Scrum in a Large Organization Ralph Koglin CPO, Bernd Götz CSM
Jun 27, 2015
Scrum in a LargeOrganizationRalph Koglin CPO, Bernd Götz CSM
Introduction
•Today•History•Good and Bad from the Trenches•What's next?
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• Bernd and Ralph
About Us
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• Bernd and Ralph
About Us
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Swiss Re is a leading and highly diversified globalre/insurance company
• Our financial strength is currently rated:Standard & Poor’s: AA-/stable; Moody’s A1/positive;A.M. Best: A+/stable
• A pioneer in insurance-based capital market solutions, wecombine financial strength and unparalleled expertise forthe benefit of our clients.
• We deliver both traditional and innovative offeringsin Property & Casualty and Life & Health that meet ourclients' needs.
• 150 years of experience in providing wholesalere/insurance and risk management solutions.
The “Gherkin”, London
Headquarters, Zurich
Armonk, New York
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• Develop a global treaty rating platform reflecting the best practices ofexisting rating methods and tools currently implemented in the Americas,Europe, and Asia-Pacific as well as more recent and future developments
• Replace a wealth of existing tools (largely excel based tools)
• The Global Rating Platform forms a central part of the underwriting process
• A multi-year initiative
The Global Rating Plattform
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GRP Today
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modernanalyst.com
• Chief Product Owner, three Product Owners
• 37 team members
– Four teams with Scrum Masters
– One "Chief Scrum Master"
• Distributed between
– Riga (Latvia)
– Zurich (Switzerland)
The Project Setup
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Teams and Chapters
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See Kniberg, Scaling Agile @ Spotify
• 3 week Sprints
• Working Agreements
– Definition of Ready
– Definition of Done
• Daily Stand ups
– 10 -15 minutes per team
– 10 -15 minutes Scrum of Scrum
• Product Backlogs
• Regular planning poker sessions for storypoint estimation and release planning
Scrum Setup
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Sprint Details
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Sprint 81 Sprint 82
Monday
Sprint releasedeployment, BusinessReview preparation
Business ReviewRetrospectives (per team)
Sprint Planning (all)Story planning andestimation per team
Story planning andestimation per team
Mor
ning
Aft
erno
on
SprintingFriday Tuesday
Story preview sessions
Story analysis and designSprint release wrap up(continued on Friday)
Thursday
Release Planning
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1 2 3 S 2 3 4 5 S1 S
Release 5.1 – May 12
3 Feature Sprints1 Stabilisation Sprint
Major Topic:• xxx
(incl. performance improvements)
Minor Topics:• yyy
ca. 6 small Stories:- agreed critical stories
Major Topic:• xxx
(development proceeds till end of 2014)
Minor Topics:• yyy• zzz (agreed on stories)
ca. 10 small Stories:- agreed critical stories
Stabilisationonly!
Release 5.2 – Sept 15
5 Feature Sprints1 Stabilisation Sprint
Release 5.3 – Oct 27
2 StabilisationSprints
S
History
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• ~10 team members
• In 2008 the project started with"Swiss Re RUP"
• Large use case documents
– expensive to maintain
– handed over from Business to IT(throw it over the fence….)
• Wasteful!
2008: Business vs IT
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Use CaseDocument
modernanalyst.com
• ~ 15 team members, all in one team
• Crisis workshop to pull the project together
• "Partial" introduction of scrum:
– Let's call use cases stories
– Word to Wiki
• Three week development cycles
• First product backlog
• Project manager becomes product owner
– High level features for releases put together by PO
2009: "Scrum But"
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• ~ 15 team members
• Version 1.0
– minimum viable product
– high degree of stress
• Split into two teams, introduction of Scrum of Scrum
• Technical debts
• Introduction of story point estimation using planning poker
2010: First Production Release
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Version History
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1 Sep 20101.0
26 Aug20112.1
27 Aug20123.0
13 Jul 20134.0
Summer20145.x
Good and Bad from theTrenches
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• Core Values! Great!
• Bodies and committees – PSB, LSC, TDC,SQA, AQ, MTV, GIA, ORM
• BPPM - Best Practice Project Management
– still alive and kicking
– project vs product thinking…
• Yearly planning and budgeting process
• Build vs run organizations
– Move to run mode, handover to maintenanceteam, aka "waste"
• How to identify and how to agree what'swaste and what's not
Hang on… is Swiss Re a Truly Agile Company?
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modernanalyst.com
• A physical board is not possible due totwo locations
• Jira with Rapid Board (aka Greenhopper)
• Confluence Wiki
– User documentation
– Specification
– Business documentation
– Technical documentation
• It took some time to get there
• Is Swiss Re lucky with this tooling?
Lean Tooling in an Enterprise
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Jira
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Confluence
• Communication and Collaboration
– Heavy users of Swiss Re's Web Based Conferencingplatform
– Lotus Notes Sametime for group and individual chats
Team Location and Setup – Collaboration….
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• Near Shoring – it'sgiven at the moment
• Lots of travelling
• Regular all teamworkshops andevents
• Build trust acrosslocations
The Waterfall Virus still Alive…
People stuck in Waterfall Thinking
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Defects, Defects, Defects
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Stabilization Sprints
1.2 2.1 2.5 3.1 3.5 4.0 4.2 5.0
• Lack of automation
– Being addressed, is a huge undertaking ifnot picked up from the beginning
• Incomplete acceptance tests
• Developers don't test their own codewell enough (not enough unit testing,not enough integration testing)
• Domain complexity (complex domainmodel, complex calculations, hard tovalidate)
• Too much load by PO, hence too muchwork in progress
Where are those Defects coming from?
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modernanalyst.com
Stories and Defects Correlation
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0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1 1.1 1.2 2 2.1 2.5 3 3.1 3.5 4 4.1 4.2 5
Num
ber
of S
tori
es/D
efec
ts
Version
Stories vs Defects
Stories per Release
Defects per Release
"We know it,but…"
What's next?
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• More product focus (vs. project focus)
• Continuous delivery
– More frequent deployments to production
– Having a potentially shippable product each Sprint
– Strong investment into test automation
• Leaner specification, e.g. using "Specification by Example"
• Foster Lean/Agile knowledge within the Business organization
• "Delight the Customer"
PO/SM Wish List
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• Is it enough to count stories, and to drop story point estimation?
• Our own data supports above statement, correlation is 0.97!
• See Story Points considered harmful, Vasco Duarte
Changes in Estimation
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• It works! Even in a large organization!
• Training and education!
• The relationship between Business and IT improved with Agile/Scrum
• It's still very much bottom up, and based on energetic people
Conclusion
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Thank you!