Presentation by Senior Consultant Maurizio Mancini of Exempio.com about an Agile Reboot of one Agile organization that was accomplished in just 100 business days!

1. Getting Agile right - rebooting an
Agile organization in 100 days
MAURIZIO MANCINI | AGILE COACH/CONSULTANT | EXEMPIO.COM
MAURIZIO.MANCINI@EXEMPIO.COM

2. Reboot?

3. Sign 2
Teams still early in the Agile
journey - number of flavours of
Agile is equal to the number of
teams you have
3 Most Common Signs you need a Reboot
Sign 3
You have Featuritis
Sign 1
You have 3 to 4 times more
“projects” than your teams
can deliver

4. Bonus 1
You’ve rolled out Agile at least
3 times already
Bonus 2
People tell you ‘Agile Doesn’t work’
Bonus Signs

5. Everyone Was Busy

6. PLAYING AGILE BEING AGILE
TO DO
IN
PROGRESS
DONE

7. Context of the Company

8. Context of the Company
• Ad Exchange
• Large Platform-20000 Servers On-Prem
• 5 Data Centers World Wide
• High Volumes-100 Billion requests/day, 3 Trillion Daily Events
• 12 Millions of Lines of Custom Code
• Only 1 Product with over 150 components
• Engineering team ~ 200

9. Kick Starting your Reboot
The Five Steps

10. # 1 Buy-In and Understanding from the Top!
CEO
COO CFO CTO

12. More
Right Stuff
Agile is focused on delivering …
Same
Time Period
Generates
Business Value!

13. Discipline Product Strategy
2 more Misconceptions of Executives

14. # 2 Clear Business Goals

15. Business Goals-The Market

16. Business Goals-MVP of New Features/Products

17. Business Goals-Deeper Understanding of Capacity

18. Business Goals-Employee Frustration and Satisfaction

19. # 3 Clear Ownership and Accountability

20. Role Confusion
“Why did the engineers build it if it wasn’t going to work?”
“I thought the CTO sets development priorities”
Overcommitment
“Hey I already working very hard, I am on 5 projects, I am
doing my best but there is too much to do.”

21. Process Confusion
“Hey -- I just said it would be a good idea to add the feature —
I didn’t tell them to do it!”
Accountability Resistance
“We don’t need any planning — it just slows things down”

22. # 4

23. # 5 Get Moving

24. 100 Days and Counting
Our Roadmap

25. Strategic
Assessment
Sept 2017
Oct 2017
Team
Assessments
Dec 2017
Agile Refresher,
Tool Realignment
Team
Assessments and
Agile Refreshers
Nov 2017
100 Business Days and Counting… Our RoadMap
Organization-wide
meetings on priorities,
accountability & drive
Nov 2017
Nov 2017
Tech Roadmap
for TechDebt

26. Go!
January 2018

27. Strategic Assessments

28. Meet with CTO
Gather his perspective
Meet with
Key Team
Members
Gather teams
perspective of
companies
Strategic Direction
Vision
1 year and 3 year
Tech Debt
Analysis
Quality of current
code
Strategic Assessment

29. Strategic
Assessment
KEY FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

30. Everything is
a
Top Priority
Teams
Playing Agile
instead of
Being Agile
Portfolio and
Program
planning
inadequate
Strategic Assessment Key Findings
Tech Debt
Analysis
Level was
Reasonable
TO DO IN
PROGRESS
DONE

31. ARB and PC
Architecture Review Board and
Product Council
Weighted Shortest Job First
WSJF for Project Ranking
Portfolio Kanban for
Upper Management
WSJF
RECOMMENDATIONS

32. Projects use
Scrum or
Kanban
Dynamic Teams
Scrum
Kanban
RECOMMENDATIONS

33. Strategic and Team Vision

34. Team Assessments

35. Interviewed more than 50
people across various roles
Through the use of 1-1 or small group interviews
Directors
Managers
Team Leads
Team Members

36. Conducted a survey-Five Point scale
31 questions
on
6 dimensions
and a
comments
section

37. Agile Basics (6)
Values and Principles, Scrum or Kanban roles,
Stable Teams, Epics and Stories
Product Ownership (5)
Available, Vision, Product Backlog Prioritization,
Refinement and Readiness, Acceptance Criteria
Team Roles and Agile Concepts (5)
Clear roles, Sprint Planning and Goals, Definition of
Done, Predictable Velocity, Building in Quality

38. Processes (5)
Scrum Master assigned, user stories ready, self-
organized team, collaborative planning, retrospective
and followup
Release Management and Delivery (5)
Release Planning, product backlog prioritization, business
feature estimation and slicing, cross team dependancies,
Sprint Reviews
Quality (5)
Quality goals: corporate, software product, software
component. Sprint quality goal improvements, quality
measurements being made

39. Attended a number
of team meetings
Where I needed a little more insight into
how the team or product worked

40. Team
Assessment
Results
POSITIVE PATTERNS AND ANTI-PATTERNS

41. Keep it Up!
• Team Work
• Self Organized Teams
• Two Week Release Train
• Technical Level of QA Team Members
• Continuous Integration was available
• Some Dev helping with Automation
• Tools were up to date
• Separate team doing End to End testing
• Some requirements were on the Wiki
Opportunities to take it to
the Next Level

