Using Agile and Lean to Stay Ahead in a Tough Economy

Presenter: Sally Elatta

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Using Agile and Lean Methods

to Stay Ahead in a Tough Economy!

copyright © Sally Elatta 2009 www.AgileTransformation.com

Speaker

Sally Elatta

President AgileTransformation.com

Agile Process Improvement Coach, Software Architect

Certified Scrum Practitioner & ScrumMaster

Certified IBM, Sun, Microsoft Professional

[email protected]

www.AgileTransformation.com

221

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.agiletransformation.com/


• Quick overview of Traditional Development

• Provide an overview of Agile, Scrum

• Why it‟s being adopted

• Overview of the basic process

• Discuss the various Agile/Scrum roles

• Provide you resources for follow up

information.

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copyright © Sally Elatta 2009 www.AgileTransformation.com4

The Waterfall Process

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Waterfall Characteristics

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Why Change?

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Business & IT

Views of Each Other

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Business > IT

• Slow, Bottleneck

• Too Complex

• Necessary Evil

• Black hole

• Talk in Gibirish

• Can’t produce ROI

• Arrogant, Unfriendly

• Don’t understand business

• Technology and Documentation driven

IT > Business

• Indecisive

• Never Happy

• Don’t understand IT

• Can’t prioritze

• Unreasonable

• Won’t take ownership

• Won’t engage

• Lack SMEs

• Forget IT Costs $$$


What Does Business Need?

Business Needs

• Speed in Delivery

• Understanding of Needs

• Predictablility

• Responivness

• Flexability

• Measurable ROI

• Customer Service

• Trusted Expert

• Focus on Priorities

IT & Business Need to:

• Listen, Humility

• Collaboration

• Achieve Results

• Break internal silos

• Trust each other

• Predictable process

• Provide visibility

• Don’t over promise

• Prioritize better

• Engage each other8


The manifesto‟s shared value statement:“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and

helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals & interactions Over Processes & Tools

Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation

Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation

Responding to Change Over Following a Plan

“That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

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Key Agile Principles

Focus on delivering high value, high priority for the customer value –

Employ business-driven prioritization of features.

Iterative & Incremental Delivery –Create a flow of value to customers by

“chunking” feature delivery into small increments.

Intense Collaboration – Face-to-face communication via collocation, etc;

diversified roles on integrated teams.

Self Organization – Team members self-organize to fulfill a shared project

vision.

Continuous Improvement – Teams reflect, learn and adapt to change;

work informs the plan.

Just Enough Documentation – Only valuable documentation that is

actually consumed will produced, no more heavy overhead that has no

value to the business.

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Project Management Principles

(Release Planning, Sprint and Iteration Planning, Daily Scrum,

Sprint Demo and Retrospective ..etc)

Engineering Principles(TDD, Continuous Integration,

Refactoring ..etc)

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Basic Concepts of Lean

Core Concepts:1. Value: What the customer is willing to pay for.

2. Value Stream: Actions that add value to a product or process.

3. Flow: The continuous movement of product, favoring single-piece flow and work cells versus production lines.

4. Pull: Replacing only material that is used and eliminating excessive inventory.

5. Continuous Improvement: A relentless elimination of waste on a never-ending basis.

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Lean Continuous Improvement Cycle

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4) Involve and empower employees

Continuously improve in the pursuit of perfection

1) Specify value in the eyes of the customer

2) Identify the value stream and eliminate waste

5) Continuously improve in the pursuit of perfection

3) Make value flow at the “pull” of the customer


Doing More with Less!

• A high performing cross-functional Agile team can work together more effectively and efficiently to deliver value that is on target with what the business wants.

• Agile and Lean will help you identify process waste and give you a simple method for eliminating it!

• To create high performing teams, you need high performing players. You also need to invest in re-skilling the ones that have potential.

14copyright © Sally Elatta 2009 www.AgileTransformation.com



The Agile/Scrum Process

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Agile practices include:

• Release Planning (1)(creates Product backlog)

• Iteration Planning (2)(creates Iteration backlog)

• Daily Standup

• Fixed-length iterationsand small releases

• Feature Review (3)

• Process Reflection (4)

Identify top-priority

items and deliver them

early and often.


• Feature List/Backlog: List of stories/ requirements

• Story: A small deliverable valuable to the business

• Release: “Done” stories moved to production

• Iteration/sprint: Fixed timebox that delivers

incremental value

• Tasks: The small workable pieces needed to get a

story „Done‟.

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Product Owner

thinks of New Idea

Product Backlog

Sprint Backlog

Features/Stories Small Stories

Each story is broken down into tasks. Each team member signs up for tasks and provides estimates of effort.

Tasks

Spri

nt 1

Spri

nt 2

Spri

nt 3

Spri

nt 4

Spri

nt N

Each Iteration is 1 – 4 weeks in length. Multiple iterations make up a Release.

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Sample Backlog

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Agile Characteristics Product Backlog

Test Driven Development Business / IT as One Team20


Release Planning

• What are the top priority items we need to deliver in this release?

• How Big/Small is each one? What is the dependency between them?

• How much can the team handle each iteration? Pencil in the next several iterations.

• What are our „Conditions of Satisfaction‟ for this release? When are we „Done‟?

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Release Planning

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Iteration Planning

• Half day or full day meeting to answer the

following:

• What are the top stories we need to get done this

iteration?

• How will we know when each item is „Done‟, what are

the acceptance test cases?

• What tasks do we need to get each item done?

• Who will signup, commit and provide an ETA for each

task?

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Sample Iteration Plan

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Daily Tracking

• What did you do yesterday?

• What will you do today?

• Any Impediments?

