Tathagat Varma, Sr. Director, Yahoo! India

Yahoo! is focused on making the world's daily habits more inspiring and entertaining. By creating highly personalized experiences for our users, we keep people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the world. In turn, we create value for advertisers by connecting them with the audiences that build their businesses.

Our Context

•  Consumer Internet •  Critical success factors – Innovation – Speed – UX

•  Agility is more about results than beliefs, labels or rituals

Yahoo!’s Agile Journey…

•  Jeff Sutherland presented a talk @ Yahoo! and to the leadership team in an offsite in Nov 2004.

•  Started embracing Agile in 2004 with grassroot

effort (bottoms up)

•  Over these 8 years multiple effort along with various approaches are experimented within Yahoo!

•  Few teams developed and excelled in agile methodologies and now helping out other teams scale agile in the organization.

Agile and Scrum Adoption Program (“ASAP”)

Facilitate

•  center-wide agile adoption

Focus

•  “be agile” rather than “do agile”

Framework

•  label-agnostic, but result-oriented

What is the most important part in these two machines?

“The Brakes!!!” They let you go faster…

The “ASAP” journey

Establish Credibility •  2010-2012

Scaling Up •  2011-2013

Self-Sustaining •  2012-2014

Establish credibility

•  Don’t ‘sell’ agile. Solve specific problem(s). •  Don’t boil the ocean. Create beachheads. •  Don’t make wild promises. Show real results. •  ROI ≠ $$$ Saved. ROI = $$$ Earned.

Scaling Up

Community

Internal community of practitioners and enthusiasts Expert talk series – bridge the gap between theory and practice External community connect Unconferencing Lean Coffee

Org Structure

Roles and responsibilities Goal-setting Performance management Compensation and rewards Professional Development

Training

Intact team training Role-specific training

Specialized Coaching Executive Briefings

Process

Product Development Process Common Metrics Strategy Tools

Metrics Strategy

“Readiness”

“Adoption”

“Efficiency”

“Effectiveness”

Decoding the ‘Stages’

Readiness: team is interested to adopt some form of agile development and shows its commitment by taking the first few steps towards it, which means the

basic building blocks are in place

Adoption: team (includes PO and SM) starts the basic closed-loop management, i.e. a PDCA cycle in which the entire team participates and there are as many frequent checkpoints in the team and the development process as required to identify problems and take corrective actions as early as

possible

Efficiency: team starts measuring quantitative data to plan its goals, track its progress, improve its process efficiency and eventually to plan its future

performance

Effectiveness: team has a highly effective closed-loop process with ability to make quick course-corrections and must now align its

performance more clearly to it goals by constantly reviewing its current performance against the planned performance of the product against customer's

external definition of performance. This stage is the basic foundation for continuous improvement!

From ‘efficiency’ to ‘effectiveness’

ASAP Dashboard

Self-Sustaining

•  Starting-up is easy, sustaining is tough, continuous improvement is toughest!

•  Strength of process and transformation is only tested operating in ‘real world’

•  Practices that bring results are likely to sustain over any ‘prescription’

•  Achieving ‘effective’ state is key to become self-sustaining

What are we learning?

• Credibility is extremely important •  Scaling up ≠ 100% Adoption • Results talk louder than intent!

It’s not about the method! A photographer went to a socialite party in New York. As he entered the front door, the host said ‘I love your pictures – they’re wonderful; you must have a fantastic camera.’ He said nothing until dinner was finished, then: ‘That was a wonderful dinner; you must have a terrific stove.’

– Sam Haskins h"p://www.haskins.com/ImageShop/Image_Shop_60s/60s_Books_A.Image_01.html  

References

•  The ASAP Journey – Tathagat Varma, Scrum Bangalore Meetup, 2012

•  Managing Large-Scale Agile Transformation – Tathagat Varma, APMG Showcase, 2012

Thanks!

Tathagat@yahoo-inc.com