The Art of Scrum && Quintuple-Constraint alexanderjsingleton

The George Washington University School of Business | MSIST

The “liberating-shackles” of process and procedure afforded by Agile-Scrum project management methodologies.

● Ubiquitous core-business of Search facilitates 3.5 billion queries per day, Google is celebrated for much more- from:

○ Google X and ○ Google Ventures to ○ Nest Labs○ DeepMind.

● Roughly 90% of Google’s business is driven by Google AdWords (GADW), a subsidiary offering advertising services and analytics as a platform.

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Company Proble statement

● Ubiquitous core-business of Search facilitates 3.5 billion queries per day, Google is celebrated for much more- from:

○ Google X and ○ Google Ventures to ○ Nest Labs○ DeepMind.

● Roughly 90% of Google’s business is driven by Google AdWords (GADW), a subsidiary offering advertising services and analytics as a platform.

● Google continues to outperform market expectations to this day, boasting a $5.1B stock buy-back 3Q14.

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Google Revenue from 1Q08 to 3Q15 ($MM)

Problem

● Systemically outgrown start-up culture.

● How to improve quality & reliability while remaining culturally dynamic?

Reiterating the criticality of AdWords as a core business segment, 95% of Google’s aggregate revenue was driven by Google AdWords (GADW) at the time concerning the subject case. In 2005, just eight years after incorporation, the growing complexity of the AdWords application systemically outgrew relaxed product management standards, missing deadlines due to operational inefficiencies.

Solution

Agile | Scrum

● Strategic objectives coincidentally required project management, as the actual project, to ensure the long-term viability of GADW business segment in conjunction with their core-competency of Search, to guarantee effective execution with quality and reliability efficiency standards.

● Contemporary project management accounts not only the “triple-constraint” of cost, scope and reliability constituting traditional “waterfall management” but additive are quality and reliability, comprising the “quintuple constraint."

Agile

A brave new world in management.

Agile Manifesto

● Individuals and interactions over process and tools.● Working software over comprehensive documentation.● Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.● Responding to change over a following plan.

http://www.agilealliance.org/the-alliance/the-agile-manifesto

Scrum: What is it?

Iterative

The classical principles and standards of “waterfall” project management are simply not conducive to the iterative nature of software development. Writing software, isn’t all too far from like writing this report-many drafts or iterations were produced before the final release, or publication in this case.

Dynamic

Tech projects, let alone the state-of-the art, are born mired in risk and uncertainty- dynamic and ever-changing, an iterative framework like Scrum, is a series dynamic of workflows, allowing change by discovery or request, committing to subset features ideally delivered in each two to four week iteration, known as a sprint.

Accommodative

As the Chief Product Owner at Yahoo observed, “[Scrum] is the only software-development process that has demonstrated linear-[scalability] when adding resources to large projects.”

http://www.agilealliance.org/the-alliance/the-agile-manifesto

Scrum: Who?

Product Owner

The product owner typically represents the needs of the business and is commissioned for “documenting and prioritizing high-level requirements as input into outgoing planning.”

Scrum Team

A Scrum team is a cross-functional software development team, or “dev” team, “undertaking the required work in each sprint and enlisting input from the Product Owner when requirements need to be clarified.”

Scrum Master

Implementation, including any variations for the greater good of Google, company-wide, as the bonafide deliverable.

Scrum: How to @ ?

Experiment

Scrum project management experimentation for two project-ready GADW applications.

Debrief

Debrief and evaluation of Scrum administration, or any adjustments thereof.

Implement

Implementation, including any variations for the greater good of Google, company-wide, as the bonafide deliverable.

[Strategy,Structure,Execution] <<

Coach Mark Striebeck

● Mark Striebeck is currently an engineering manager at Google, responsible for testing infrastructure, tools and adoption but spending his Google “20% time” working in an internal user-group chartered to further the adoption of Agile practices.

● Prior to joining Google, he was one of the pioneers of Scrum project management, discovering Agile development while working at VA Linux Systems and Research; he holds two master’s degrees in computer science and mathematics.

