#scalingagile

[jogoagilecoaching]

Learn about scaling Agile in our latest video! We cover the basics, challenges, and available frameworks. Subscribe for more Agile insights! #ScalingAgile #SAFe

[gfader]

How do you Test in Production at Scale? via Uber @amitgud

Amit explained the scale at Uber.

1000s of Microservices

Why test in prod?

Less operational cost of maintaining a parallel stack.

One knob to control capacity.

No synchronization between Test and Prod required.

More accurate end-to-end capacity planning.

Delta test traffic runs on the production stack.

Test traffic takes the same code path as production traffic.

Bonus: enables other use cases. (canarying, shadowing, A/B testing...)

Nice overview of the challenges 

A way how to deal with all these problems. 

Tenancy Oriented Architecture

To make this work you need to have a lot of things in place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIlFmja65_g

[kendis-io-blog]

Nexus is a simple framework which implements scrum at scale across multiple teams to deliver a single integrated product. Teams work in a common development environment and are focused on producing a combined increment every sprint with minimal dependencies.

It can be applied to 3-9 scrum teams. So it cannot be scaled to more than 9 teams and not more than a hundred practitioners.

In this article, you will learn from real life examples of companies like Security Software Product Company, HVAC Manufacturing Company and Asian Airline who are truly exceptional in their respective fields transform with the application of Nexus.

These issues majorly ranged from having no clarity on integrating their product into one, coordinating multiple teams and scaling difficulties. These companies understood and realized where they were lacking. With Nexus, they found the ideal solution to their problems that eventually led them to the path of success.

Security Software Product Company

This is a leading international Indian company that makes security software products. Before changing to Nexus, there was only one scrum team that was working on mobile applications. They did try scrum with one team which proved to be very effective.

But as more scrum teams were added and the focus started to shift towards API development, mobile applications and integration services, this where they felt that their work was starting to fall out of place.

These are the challenges that the company faced at the time:

A need for a better organizational structure

No prioritization of tasks that needed to be done

No cross functional teams

Teams saw the product owner as a single authority, not a part of the team

Teams were not coordinated

The presence of agile and non-agile teams were working at their own pace that hindered making an integrated product

Dependencies were not being properly visualized

Since scrum was understood by the team, they needed a framework that was minimalistic and can be easily scaled across their small teams. They hired Venkatesh Rajamani, an agile coach, who enlightened them about Nexus. Thus their journey of transformation began.

Firstly, the teams had to become cross functional. They had to be taught how to be self-organizing and self-managing. A single product backlog was formed. In this backlog all the features were ordered and prioritized. This helped paint a better picture of how the sprint will go.

As a result of effective coaching, Nexus transformed the company entirely.

Six teams worked on an integrated increment that rolled out releases after every two weeks

The sprints and increments became more coordinated

Dependencies were minimized.

Product owner had the opportunity of inspecting and adapting that insured to bring the highest value in the shortest amount of time.

Retrospectives helped identify what was wrong and frequent feedback was given.

This increased faster time to market, value and delivery

HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioner) Manufacturer

The international manufacturing of HVAC equipment in Germany needed to redesign more than 80 of their websites. They had to be implemented on to a new CMS (Content Management System) which would provide information to their customers, installer services and data analytics. For carrying out this task there were marketing, IT and digital agency teams.

After a year, there was no progress as the company exceeded their budget and their time limit and accompanied by the following issues:

They failed to create a differentiation amongst their brands

The teams were not producing an integrated increment. Rather they were separately focused on to fulfilling their own requirements and tried to outdo one another, which led to creating internal conflicts and disagreements

There was a weak team and organizational structure.

With these complicated issues, they hired an agile coach. Johannes Geske, an eminent business agility consultant, who is renowned for his vast knowledge of agile, worked to put the company on to the path of success. His plan was to guide the company to Nexus eventually. But he had to start from the bottom. He started off with implementing scrum to one team.

The plan was to deploy a microsite that would allow the regional marketing team to carry on with their online platform in more than 30 countries. And by the end of the third sprint, this product increment was released. During which, the scrum team got the idea of creating the proper architecture and the appropriate technology to use. Teams became more self-confident and started taking ownership of the work they did.

With the success of the first scrum team, the idea gradually spread to four scrum teams thereby implementing the Nexus Framework. There was now only one product owner, who was supported by a team of business analysts and user experience experts. They frequently met with business stakeholders to discuss requirements and welcomed any feedback that would help them improve.

