George Anghelache Cristian CazanOctober 2012

Darwin, Agile and the Dinosaurs

2IN YOUR ZONE

Endava is a leading IT services organization, with offices in London

and New York and delivery centers in Romania and Moldova that

support the full project lifecycle. Utilizing our distributed agile

delivery model - TEAM, we are able to deliver significant

improvements to quality and productivity resulting in our clients

being able to deliver substantially more for the same budget.

Introductions

3IN YOUR ZONE

Delivery Manager

• 15+ years experience in IT

• Former Projects Delivery Manager and

Head of PM, overseen good delivery of all

Endava projects from a RO base

• Agile Expert, consulting blue-chip clients in

implementing nearshore distributed agile

Delivery Manager

• 15+ years experience in IT

• Former Head of Development Romania,

spotting, attracting and managing over 160 IT

professionals in 2 delivery locations

• Agile Expert, Certified Scrum Master, wide

consultancy experience in enterprise agile

George Anghelache Cristian Cazan

Introductions

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Darwin, Agile and the Dinosaurs considerations when evolving Agile to Enterprise Level

Agile Purists and Enterprise Agile practitioners are

always debating how Scrum roles, ceremonies and

practices should be implemented when dealing with

highly complex Enterprise environments and

solutions.

Can a single Product Owner cope with the

complexity? How do we scale Agile? Do we need

Architectural leadership?

Let’s look at these topics together.

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Raise your hand if …

•You’ve tried Agile on this type of project

•5-15 teams

•Multi-site teams

•Multiple vendors

•Large and complex systems

Any others ?

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What does Complex Enterprise Environment mean?

•Large organizations

•Complex integrated business critical systems

•Multiple vendors to develop their systems

•Mix of technologies

•Very complex budgeting cycle

•Intricate organization structure and stakeholder tree to

manage

•Large programs of work

•Long history => inherited a good amount of antiquated

delivery practices

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What does The Book say?

•maximizing the value of the product

•maximizing the work of the Development Team

• the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog

• Clearly expressing Product Backlog items

• Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions

• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all stakeholders, and

shows what the Scrum Team will work on next

• Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level

needed

Product Owner as Defined in Scrum

7

?

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Hmm… will it work at Enterprise Level?

One Man Band One Stressed CookieThe Hero

8

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•Focus the will of many business users into detailed US

•Get buy-in of very large stakeholder tree

•Work around complex budgeting and tracking mechanics

Enterprise Agile Challenge

What would be an

Evolution of the Product Owner

in a complex enterprise context?

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The Composite Product Owner

Product Owner

Business Analyst

Project Manager

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We need a evolution of the concept at Enterprise Level

Complexity

Decouple three main areas:

strategy / features / management

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•Focus on building the features

•Removing impediments in a complex client environment

•Channel results and reporting under contractual terms

Enterprise Agile Challenge

What would be an

Evolution of the Scrum Master

in a complex enterprise context?

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Composite Scrum Master

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Scrum Master

Project Manager

features and scrum team enterprise planning and communication

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• Complex integrated business critical systems creating lots of dependencies

• Mix of technologies as multiple vendors have & are developing the systems

via large programs of work

• Intricate organization structure and stakeholder tree to manage

Enterprise Agile Challenge

What would be an

Evolution of the Agile Scaling

in a complex enterprise context?

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Scrum of Scrums, caveats with growth?

Project coordinationRelease PlanningScrums coordinationTech leadershipSolution storming

•The SoS will have an overload to lead all the teams and projects

•Keeping up to date will require too many meetings, too many details

•Effective acting as Tech Leadership and Future Team compromised

•LIMIT @3-4 SCRUMS and 30-odd people

Scrum coordinationPlan ownershipUser Story ownershipQuality

14

Project Manager

Design Lead SoS Scrum Master

SM + Team SM + Team … SM + Team

Test Lead

Add more teams

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Enabling Enterprise Scale Agile

• Growing to a large number of teams requires a change of the standard structure

• Vertical ownership: each Cluster and each Scrum = Feature focus

• Scale Horizontally by creating new clusters containing 3-4 Scrum teams

• Each Cluster has a project manager to focus on: Release Planning, Reporting and Impediments

• Horizontal ownership: the shared Design Scrum = Technical Knowledge and Quality focus

Virtual Scrum of Scrums of Scrums: DS SM, PMs, SMs, Agile Coaches

Cluster of teams Cluster of teamsDesign Scrum (DS)

Technical Knowledge & Quality focus via DS shared allocation

Featu

re f

ocu

s.

