Are You Ready for Agile? Questions to consider before embarking on

Agile Journey

Ramesh Donnipadu

• 18 years in Industry. Currently with UNTD

• CSM & Agile enthusiast

• 3+ years of experience with Agile/Scrum

• Successfully helped organizations in adopting to Large-scale, Multi-

site Agile adoption

Who am I?

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•Audience – Who is this session for?

• Do you know what Agile is?

• Are you considering adopting Agile?

• Have you started Agile recently?

• Have you been practicing agile for a while?

•Pre-requisites for succeeding with agile adoption

Agenda

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Is Agile hard?

• Is Agile a Process? Set of Practices?

• Commitment from ALL levels

• Requires great discipline & Courage

• Willingness to Change

Checklist

• Management Preparedness

• Engineering Preparedness

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• Do you have the support of your Management?

• Have you trained your folks?

• Do you have a dedicated Team, Scrum Master & Product Owner?

• Have you planned for additional help during initial iterations?

• Have you assessed suitability of existing facilities?

• Is appropriate attrition strategy in place?

• Should I start with one team or bring everyone on board?

• Do you have a plan on Dependency Management?

Management Preparedness

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1. Do you have the Management’s support?

• “Check-box” support Vs Passionate commitment

• Provide resources, time, constant encouragement

• Willingness to let go – Estimates, decisions, agreements, directions are now

owned by the Team!

• Empower the teams

• Revise measures of success

2. Did you train your folks?

• Does the team understand Agile Manifesto, Principles behind them?

• CSM training for Scrum Masters – recommended for entire team

• CSPO training for Product Owners

• Scrum awareness program for the support staff

• Pre-training with study groups, Participation in user-group meetings & discussions

Additional Training

Scrum Team Scrum Master

Product Owner

Execs, Line Managers

Punctuality, Teamwork

Delegation Customer Expectation management

Team empowerment

Cross-functional skills

Conflict resolution, Facilitation skills

Conflict resolution, Facilitation skills

Facilitation, Conflict resolution

Ownership (Functional, Technical, Operational)

Root-Cause analysis

Root-Cause analysis, 5-Whys

Servant Leadership

3. Have you signed-up for additional help?

- Have a full-time coach to help you during initial sprints

- Can you seed your teams with experienced Agile practitioners?

4. Do you have dedicated staff?

- Dedicated Team

- Dedicated Scrum Master

- Dedicated Product Owner

- PO => Rep of all end-users

- No PO or Multiple POs - ×

5. Changes needed to Facilities?

• Is your team co-located?

• Cubicle based team Vs war-room based team?

• Enough space for hanging charts

6.Is appropriate Attrition strategy in place?

• Tightly gelled teams

• Small teams, shorter iterations => any departure is setback

• New member = disruption

• Frequent additions/deletions = disruption

• Have a trained pool of resources (buffer)

Large scale Agile adoption

- Start with one team Vs entire organization

- Team-specific product backlog Vs Org-wide Vision & Roadmap

- Dependency Management

- Exclusive Code ownership Vs Shared Ownership

Distributed Agile

• Build Trust among the team members

– Frequent face-to-face communication, travel ambassadors, team building exercises, Working agreements, Delivering commitments

• Communication tools

– IM, Tele/Video Conf, Skype, Email, Wiki, WebEx, VNC

• Project Management tools – Rally, Version One, ScrumWorks, Jira, Crucible

• Source Code repository replication systems (Git, WanDisco, CollabNet)

Engineering Practices

• Do you have sufficient Unit test coverage?

• Do you use Automation testing?

• Do your teams know

– Refactoring?

– Pair-Programming?

– Test Driven development?

• Is your build/deployment system fully automated?

• Do you practice Continuous Integration?

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Tools

• What kind of collaboration tools to use?

• Auditing monitoring tools?

• Bring every system from DEV sandbox to Production under monitoring

• Multi-location teams

– Source code replication tools

– Video conf, IM, WebEx

• Project Management tools

– Version One, Rally etc.

Conclusion

• Agile is hard

• Systematic preparation is key to success

• No need a ‘√’ for ALL questions

• Are the questions related to Agile?

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THANK YOU

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