governing agile teams: disciplined strategies to increase agile effectiveness

AW2 Session 6/5/2013 10:15 AM

"Governing Agile Teams: Disciplined Strategies to Increase

Agile Effectiveness"

Presented by:

Scott Ambler Scott Ambler + Associates

Brought to you by:

340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073 888‐268‐8770 ∙ 904‐278‐0524 ∙ [email protected] ∙ www.sqe.com

Scott Ambler Scott W. Ambler + Associates

Scott Ambler works with organizations worldwide to help them improve their software processes. Scott is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies and creator of the Agile Scaling Model (ASM). He is the coauthor of twenty-one books, including Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, The Enterprise Unified Process, and Disciplined Agile Delivery. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Visit his home page ScottAmbler.com and his Agility@Scale blog.

© Scott Ambler + Associates 1

Governing Agile Teams

Reality over Rhetoric

The Survey Results Shared in This Presentation

• All surveys were performed in an open

manner

• The questions as they were asked, the

source data, and a summary slide deck

can be downloaded free of charge from

Ambysoft.com/surveys/


Agenda

• What is governance?

• Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

• Agile governance strategies

• Measuring agile teams

• Parting thoughts

3© Scott Ambler + Associates

Defining governance

Governance establishes chains of

responsibility, authority and communication

in support of the overall enterprise’s goals

and strategy. It also establishes

measurements, policies, standards and

control mechanisms to enable people to

carry out their roles and responsibilities

effectively.

You do this by balancing risk versus return on

investment (ROI), setting in place effective

processes and practices, defining the

direction and goals for the department, and

defining the roles that people play with and

within the department.


Is your governance

strategy designed to

enable you or to control

you?


A Quick Show of Hands…

Governance Should Address a Range of Issues

• Team roles and responsibilities

• Individual roles and responsibilities

• Decision rights and decision making process

• Governing body

• Exceptions and escalation processes

• Knowledge sharing processes

• Metrics strategy

• Risk mitigation

• Reward structure

• Status reporting

• Audit processes

• Policies, standards, and guidelines

• Artifacts and their lifecycles


Potential Scope of Governance


Operations IT InvestmentDelivery/

Development

Infrastructure

(Services, Cloud…)SecurityData

Information Technology

Corporate

Why is Effective Governance Important?

• Effective governance should help agile delivery teams to:

– Regularly and consistently create real business value

– Provide appropriate return on investment (ROI)

– Deliver consumable solutions in a timely and relevant manner

– Work effectively with their project stakeholders

– Work effectively with their IT colleagues

– Adopt processes and organizational structures that encourage

successful IT solution delivery

– Present accurate and timely information to project stakeholders

– Mitigate risk


Survey Says: How Do You Rate Your IT Governance Program?

6%

8%

19%

11%

20%

36%

Too early to tell

Generally helps

Neither helpful norharmful

Generally harmful

Don't Know

No IT governanceProgram

Source: DDJ State of the IT Union July 2009

Survey Says: IT and financial governance, including capitalization

and budgeting processes, have been addressed and there is an

officially recognized agile path

5%

13%

31%

28%

17%

7%

Don't Know

Highly disagree

Disagree

Neutral

Agree

Highly agree


Source: DDJ State of the IT Union November 2011

Why Traditional Governance Strategies Won’t Work


Traditional assumptions that conflict with agile:

– You can judge team progress from generation of artifacts

– Delivery teams should work in a serial manner

– You want teams to follow a common, repeatable process

– Projects should be driven by senior IT management

Principles of Agile Governance

Collaboration over conformance

Enablement over inspection

Continuous monitoring over quality gates

Transparency over management reporting


13

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is a process

decision framework

The key characteristics of DAD:

– People-first

– Goal-driven

– Hybrid agile

– Learning-oriented

– Full delivery lifecycle

– Solution focused

– Risk-value lifecycle

– Enterprise aware

© Scott Ambler + Associates

The Scrum Construction Lifecycle


Extending the Scrum Lifecycle for Solution Delivery



A Governed Agile Lifecycle

DAD Milestones

Milestone Fundamental Question Asked

Stakeholder consensus Do stakeholders agree with your strategy?

Proven architecture Can you actually build this?

Project viability Does the project still make sense?

Sufficient functionality Does it make sense to release the current solution?

Production ready Will the solution work in production?

Delighted stakeholders Are stakeholders happy with the deployed solution?


Enterprise Awareness Enables Governance


• Governance is an enterprise concern

• Activities which appear to be waste at the

team level prove valuable at the enterprise

level

• Disciplined agile teams optimize the

“enterprise whole”, not just the “team part”

But we’re not there yet:

Results from a May 2013 opinion poll on

the Agile and Lean Software Group on

LinkedIn

3

15

21

16

What do you mean?

No

Yes - Waste of time

Yes - Valuable

Are you inputting your time?