A single product backlog was made which had all the prioritized features and minimized dependencies. This was updated regularly by the product owner. As a result, the teams coordinated their work with each other as compared to the situation before where they were in a constant state of competition trying to beat one another. With the Nexus Integration Meeting, progress and dependencies were discussed. The scrum teams also had their own meetings where they discussed their goals and impediments.

The Nexus Sprint Review played an essential role in collectively assessing the work done by all the teams in a sprint. This was an opportunity to relentlessly improve and adapt to any changes that were suggested.

With Johannes Geske’s excellent guidance, the company thrived. Seeing how the company’s work was scattered before, with Nexus they got a sense of direction. They knew exactly what goals to achieve and how to attain them in the shortest sustainable time. In fact, their progress and quality of work improved so much that the websites were made 3 months earlier before their deadline.

Asian Airline

In 2012, the company’s leadership felt that they needed to implement agile methodologies into their company. They felt that they needed to become more adaptive and swift to changing requirements.

They started off with having one scrum team that focused on developing the airline’s loyalty mobile application. Seeing how their productivity increased with the scrum team, more scrum teams were added. By January 2015, there were four scrum teams. These scrum teams focused on the front and back end, user experience design and testing of the mobile application.

The scrum teams were doing great on their own, but when it came to producing a single product that is where their problems began. This ranged from:

Difficulty in integrating the work of multiple teams into one

Multiple dependencies

Inability to scale the teams

They needed guidance and a solution for their existing problems. This is where they reached out to Lorenz Cheung, who is a seasoned agile coach and a professional scrum trainer based in Hong Kong. He guided the company towards the Nexus Framework. He observed that the company had an idea of how scrum worked so he used that as a foundation to build Nexus. He educated the company’s employees on the practices and ceremonies of the Nexus framework such as Nexus sprint planning, Nexus daily scrum, Nexus sprint review, Nexus retrospective and refinement.

And an integral part of the framework was the Nexus integration team that guaranteed that an integrated increment was made every time. And lastly, Nexus would allow the teams to view and remove their dependencies. With Nexus, the four scrum teams prospered. The teams were working at their own pace and at the end of every sprint the product was being integrated into one and on time. Dependencies were being sought and removed efficiently. Product owners eagerly participated with the stakeholders and took feedback in the form of surveys. This helped them focus on continuously improving to meet their customer’s requirements.

Before Nexus the integrated increment was delivered after eight weeks. But after the implementation of Nexus, the deliverable was made after every two to four weeks. Their rate of release became stable and consistent and by accepting feedback earlier, they were quick to change according to their requirements.

The resources have been obtained from Scrum.org

About Kendis

Digital boards to manage dependencies, multiple teams and program increments for scaling agile initiatives. Kendis works on top of JIRA and other agile tools, your teams can keep on working with their existing JIRA boards and program level and above is planned and managed at Kendis.

Try out 30 days free trial or book a demo with our product expert.

[agilerasmus]

MACH#7 - Skalering

MACH#7 – Skalering

Bankdata, Åbogade 15, 8200 Aarhus

18. april 2018, 16:00-18:30

Dagens vært er Rasmus Kaae med følgende agenda:

Kamp Skalering (Jesper Boeg)

Arla Skalering (Morten Norre)

Program Skalering (Rasmus Kaae)

Tilmeld dig med det samme!

[bizcraft-blog]

Scaling Agile — a perfect method

  SaFA begins with the (quite reasonable) assumption that if you are an enterprise attempting to "do Agile" then you have likely accumulated a lot of crap: expensive tracking tools, various flavors of consultant, painful, pointless meetings, new roles that look exactly like the old roles but with different names, and no shortage of charts, graphs, burnups, burndowns... and burnout.

The fish is your enterprise. Looks good from the outside, but unstomachable within. So start scaling. Remove the veneer of Agile with all its phony buzz words, its bright, shiny corporate artifacts. Then take out the choking hazards, the bottlenecks to actual productivity, the organizational impediments to true engagement, the small annoyances that make people vomit. Finally, remove the guts and gore that represent all the rest of the waste, the remnants of a life you are no longer to be bound to.

Congratulations. The value of your enterprise fish has risen in the market, and now you have something to plan a recipe around. 

[kendis-io-blog]

We would like to extend our gratitude to Scrum.org, for giving their valuable feedback on our previous article about transforming to Nexus. In this blog, we describe the transformation of notable companies, that have been requested and suggested by Scrum.org, to the Nexus framework.