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Iteration Review

• Product owner and team show off what the team got

done in the last iteration and discuss impediments.

• Get feedback from other users

and stakeholders and discuss

plan for next iteration.

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Iteration Retrospective

What Worked Well?

• Impediments were removed quickly

• Team collaborated well to solve problems.

• Business users attended standups

What Needs Improvement?

• Prioritize stories before team meeting

• Identify acceptance tests before meeting

• Begin using TDD

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Story Points

• We simply use relative complexity buckets

to size each story.

Smallest

20+

Small Medium Med-large Large Very Large EPIC!

How many stories a team gets ‘Done’ each iteration is their Velocity

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Committed:

– Scrum Master

– Product Owner

– The Team

Interested:

– Stakeholders

– Users

Scrum Roles

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Who is the Product Owner?

1 Person in charge of the backlog!

Prioritizes the backlog stories for highest ROI.

Most likely from the business. Has the most

to loose/gain from project outcome.

Accepts or rejects work completed.

Knowledgeable, Empowered, Engaged

Only one who can add or remove

stories from the backlog.

The Captain of the Ship!

Owns final success or failure

of project.

Product Backlog

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Business Users and SMEs

• Help Product Owner and Team by: Identify User Acceptance Test cases ahead of each

planning meeting.

Answering team questions and being a business

SME.

Help define priority and work that will provide most

value.

Perform user acceptance testing and recommend

acceptance or rejection of work.

Provide positive and constructive feedback to the

team.

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The ScrumMaster

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• Is the owner of the “Process”.

• Attacks impediments like a hawk!

• Makes sure the team is getting the

business collaboration needed for success.

• Helps build teamwork, motivation and

create self organizing teams.

• Prepares 'visual' reports that represents the

teams progress.


The Team

• Small, cross-functional group of people that work

together daily. Size is 7 (+- 2)

• Team is made up of developers, analysts,

testers, business users, data and systems folks

..etc.

• Some members are dedicated (75%+) and

some are shared with other projects.

• Each member attends all the core meetings,

breaks down and estimates tasks.

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Sample Team Structure

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Management Has a Role Too!

• Yes, management has a key role to play in

the Agile world, even though they are not

part of the “committed” execution team.

– Assign the right folks to the project

– Balance their workload so they can

contribute to the team

– Help them by removing impediments (and

not being one!).

– Agile requires discipline at all levels!

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New Skills Are Needed!

• Business: Leadership, Teamwork and Collaboration

Ability to define stories and user test cases

Ability to perform acceptance testing

Ability to truly prioritize what is needed now and

what provides value. Understand ROI

Better understanding of the technical world

Time management and commitment.

Support and stay positive

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New Skills Are Needed!

• IT: Effective Facilitation and Agile Requirements Gathering

with „Just Enough‟ Documentation

Leadership, Teamwork and Collaboration.

Ability to breakdown stories into small manageable tasks.

Ability to focus on getting stories completed with low/no bugs by incorporating Test Driven Development.

Ability to work and collaborate within the IT department (cross functional).

Communication, synchronization between multiple teams.

Foucs more on business value (ROI) than technical implementation. (Cool Cost Me Money!)

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So Who is Doing Agile?

Bottom Up Approach:Siemens, Phillips, BBC, State Farm, SAIC, LMCO, Federal Reserve Bank, CNA, Ariba, HP, TransUnion, Motorola, Medtronics, Sammy Studios, State Street Bank, APL, Avaya, Mutual of Omaha and more!

Top Down Approach: Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, Lexis-Nexis, Primavera, CapitalOne, Nokia, Bose, Bentley Systems, Union Pacific, ClearChannel, BMC, Farm Credit Services of America, KeyBank, Covad, Siemens Medical, and Siemens Telecommunications and more!

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Steps for Adopting Agile & Lean

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Pilot Adoption Steps

1. Identify an Agile Evangelist

2. Executive and Business Buy-in

3. Identification of Pilot project(s)

4. Team Training

5. Execute

6. Inspect, Measure, and Adapt

Enterprise Transformation Adoption Steps

1. Identify an Executive Sponsor

2. Get Management and Business Buy-in for Transformation

3. Assessment

4. Develop Transformation Roadmap Plan

5. Execute

6. Inspect, Measure and Adapt


How Agile Transformation

Can Help

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Real World Workshops

• Management and Business Overview of Agile/Lean

• Real World Agile and Scrum team training + Project Jump Start

• Effective Facilitation & Requirements Gathering

• Servant Leadership

• Agile Project Estimating and Planning

• Engineering Best Practices

• … More!

Real World Coaching

• Troubled Project Assessment & Recovery

• Agile Project Initiation and Planning

• Agile Project Execution

• Organizational Assessment

• Enterprise Transformation Roadmap Development and Execution


Contact Us

• United States

– 402 212 3211

• Email

– [email protected]

• Web

– www.AgileTransformation.com

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mailto:[email protected]

http://www.agiletransformation.com/

• My Article: http://tinyurl.com/6h5mam

• Read this Scrum in 5 Minutes article: http://tinyurl.com/ob76kc

• Watch the 10 minute video intro to

Scrum: http://tinyurl.com/5py7ct

• FAQ

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http://tinyurl.com/6h5mam



http://tinyurl.com/ob76kc

http://tinyurl.com/ob76kc

http://d.scribd.com/docs/chhrc80o9ml1tshmgg0.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/5py7ct

http://tinyurl.com/5py7ct

http://agiletransformation.com/index.php/faq/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5k7a9YEoUI

Using Agile and Lean to Stay Ahead in a Tough Economy

Technology

release planning

iteration

business users

product owner

process

provide

agile

backlog