DAD Practices that Support Governance

• “Standard” agile practices:

– Coordination meeting

– Iteration demonstrations

– All-hands demonstrations

– Retrospectives

– Information radiators/Visual management

• Disciplined practices:

– Risk-value lifecycle

– Explicit light-weight milestones

– Follow enterprise development guidelines

– Work closely with enterprise professionals

– Development intelligence via automated

dashboards


Measuring Agile Teams

• Talk to people; don’t manage to the metrics

• Measure teams, not individuals

• Collect several metrics

• Trends are better than scalar values

• Empirical observation is important but limited

• Prefer automated metrics

• Some metrics must be gathered manually

• Prefer pull versus push reporting

• Beware scientific facades

• Measure the value of your metrics program

• Be prepared to educate people

• The value of many metrics diminishes over time

• If you collect no metrics at all you’re flying blind

• If you collect too many metrics you may be flying blinded


Goal Question Metric (GQM)

The GQM process:

1. Develop a set of corporate, division and project business goals for productivity

and quality

2. Generate questions that define those goals as completely as possible in a

quantifiable way

3. Specify the measures needed to be collected to answer those questions and

track process and product conformance to the goals

4. Develop mechanisms for data collection

5. Collect, validate and analyze the data in real time to provide feedback to

projects for corrective action

6. Analyze the data to assess conformance to the goals and to make

recommendations for future improvements


Some potential goals

• We should invest in IT wisely

• We should provide a healthy work

environment to staff

• Teams should deploy in a timely manner

• Teams should provide real value to

stakeholders

• We should reduce overall technical debt over

time

• Team should produce solutions that of

sufficient quality

• We should comply to appropriate industry

regulations


Potential Metrics

• Acceleration

• Activity time

• Age of work items

• Blocking work items

• Build health

• Business value delivered

• Change cycle time

• Code quality

• Defect density

• Defect trend

• Effort/cost projection

• Iteration burndown

• Lifecycle traceability

• Net present value (NPV)

• Ranged release burndown

• Release burndown

• Return on investment (ROI)

• Risk mitigation

• Stakeholder satisfaction

• Team morale

• Test coverage

• Time invested

• Velocity


Goal: Spend IT Investment Wisely

Questions

1. How effective is the

investment in IT activities?

2. What future spending do

we require?

3. Is productivity increasing?

Potential Metrics

1. Business value delivered,

net present value (NPV),

return on investment (ROI)

2. Effort/cost projection

3. Acceleration, business

value delivered, velocity

(trend)


Goal: Deploy in a Timely Manner

Questions

1. Is the team working at a

sufficient pace?

2. Is the team working

together effectively?

3. Are changing requirements

putting the release date at

risk?

Potential Metrics

1. Release burndown, ranged

release burndown

2. Team morale, stakeholder

satisfaction, blocking work

items

3. Age of items, ranged

release burndown


Goal: Reduce Technical Debt

Questions

1. What is our current level of

technical debt?

2. Are we improving quality

over time?

Potential Metrics

1. Code quality, defect

density

2. Build health, defect trends,

test coverage


Survey Says: Agile teams are judged primarily on traditional IT

and cost-based metrics

4%

6%

14%

29%

39%

9%

Don't Know

Highly disagree

Disagree

Neutral

Agree

Highly agree



Survey Says: Agile teams are judged primarily on business value

creation

3%

5%

14%

24%

41%

13%

Don't Know

Highly disagree

Disagree

Neutral

Agree

Highly agree



Development Intelligence


• Tools should be instrumented to

automatically log important activities and

thereby facilitate generate of metrics

• Metrics are displayed in (near) real-time on a

project dashboard

• Should be non-intrusive to the team

• Benefits

– Transparency to all stakeholders,

increasing trust

– Increased team effectiveness with

visibility into what team members are

working on, status of builds

– Information that can be used to assess

effectiveness and justify process changes

– Keeps team focused on delivering on

their commitments to the stakeholders

IT Intelligence

• Automated dashboard

that summarizes the

status for all of IT

• Shows the entire

portfolio:

– Potential/suggested

endeavors

– Ongoing

development

endeavors

– Operational solutions

• Drill down into:

– Project details

– Operational details

– Support details


4%

19%

51%

26%

Don't Know

Yes, majorityautomated

Yes, majoritymanual

No

Survey says: Do your project teams collect metrics to enable

project monitoring by senior management?

Ambysoft 2009 Governance

We’re In a Different Environment

The farther to the right an organization,

the greater the chance they’re focused on governance


Moore’s

Adoption Curve


We Need To Change The Way We Think

About Governance

Agilists Must Demand Agile Governance

Observations:

• Agile teams are being governed today

• In many organizations the governance

strategy is misaligned with agile

• You deserve to be governed effectively

• When you provide a coherent governance

strategy to senior management you are

much more likely to be governed

effectively


Principles of Agile Governance

Collaboration over conformance

Enablement over inspection

Continuous monitoring over quality gates

Transparency over management reporting


Got Discipline?


DisciplinedAgileConsortium.orgDisciplinedAgileDelivery.com

ScottAmbler.com

Thank You!scott [at] scottambler.com

@scottwambler

AgileModeling.com

AgileData.org

Ambysoft.com

DisciplinedAgileConsortium.org

DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com

ScottAmbler.com

Disciplined Agile Delivery

Disciplined Agile Delivery


Material for this

presentation is taken

from chapter 20 of

Disciplined Agile

Delivery


Presentation Description

Many organizations have successfully adopted agile on a subset of their projects,

while, at the same time, struggled to do so across entire departments. A common

challenge is the need to overhaul the IT governance strategy so that it will work with

agile teams. This is a serious issue for governance bodies with little or no practical

agile experience, particularly when experience shows that traditional governance

strategies increase the risk of failure on agile projects. Scott Ambler introduces The

Disciplined Agile Delivery framework for managing and monitoring enterprise agile

teams. This framework goes beyond offering an IT governance strategy to provide

advanced strategies such as development intelligence and the goal-question-metric

measurement approach. Learn the do’s and don’ts of governing agile teams, how

governance fits in and enhances the agile project lifecycle, how to measure agile

teams, and most importantly, why teams should demand good governance.


governing agile teams: disciplined strategies to increase agile effectiveness

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