I had the pleasure of attending a presentation from Susan Burk, Principal of Top Five To Seven LLC, about adopting pieces of agile development without embracing all of it. Essentially, being “A Little Agile” shop. Can it work? Why do large companies tend to do this? What parts are indispensable?
My notes are as follows:
Obstacles Large Organizations Face:
- HR Considerations:
- Allocations – Resources must have 100% load to be considered efficient
- Roles – People are rigidly defined in a role
- Incentives – Personal incentives given primarily for personal goals
- Regulatory Constraints:
- Finance, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals
- Incremental Delivery – Must release all at the same time
- Scale – “Agile cannot be used on large projects”
- Distributed Teams – “Agile has to be done on site”
- Documentation Requirements – Real or Imaginary
- Who reads the documentation and write the required amount of documentation.
- Architecture Requirements
- Key people have to commit for the origination of the project or the project will suffer as a result.
3D Adoption: Agile Adoption of Agile
- Roll out practices with business value
- Paves way for futre agile advancement
- Introduce more concepts over time
- Address corporate and culture concerns early
- Conduct leadership / platform level retrospective
Where can you compromise?
- Create a fully agile team
- Slowly introduce these practices to other areas
- Add Primary and Secondary roles to resources instead of additional projects
- Create ‘Generalized Specialists”
- Documentation Requirements:
- Ask to change the format and product only what what has a clearly defined “consumer”
- The tests for your project can generally be used to document what it something should do and how it would work. Perhaps use Epic stories or Use cases to describe a function.
- Architecture Requirements
- Set up “Platforms” or “turfs” allowing designers and architects to specialize in broader areas and allow for cross pollination.
- Key roles must commit to project during start up.
Where CANT you compromise?
- Stories written from business perspective must deliver business value on each iteration
Companies can benefit from:
- Agile coaches + Mentoring
- 3 projects before people really get it
Success Stories:
- IBM: Websphere – They were eventually producing software faster than their customers could consume it.
- Michael Mah
- Merask Shiplines
Read: Jefferson and the Art of Power
Scott Ander, or Ellen Goldensteiner
