agile lessons learned from the trenches
DESCRIPTION
Lessons learned rolling out agile at Pointroll from the perspective of the PMO.TRANSCRIPT
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Lessons Learned from the Trenches @Pointroll
Presented by: Brendan Flynn
Agile Comes to Chicago
April 5, 2011
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Target, Customize, QA, Test, Analyze & Optimize
Ad Serving, Rich Media, Dynamic Ad Generation and Site Content Campaign Management, Production and Measurement
Mea
sure
Mobile, iPad
Social/ Facebook Digital OOHDisplay Ads
In Stream Video
AUDIENCE / TARGETING INFO
Open, Agnostic,Targeted
DATA Promotions, Messaging
Products, Offers, Inventory Feeds
CREATIVE ASSETS
Elements, Features, Functionality
Reach Targets Wherever They Are
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Agile @ Pointroll
Practicing Agile since 2007
Leverage practices from Scrum, Lean, TDD
7 Teams, average 10-14 people p/team
Multiple product lines
All teams on consistent 2-week cadence
Agile utilized for product development, internal platform development and contracted client implementations
Regular production code releases every 2 weeks
Rally is used to manage Agile lifecycle
Confluence (wiki), JIRA (support), Team City (CI), are some of the other tools we use regularly to create visibility throughout
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Problems we had to address
Rapidly changing, incomplete or inadequate business &/or technical requirements
Organizational priorities were unclear to teams
Team had “do whatever it takes attitude” which resulted in over promising and under delivering, resulting in business frustration
Build quality into development framework; as opposed to testing for quality
Visibility / Resource allocations
No clear performance metrics
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What have we achieved?
True alignment of business and technology
Always working on highest organizational priorities
Consistently delivering business value every 2 weeks
More responsiveness to customer
Improved customer satisfaction
Improve quality/Reduced defects
Transparency into development lifecycle
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Top lessons learned rolling out agile
Burning visibility
Executive support is critical to success
Make data driven decisions
Make business decisions
Value of training
Optimize the whole (not just tech)
You still need to manage projects
Rigorously inspect and adapt
Agile is a framework, not a process
Agile is hard work
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Create burning visibility in everything you do
If it is not visible, you should not be working on it
Visibility into what your teams are working on
Visibility into how much work is remaining, in-progress, complete, for the sprint, release
Visibility into how much time is being spent on development vs. support, the types of support
Visibility into the number of defects, technical debt, failing test cases
Baseline and measure
Identify patterns and create a plan with your team for improvement
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Executive Support
When rolling out any new framework, there is a lot of noise and misconceptions in an organization
Create a bottom-up implementation with top-down executive support to help communicate and develop buy-in
Tactics we use for achieving executive support:• PMO holds weekly meetings with executive mgmt to review what
teams are or plan to be working on against organizational priorities/project pipeline
• Utilize metrics to show, not tell. Show costs, business value delivered, quality
• At portfolio level, manage capacity vs. requested work showing resource variances
• End of sprint summary – team, business & quality KPIs
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Make data driven decisions
“If it is not measureable, it is your opinion”
Support the story you are trying to tell with data
What do we measure? Team and quality metrics
How do we use it? To coach; Inform teams, stakeholders and executives
How often? Daily, sprint & pattern analysis sprint-to-sprint
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Example Team & Quality Metrics
VelocityEstimates vs. ActualsUnplanned workWork in progress limitsEarned business value5 Why’s root cause analysisDevelopment costsCommitted stories vs. accepted storiesNumber of Deferred stories and whyDefects by functionalityDefects by discovery source, environment, priorityTest coverageTest execution trends
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Make business decisions
Delivery teams @Pointroll provide a service
We try to never speak in absolutes… “There is no way we can get this release complete by this date”
Provide a holistic view of all projects across teams, people and provides options, impacts and risks
Allow business to make decisions about priority
Consistent team cadences allow easier priority decisions when planning 2-weeks vs. 2-months
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Value of training
Ensure that EVERYONE receives training… product, development teams, management
Cost of training worth investment to ensure everyone on level playing field
Creates understanding of the proper rhythm of an Agile team
TRAINING WAS THE EVENT WE CAN ALL POINT TO AS THE TURNING POINT IN OUR ADOPTION
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Optimize the whole
Conduct value stream analysis to determine where waste is occurring
How can you speed up the time it takes to go from concept to cash in the door
Look at how information flows into teams
Are there hand-offs? Lots of cycles back and forth? What assumptions are being made?
Make work ready; great teams spend 5-10% of current sprint preparing for the next sprint
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You still need to manage projects
Tried and true project management tactics are still needed in any agile adoption
What issues and concerns does the team have?
What risks exist? What are your mitigation strategies?
Create action plans, communication strategies and clear ownership
Leverage adaptive planning techniques, review release plans after each sprint and proactively adapt based on team velocity
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Rigorously inspect and adapt
We are not text book, we have leveraged practices from Scrum, Lean, TDD, PMBOK and tailored agile to our needs
We have evolved our practices over time – and will continue to do so
How we practice agile today is different than what we did 4 years ago or even 2 years ago
Establish team practices, regularly review as part of your teams retrospectives (start, stop, continue)
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Agile is a framework, not a process
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Agile is hard work
Agile is hard work; Requires change at every level
Requires new techniques on how to approach work
Strong executive support along with training, coaching, and continuously inspecting and adapting at team and organizational level are essential components to Agile success
Optimize the whole, not just technology
Make data-driven decisions to tell your story
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I knew it was working when…
A developer said, “how did I ever build software before” [before using agile frameworks]
Our CMO said in a company meeting, “you just don’t hear noise of projects not being completed anymore”
Our CEO started using terms such as sprint, team’s velocity, release plan, burn down and other “agile” terms
Sales and Account Management began writing user stories and acceptance criteria in contracts
We began releasing client work in shorter, multiple releases, not a single huge release
I had visibility into the entire portfolio of projects and where resource gaps existed