● As the new head of Agile at Google, Striebeck would need a set of methods and metrics to track progress, identify and isolate behavioral impediments, so Scrum could be comfortably suited for software development at Google

Instantiate! (put him in-he’s ready to play, to pay)

Project A Project Bution

Project A was integrating new functionality that didn’t overlap with existing features, comprised by recent-college graduates and company-rookies working remotely.

Project B was primarily composed by experienced, seasoned Google engineers designing a simplified version of the AdWords product, heavily integrated with existing features.

Implementation

Implementation Toolkit

● Release Backlog● Expression of Project Story Points● Sprint Execution & Burndown Charts● Checkpoint Meetings (modified Sprint

meetings)● Commencement/Evaluation

Coach Mark Striebeck

●In both projects, Mark chose to measure the product and release backlogs KPIs with a burndown-rate chart as the preferred tools of choice, measuring tasks-completed, not feature-completed, careful not to avoid stressing the developers.

Challenges deep-dive

Challenge 1

Laissez-Faire Although initially ideal, it is fair to attribute laissez-faire management as a failure-factor enabling managers to spread themselves too thin, which limited opportunities to contribute actionable feedback necessary for project-developers, in-turn yielding inefficient project

micro-management.

Challenge 2

AvoidanceMoreover, they ignorantly concluded that “game-planning” was an exercise in futility as the game of development always changed in spite of trustworthy mock-ups, so feature-decisions were avoided during the Scrum pre-planning meetings, distorting proposed objectives, protracting engineering development.

Challenge 3

Increase conversionCumulative scope increased greater than 30%, on both projects; interestingly, the delta didn’t result from additional feature requests, but was in fact due to managerial oversight and misguidance. The engineering team missed features in the mock-ups necessary for the release, leading to several postponements in both projects

Remediation via KPIs

Repair 1

Know your targetThe aforementioned substantiates the assessment presented herein- the notion of defining targets or release-critical objectives was an unfamiliar practice at Google, so Mr. Striebeck should’ve modified his administration or perhaps observed careful attention to estimates, challenging each member to second-guess their estimates during the sprint pre-planning phases

Repair 2

Improve what is measured

However, cardinal Google-rules of test-driven development (TDD) became the final straw breaching critical-mass: “tests were not written, code was not reviewed (which is mandatory at Google) features were not completely integrated,” so this prompted Mr. Striebeck to add dimensions to the burndown chart, to indicate how many tasks were initiated, started and finished, indicating sub-optimal task-completion velocity because of too many partially completed features outstanding

Repair 3

“Spikes”In order to remediate task scheduling discrepancies, a “spike,” was created as an investigative “subtask” of a feature-task to accurately determine all of the mechanics underneath and thus time required for a given feature; spikes were especially appreciated during scope-creep, as “everybody realized the value of getting a better estimate of implementing a feature before actually starting to work on it.”

Modified Burndown Chart

Strategy

Debrief the project Engineers by hosting a presentation on Scrum.

Structure

Maintaining backlogs was finally worth the overhead.

Tactics

How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time.

Execution

Maintain Weekly Retrospects

Results

Minimize feature time-boxes or freeze-cycles bottlenecks.

Critical Path

Project A Project Bution

ution

YEARAdWords Revenue Per Annum

(Billions)Percentage Growth

(Per Annum)

2001 0.07

2002 0.41 82.93%

2003 1.42 71.13%

2004 3.14 54.78%

2005 3.07 -2.28%

2006 10.49 70.73%

2007 16.41 36.08%

2008 21.13 22.34%

2009 22.89 7.69%

2010 28.24 18.94%

2011 36.53 22.69%

2012 43.69 16.39%

2013 50.55 13.57%

Advertising revenue of Google from

2001 to 2014 (in billion U.S. dollars)

.

Questions?

Case-Study Repositories

● [Scribd](https://www.scribd.com/doc/287153211/Google-AdWords-The-Art-of-Scrum-Quintuple-Constraint)

● [MyBlog](https://www.alexanderjsingleton.com/google-adwords-the-art-of-scrum-quintuple-constraint/)

Thank you!

alexanderjsingleton