42. Opportunities Discovered
• Who owns Quality?
• Who owns Test Automation?
• Accounting for Test Automation
• Maintenance
• UI Automation Path
• Release Process and Cadence
• Release Tool and CI process adoption
• Process and Tools Team
• Tool Tune-Up
• Service Desk - Replace
• Portfolio Management - Replace
Opportunities Discovered
• Maturing Agile
• Role Clarification
• Project Prioritization
• Organization of Work
• Backlog Cleanup
• What’s an EPIC?
• One Story at a Time
• Release Planning
• Estimation
• Tech Debt Tracking
• Updating Requirements
• Dev/QA Ratio
• Hiring and On-boarding
• Test Environments
Many of these
Opportunities are
Common Anti-Patterns
found in many
organizations

43. People Process Tools
Key Recommendations

44. Role Clarification
and
Maturing Agile

45. Scrum Master?
PM
Line Manager?
Role Confusion
PM
PM
PO
Project Manager Program Manager
Product Manager Product Owner

46. No Full Time Scrum
Masters
Product Owner role was
not clearly defined
People Playing Multiple Roles

47. Agile Refreshers
• Scrum/Kanban Short Refresher - ½ day
• Scrum/Kanban Full Refresher - 1 day
• Scrum Master Training - ½ day
• Product Owner Training - ½ day
• Being an Agile Manager - ½ day

48. We focused on:
• Getting back to the basics
• Fixing the misconceptions
• Ensuring everyone had the same foundation
• The roles
Agile Refreshers

49. Who own’s Quality?

52. 1. QA Director-Advocate of
Who owns Quality
2. Promote the
implementation of a
DevOps culture
3. Holding a QA education event
Top 3 Recommendations

53. Aligning the Process

54. Recommendation
• Minimum - Close all issues older than 1 year.
• Issues older than 6 months.
Backlog Cleanup
Most common Anti-Pattern
“We have this large number of issues
in the backlog because ‘one day’ we
may come back and do the work…”
• Projects with hundreds of issues
older than 2 years.

55. • Sounds basic, but not really
• Scaling Agile confusion in
definition
• EPIC was being used to manage
Projects
What’s an EPIC?
Recommendation
Bring it back to the
basic definition

56. One Story at a Time
• Stories were too large - Some were EPICs
• Stories were just work tasks
• Teams needed to focus
• Stop Starting, Start Finishing!

57. Process and Tools Team

58. The Importance of the Process and Tools Team
• Mechanics of the triad
• Not just tool configuration
• Team owns the triad!
• Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters
• Community of Practice (CoP)

59. Aligning the Tools

60. Aligning the Tools-Company Context
• 22 Teams-Mostly Software Teams, some Operational Teams
• Projects -Mostly Software, a few Operational
• PMO -Required Portfolio Management

61. TOOL CONFIGURATION SPECTRUM
Use the tool out of the box
-
No Configuration
This
Company
Why did you buy a
packaged software?
OOB Extreme

62. Common Anti-Patterns
• Tools are being used improperly
• Tools are not optimally configured
Tools are impacting the effectiveness
of the teams and the process

63. Teams told that tools couldn’t do
something when they could
Never shown the potential of the
tools
Previous tool experience - impacting
higher level reporting
Impact of tool mis-use and configuration on the Teams

64. Implemented
Process to use the
wiki collaboration
with the task
management tool.
Replaced
Homegrown service
desk with a modern
service desk
Intervention
We optimized the
task management
tool through a deep
intervention.
Aligning Tools for the Reboot

65. Portfolio Management
• Projects Products
• Replaced the more complex tool
• Start Simple - Get the basics working

66. Results — 10 Months

67. The Good
The Bad
The Ugly

68. The Good
28 Projects completed to date
More than Doubled the output with less people!
• Better Planning
• People Focused
• Better use of tools

69. The Good
• Clear project prioritization
• Scrum & Kanban both used
• Project teams have all skills
required to launch
• All teams have scrum masters,
product owners and are self-
empowered

70. Quality
• Solid progress on culture change - quality
owned by everyone
• Dev/QA wall slowly coming down
• DevOps culture slowly starting to emerge

71. The Tools
• Optimized for company reality
• 1-1, Task Management - Wiki Space association
• Migrated from home grown service desk to modern Service Desk

72. The Bad
Project Portfolio
• Monotonically increasing backlog without
refinement
• Phases of a project without any value
attainment
• Inadequate estimates of value & no value
accountability
Staffing
• Too many multiple-project assignments (key
resources) w/context switching problems

73. The Ugly
Go To Market (GTM)
• Not used to project completion
Prioritization
• Objectives -> Initiatives -> Project prioritization

74. Key Takeaways
and
What we would do differently

75. Transformation is Hard!

76. It Starts from the Top
Exec Portfolio Kanban

77. Agile is a Journey-Start with the Basics
Ri
Mastering
Ha
Practicing
Shu
Learner

78. What we would do differently…
• Metrics First
• Staffing Consistency
• Real Value Estimation
• Limit & Refine the Backlog
• Go To Market (GTM)
• DevOps Culture

79. The Power of the Cloud

81. Thank you!
Merci!
MAURIZIO MANCINI | AGILE COACH/CONSULTANT | EXEMPIO.COM
MAURIZIO.MANCINI@EXEMPIO.COM