The companies that have been included in this article are KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Net Health and Terminales Portuarios Peruanos. These issues majorly ranged from having no clarity on integrating their product into one, coordinating multiple teams and scaling difficulties. These companies understood and realized where they were lacking. With Nexus, they found the ideal solution to their problems that eventually led them to the path of success.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is one of the oldest airlines in the world. Founded in 1916, the airline company employs 32000 employees generating € 10 billion yearly.

In 2014, new programs were launched under the newly appointed CEO, Pieter Elbers which were focused on making the company extremely customer-centric. These programs included, Customer Experience, High-Performance Organization, Operational Excellence and Digital Transformation.

They were already using Scrum. But problems started to arise when:

The backlog was not being prioritized

They were not quick to resolve impediments

The people were resistant to the idea of changing their current culture

They were having difficulties scaling to multiple teams

In 2016, Nana Abban, an agile coach from the South African Company Akaditi and a member of the Engagement Manager community of Scrum.org, was selected by KLM to help them with their persisting problems.

A workshop was held in which teams were taught how to prioritize their tasks. But seeing how the requirements and the set up of the company was, they needed Digital Studio. Digital Studio evolved from both Scrum and the Nexus Framework. This is useful for coordinating across a large organization with ease. Scrum Studio focuses on creating highly functional teams that are focused on their tasks and openly communicate with each other.

With Scrum Studio, the Digital Transformation program was a home run. Their performance boosted in operational performance, ability to innovate, time to market and customer experience. They also formed new partnerships with Apple and IBM in creating new applications that were used at the airports.

With the Scrum Studio, the company continues to grow and expands into new ventures like, Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain.

Cathay Pacific Airlines

Cathay Pacific is a highly-reputed Hong Kong based airline that flies to over 200 destinations around the world. It is also the member of the Swire Group and is listed as a public company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

In 2015, the IT Team at Cathay Pacific had to launch their new Internet Booking Engine. They needed a framework that would help them deliver in the shortest time possible with the highest quality. The company was using waterfall with some elements of scrum which was creating challenges for them. These are listed as follows:

Failing to make an integrated increment.

Not delivering the product on time

There was a lot of rework being done

The teams were not coordinated and did not have a solid vision

In February 2017, with the help of Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber, the company was bound to transform to Nexus. But to get there, they needed to strengthen themselves by building a strong understanding and foundation of Scrum.

Three cross-functional Scrum teams were made. These teams had a mix of  UI, UX and front end developers and a separate team for back end development.

After two months of having implemented Nexus, Cathay Pacific was on the verge of coming on top of their game. Previously, they were releasing their product increment once a month. But with Nexus, they started to release two to three times in a single month thus increasing their frequency of releasing increments increased by 200%.

The Nexus Integration Team ensured that an integrated increment was delivered which helped in maintaining the focus of the teams on to their vision thus improving their quality. DevOps was gradually introduced to boost the development and delivery of their processes. The Product Owner also started to attain visibility into the teams’ work.

Ken Kwan, the IT lead at Cathay Pacific, says that Nexus is an extremely lightweight and minimalistic framework which was easily implemented.

Net Health

Net Health specializes in software solutions for out-patient care and dutifully serves 98% of the largest hospital chains in the USA. It has its head office in Pittsburgh and three regional offices present in Altoona, Jacksonville and Brentwood with a workforce of 300 employees. They have four departments of Software Development, Quality Assurance, Program Management and Product Management.

In 2014, the company first adopted Scrum. But with time and taking up huge projects, the company was having difficulties working with scrum as they were struggling with:

Breaking out of silos

Integrating work of multiple teams into one

Ineffective communication amongst teams

Failing to scale to multiple teams

Failing to manage dependencies

The absence of a single product owner

The Nexus Framework was discovered by one of the Scrum Masters at Net Health and it promised the solution to all of their problems. They chose Nexus because the teams were familiar with scrum already and liked the fact that Nexus focused a lot on self-organization.

After having implemented Nexus, there were five scrum teams that delivered three integrated increments at the end of every sprint. The teams started to communicate more frequently with each other as a way to break out of their silos to reach out and help their team members.

With Nexus, they found a way of how to deliver quicker and with optimum quality. They had regular inspect and adapt sessions that was necessary for relentless improvement.

Terminales Portuarios Peruanos

Terminales Portuarios Peruanos is a company in Lima, Peru that provides services for maritime, port and warehousing activities.

