In this 4 minute video, I talk about how successful Agile organizations embrace a notion of the ‘knowledge-creating company.’ In Agile, knowledge-creation can use “5 Levels of Planning” to ensure they are engaging in this whole organization practice. In sum, the highest level of planning, the vision, feeds and is fed by all subsequent levels, down to the lowest level of planning, the detailed daily work.
Watch my video for more about why I truly believe in both Bottom-up and Top-down decision making as a key success factor.
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Agile 101, led by Christophe Louvion
What is your pain? Command and control, changing priorities during the sprint, hybrid process, making decisions outside the team that affect the team, improper tooling, moving resources around.
Root causes: Lack of self organization caused by lack of education, lack of an Agile driver, internal or external customer pressure, lack of executive vision, fear of change, skill set mismatches, ask teams to do things that don’t work well, lack of action items with a clear owner and clear deadlines.
Christophe had people in his breakout commit to action items. Christophe is going to call each of these people and verify if they accomplished their action items, like Lisa who committed to requesting a coach to come into their company and help them with their hybrid Agile process.
Pains: The sausage factory syndrome, the business doesn’t want to know how the software is made, but give me what I ask for when I need it. Market dynamics like drops in ad revenue and other drops in the market.
Solution: Innovation is now affordable because we can all experiment, try something in your sprint and if it doesn’t work out you only have 2 weeks invested. Read the book Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christenson.
Risk management is important to executives, and Agile reduces it significantly. Money quantification, understand the value of what you’re delivering. Look at Capers Jones and his 2008 book Applied Software Measurement and his 2007 book Estimating Software Costs.
Agile Governance and Compliance, led by Laureen Knudsen
Pains: People live in rigid environments and don’t want to change. People don’t want to show their work because it’s too raw and there is fear around failing fast by validating your work with actual customers. There were questions about what is the earliest point to show things to customers.
Organizationally what is happening to enable collaboration? Organizations need to communicate down about vision, and the teams need to communicate up areas of process improvement. There was talk about servant leaders, and how command and control managers actually make people dumber. Most Agile teams start with iteration planning, standups and the end of the iteration demo.
Start with a Vision, this is the first level of planning that the leadership team owns.
Then move to a Roadmap where you talk about themes of releases. It’s important to talk in themes and the Product Council is the feedback mechanism for that process.
Then Release planning is next. It is important for everyone to be involved in the Release planning.
Then think about taking the Release theme and how the Iterations build toward that goal.
Then Daily examine what you did toward that goal yesterday, what you are going to do today, and what is getting in your way.
Each level then provides a feedback loop to the higher level of planning. At Rally everyone is involved in these 5 levels of planning within every department in the company.
Pains: Integrating testing teams in with development teams, making testing teams more effective and how to introduce Test Driven Development into the development team. An important way to integrate testing and development is to integrate and involve both roles in planning sessions. Testing should be part of the definition of done and involve testers in creating a story’s acceptance criteria.
The group talked about how to break down the walls between testers and developers, by focusing on the reality that everyone owns the quality of the software being developed. When testing is integrated into the process it makes them more effective. Finally, a few teams are trying to use Test Driven Development. Test Driven Development can’t be imposed onto the team, the key developers on the team need to lead by example by embracing TDD practices.
RallyDev.com
