Coordination

HP Exstream And Agile – Collaboration

Daily Standups


• 15 minutes or less

• Team answers three questions:

• What I did yesterday?

• What I will do today?

• What is slowing me down?

• Post Standup allows team to address detail discussions resulting from the Daily Standup

• Print Facility Manager attends via conference call

HP Exstream And Agile – Visual Progress

Information Radiators


Information radiators are graphical charts/displays kept in

public areas that communicate an Agile team’s progress.

Common examples:

• Average Velocity

• Sprint Burn down

• Project Burn up


Retrospectives


Demos

At the end of every sprint a team “Retro” is conducted

The team uses sticky notes to answer these questions:

• What should we as a team:

– stop doing

– start doing

– keep doing

• The team also decided to add “Word of the Sprint” to the Retro

Demos allow Scrum teams to demonstrate result of

their work to the company

• The team uses the actual working software built to

show the direct business value they are delivering

live in front of the business

Prior to Agile, BCBSNE would not have seen

working software for 6-12 months or longer

• Power Point presentations or piles of paper

documents were used in the past.

By choice, ePublishing demos about every three

sprints rather than every sprint


Just Enough Just in Time


Traditional project management struggled with not delivering working software until

the entire solution is built.

• The result: business waits, time passes, requirements regularly change and what is

finally delivered may or may not be what is now needed

Our Agile teams have dramatically cut time to market through continuous delivery of

just enough features delivered just in time.

– Example: At BCBSNE, we deliver one section of a multiple section document fully working

back to the customer before moving on to build out the other sections.

– Allows our customers to provide continuous feedback using working software.

HP Exstream And Agile – Focus on Value

DeliveredJust Enough Just in Time


Every three week sprint ePublishing is delivering slices of working software into test

and/or production.

• Business teams are alerted so they can begin using working slices and providing

feedback to team

• The focus remains on just enough rather than delivery of the “whole”

• Feedback and additional features are put into the backlog and groomed/planned to be

built in future sprints

In the Eye of the Storm

Rising to a Challenge


Summer 2013

• A new system being built required the fax or mailing of over 320+ new letters

• Backlog grooming and velocity forecasting in Spring of 2013 indicated serious issues

regarding the actual velocity vs needed velocity

• The ePub team completely reformed in form, function, roles, and collaboration

methods used with the other development team

• We switched for three sprints from Scrum to Kan Ban

• Result:

– Velocity (measured in letters) went from delivering 20 letters per sprint to delivering over

320+ letters in 2-3 sprints

Questions?


On-line Q & A Tool

• How to use survey tool

– Smart Phones: Go to http://pollev.com/jonathanshow931

– Text Message:

• Send message text to 22333

• In Body of Message type:

688112 followed by your question


http://pollev.com/jonathanshow931