It was struggling to align its business objectives with development and to improve time to market. They were presently stuck in using a mix of Waterfall, Rational Unified Process and traditional Project Management. The problems that they had were:

The teams were not properly coordinated

The teams could not prioritize their work

Unnecessary waiting time that slowed down delivery and reduced their value.

They realized that it was time to change, and instead of having a mix of frameworks, they wanted to adopt one framework and scale that effectively.

They started off with Scrum. When scrum was understood, they naturally moved to Nexus and it did wonders for them. They found it extremely easy to adapt and simple to understand. The Product Owner played a key role in working with the business stakeholders to align the business objectives with what the users need. A single product backlog was made that had all the tasks prioritized into one.

With Nexus, sprints were timeboxed to two weeks and delivered at the end of every sprint. After one month of Nexus, the teams had their first release. There was a 300 per cent in velocity with an increase in business.

The resources have been obtained from Scrum.org

About Kendis

Digital boards to manage dependencies, multiple teams and program increments for scaling agile initiatives. Kendis works on top of JIRA and other agile tools, your teams can keep on working with their existing JIRA boards and program level and above is planned and managed at Kendis.

Try out 30 days free trial or book a demo with our product expert.

[kendis-io-blog]

PI objectives are a set of directives that are summarized to describe the technical and business elements of a goal that needs to be achieved by an agile team or an agile release train. They serve the basis of planning and aligning the outcomes of a program increment.

PI objectives help to give a clear understanding of what needs to be done. With that being said, the information described in the PI objectives is effectively communicated to business owners or stakeholders, which also educates them on what will be made and in a way that it also validates the team’s grasp on the matter.

A lot of work goes into correctly mapping the objectives out. In this article, we have broken down the process of creating smart PI objectives into three simple steps.

1. Planning your Objectives

Every agile team should have at least one PI objective to cover. But to start formulating these objectives, you need to ask yourself:

What and why do you want to achieve your goal in the PI?

How will you achieve what you want in this PI?

To answer all of these questions, you need to have a staunch understanding of the vision and the scope of your project. Teams need to possess an in-depth knowledge and an understanding of the teams, their velocities, competencies, milestones, and its dependencies. This helps in analyzing and doing relevant estimations of the upcoming stories. A time limit should be set for when the objective can be achieved.

The PI objectives should draw focus towards helping the user or the business owner implement a feature. It should be planned in such a way that you get feedback as early as possible so changes can be made in time so that it reduces costs and risks in the future.

2. Creation of your Objectives

Once the planning is done, these PI objectives need to be summarized down into statements that address both the technical and the business aspect of what needs to be done.

The information presented in these statements needs to be specific, clear and concise. A good practice to ensure that the objectives are correct is to apply SMART rules. SMART is abbreviated as Specific and Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Their rules are described as follows:

Specific and Measurable – They need to be supported by reasonable estimation thereby distinctly describing or quantifying what needs to be achieved. Feedback from stakeholders is important to guarantee success.

Attainable – It should be realistic, free of any ambiguity and should explain the matter as explicitly as possible.

Relevant – The PI objectives need to be aligned with the vision and the product backlog.

Time-Bound – Set a time limit to achieve the objective.

An Example of an unclear objective:

Improve Performance.

An Example of a Clear Objective:

Increase page load time by x% so the customers experience less frustration.

3. Assigning Business Value

With the PI objectives made, the final step is to get a business value assigned. This is assigned by business owners during the PI planning session. Business owners assign a value from 1 being the lowest, to 10 being the highest. These values determine the priority or the severity with which the objectives need to be done.

Having PI objectives give direction to your project. It enhances transparency and visibility into the entire project by coordinating everyone to the same mission. Not all of the PI objectives are completed in a program increment.

The objectives that are not met in a program increment, are re-evaluated from where they are either removed or moved up the backlog for the upcoming program increment. This not only reduces excess WIP but also ensures continuous improvement.

About Kendis

You can create custom or team PI objectives in Kendis that will help you in aligning and coordinating all the goals that your agile teams wish to achieve.

Kendis works on top of JIRA and other agile tools, your teams can keep on working with their existing JIRA boards and program level and above is planned and managed at Kendis. Try out our 30 days free trial or book a demo with our product expert.

[gfader]

1 daily sync with 500 people is expensive but key for #autonomy.

Great advise in the Tim Ferriss podcast!

General Stan McChrystal  & Chris Fussell on Anti-War Americans, Pushing Your Limits, and The Three Military Tests You Should Take

http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/07/10/general-stanley-mcchrystal-on-anti-war-americans-pushing-your-limits-and-the-three-military-tests-you-should-take/

[gfader]

Do you know how LeSS and SAFe measure up? via @ran_nyman & @aritikka

Nice slide deck with some nice message in it, although a recording or live presentation would be helpful to see the full picture! Thanks anyways guys!

