Starting with Agile at a global player
Introduction
Our client, an enterprise data warehousing and analytics division of a fast-moving consumer goods company with a global footprint, (a waterfall organisation), was curious to start with agile ways of working.
One of our agile coaches began work at their office and found a complex system of command and control structure, high pressure and hard deadlines with little transparency and low success rates.
The Start
The coach first built productive relationships with various key individuals: stakeholders, programme managers, project managers and delivery leaders. These relations are instrumental in supporting changing the divisions ways of working.
Roll-out
Wanting to work with agile is first identified, then with our help, the client found that working with agile methods and ways of working by itself was not the goal. The stakeholders learnt first about the potential benefits of building a culture of continuous improvement (kaizen) and the advantages of shorter time-to-market.
Accelerating time to market
Removing silos in your organisation
Continuous improvement and learning culture
Maximising output without hurting morale
Dependencies
With complicated and protracted projects, in their normal mode, the organisation, many dependencies, and designs were defined upfront. The complete solution, the output was designed and fixated together with fixated budgets and timelines.
Negotiation
One of the key negotiation points for our coach was to enable the stakeholders to learn about enhancing value while delivering; the first outcome was a compromise: semi-fixed scope. The agreement was a step in the right direction. Some of the work was deemed 'must-have', but most of the work now was should- and could-have (the MoSCow method).
Setting up teams
The teams were formed around goals and values to outcomes in respect of their work in functions, so that silo's ceased to exist. The coach used Scrum. With short, 1-week sprints, so that the features teams were running in a highly transparent manner. With multiple feature teams, the Product Owners and Scrum Masters decided to self-organise and ran Scrum of Scrums twice a week. Scrum if Scrums meetings also included other stakeholders, so they could have real insight into what the work at hand was. Weekly product demo's helped the stakeholders and anyone to see the product increment grow.
Applying continuous improvement
Organising a series retrospective sessions for the Product Owners, Scrum Masters and stakeholders supported continuous improvement on their layer, which also functioned to keep the stakeholders engaged in the process improvement.
Conclusion
Starting with Scrum and later with Scrum of Scrums, helped this company to have a clean pocket of productivity, with a more and more self-organising team what focused on valuable outcomes and was able to produce value much earlier.