Deta

il

Add more team clusters; Multisite enabled

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• Complex domain knowledge spanning many integrated business critical

systems

• Significant mix of technologies, frameworks, 3rd party product, COTS

• Various technical and subject matter expert groups to assimilate

knowledge from

Enterprise Agile Challenge

How would you approach

Growing multiple scrum teams

in a complex enterprise context?

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How do you ramp-up Highly Productive Teams?

• Organic growth, seeding and pairing techniques to ramp-up and build highly productive teams

• Use pairing to accelerate domain knowledge transfer, new members ramp-up and improve code quality

Initial Core Team

Team 1

Team 2

+

+

Team 3

Team 4

Team 5

Team 6

+

+

Project Lifecycle

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• Intricate flux of requirements to backlog items through many layers of

business users, key stakeholders, compliance agents and composite product

owner

• Insuring strategic architecture and design principles alignment with

empowered technical groups from the client

Enterprise Agile Challenge

How would you evolve

Planning activities

in a complex enterprise context?

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Forward Planning

ClientSprint 1

Build

Sprint 2

Build

…

Build

Sprint 6

Build

Sprint 7

H.U.T.

Release planning

What’s to be build?

Design AuthorityTechnical experts

How we build it?

Composite Product Owner

Now Team

Planning Look ahead Foresee impediments

Future Team

SMsDesign Leads

20IN YOUR ZONE

• Chuck Norris is ScrumMaster and ProductOwner –

simultaneously

• Chuck Norris has implemented everything at the planning

meeting

•When Chuck Norris says “done”, then it’s “done”

• Chuck Norris answers just two questions on the stand-up

meeting: Chuck Norris does not know obstacles

• Chuck Norris does not need Reviews or Retrospectives:

there is no improvement for Chuck Norris’ process

• Chuck doesn't meet customer requirements and needs,

they meet his!

The Anti Hero

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Thank you!

Cristian CazanDelivery Manager

Cristian.Cazan@endava.com

George AnghelacheDelivery ManagerGeorge.Anghelache@endava.com

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This material draws inspiration from a massive community of Agile enthusiasts, our own experience and that of many clients and

companies we've engaged with through the years.

• People that have inspired us through many trainings, workshops , articles and webinars: Mike Cohn, Jeff Sutherland, Henrik

Kniberg, Ken Schwaber, Roman Pichler, Anna Forss, Serge Beaumont, Mike Beedle and many others we’ve not intentionally

forgot

• Sites and whitepapers with excellent knowledge: www.agilealliance.org; www.mountaingoatsoftware.com;

www.scrumalliance.org; www.controlchaos.com; www.implementingscrum.com; www.jeffsutherland.org; www.agileforall.com;

www.infoq.com; www.rapidscrum.com; www.slideshare.net; www.agile42.com; scrum.jeffsutherland.com;

www.agilemanifesto.org; www.scrum.org; www.wikipedia.org; www.projectmanagement.com; www.romanpichler.com;

www.agilesherpa.org; www.cathycarleton.com; www.implementingscrum.com; www.gantthead.com;

• Books that have added invaluable knowledge: Ken Schwaber - Agile Project Management with Scrum; Mike Cohn - Agile

Estimating and Planning; Mike Cohn – Introduction to user stories; Roman Pichler - Agile product management with Scrum;

Anna Forss - Confessions of a serial product owner; Ken Schwaber - The Enterprise and Scrum; Mike Cohn - User Stories Applied;

Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto - Teamwork; Serge Beaumont - Practical Tools for the Product Owner: Focus, Value, Flow; Jim

Highsmith - Agile Project Management; Jeff Patton - Story Maps; Mike Cohn - Succeeding with Agile; 37 Signals: Getting Real; Jeff

Sutherland - The Power of Scrum ; Tobias Mayer - Scrum Roles; Donald Reinertsen - The Principles of Product Development

Flow; C. Jakobsen and J. Sutherland - Scrum and CMMI – Going from Good to Great; Donald Reinertsen - Managing The Design

Factory; Scrum Sense – What every product owner should know; Ken Schwaber, Beedle Mike - Agile Software Development with

Scrum;

• Pictures copyright and courtesy of The Flistones, Warner Bros; Television Distribution & Meet the Robinsons, Disney Pictures

Attributions