My hightlights:

Disclaimer :-) - slide 6

We are slow and wasteful! Would scaling Agile up help us?

What changes and what not with SAFe and LeSS? 

“reducing batch size improves most development projects significantly”

Coordination Approaches Compared - slide 67

http://www.slideshare.net/gosei/xp2015-scaling-agility-explored-less-safe-comparison

[gfader]

Huge project? Scaling Agile or unscaling Agile? via @bobgalen

We’re looking at problems and creating the most complex solutions we can come up with. We are enamored with:

Distributed teams and / or large groups of teams

Way too complex architectures and designs

Solving problems with project management thinking

Management” solving problems with “old thinking”

Building bloated software with features nobody uses

Not truly understanding our clients

Allowing business-facing folks to “ask for everything”

Scattershot vision hoping that we eventually hit the target

Nice!

Small teams can do great things. That is if we allow them to do it.

That was the essence of agility in the beginning and it still is. I hope this article has inspired you to reduce your teams, break up your products, and take a new look at how you build your software and what you build.

Remember – a handful of agile teams can do great things. And a handful of product visionaries can guide them towards just enough, lean, and wonderful software.

Amen brother!

Great blog post from Robert Galen a SAFE SPC

http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2015/5/24/the-newest-craze-in-agile-simplicity-and-un-scaling

[gfader]

Thinking about scaling? Don't scale dysfunctions! via @vfrederik

Transform your teams to Scrum with a stable release cadence. Maximize Scrum at team level, and next with multiple teams, and next with multiple products. Sounds like a sound approach to me.

Nice blog post from Frederik Vannieuwenhuyse https://technology1unplugged.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/scrum-scaled-for-large-projects-and-organizational-initiatives/ 

As a comment on Ken Schwabers  https://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/scaling-scrum/

[gfader]

Do you know a perfect method to scale your enterprise? via @tobiasmayer

Looks good from the outside, but unstomachable within. So start scaling. 

Remove the veneer of Agile with all its phony buzz words, its bright, shiny corporate artifacts. Then take out the choking hazards, the bottlenecks to actual productivity, the organizational impediments to true engagement, the small annoyances that make people vomit. Finally, remove the guts and gore that represent all the rest of the waste, the remnants of a life you are no longer to be bound to.

Nice!

http://bizcraft.tumblr.com/post/96522918412/scaling-agile-a-perfect-method

[gfader]

Scaling Agile Development with LESS

Nice article that gives an overview of LESS (Large Scale Scrum). How Scrum is applied on a bigger scale and what is different there...

Big focus on Principles like: 

Customer Centric

Transparency

Whole Product

More with Less

Systems Thinking 

Continuous Improvement

...

Practices that work well 

Agility across teams: LeSS increases learning across teams via focus & coordination

Continuous Integration

Internal Open Source

Feature Teams

Communities of Practice

More talking

There are a lot of tips that I could quickly relate to. Some of my favorites:

avoid a single dispersed team with scattered members

Continuous Integration across all sites

and more...

Article from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde Large and Multisite Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum http://www.crosstalkonline.org/storage/issue-archives/2013/201305/201305-larman.pdf

BTW: They created a fancy website lately that you should check out http://less.works/ 

[gfader]

After working years in domains of large, multisite, and offshore development: Don’t do it. #quote #book

On to our key recommendation: After working for some years in the domains of large, multisite, and offshore development, we have distilled our experience and advice down to the following: Don’t do it.

Maybe "How do we scale Agile?" is the wrong question.

From

Scaling Lean & Agile Development - Craig Larman & Bas Vodde  Introduction Chapter http://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Lean-Agile-Development-Organizational/dp/0321480961

[gfader]

Does SAFe respect People, Inspection and Adaptation? via @henrikber

Lots of things have been said about SAFe. These 2 things bother me the most (via @henrikber)

In a complex situation the solution needs to emerge through inspect and adapt. 

People that are doing the work know best how the work should be done

SAFe violates these 2 arguments

Article from David Anderson that highlights those 2 arguments.

The Kanban Method will coexist with SAFe in the marketplace. People will choose between a modern 21st Century approach to complex situations or a familiar 20th Century approach to change and their software engineering processes.

http://www.djaa.com/kanban-anti-safe-almost-decade-already